In cities like London, the debate often becomes cycle Vs car but it really isn't. If we want to encourage, even prioritise cycling over the car, we have to literally reimagine how we live. We can’t just take the existing width of road and declare that half of it is now for cyclists and the other half for the rest of the very considerable London traffic — heavy vehicles, great big lumbering buses, cars and so on.

In Low Traffic Neighbourhood parts of a borough, which are off-limits to personal cars, there should be park-and-ride schemes because some people – older, with mobility issues, carrying children or bulky parcels, keeping themselves dry in the rain – may need motorised transport to get from A to B. There are suggestions that mini-buses should ply around the newly low-traffic areas. But, in what novelist Elif Shafak calls “the Age of Angst”, it isn't always easy to have reasoned debate. As she says, “social media platforms have become the Colosseum of the twenty-first century.”