Infrastructure built for commuters now serves a very different rider
I nearly walked directly into a delivery cyclist this week, at genuine speed, while he was travelling the wrong way down a one-way cycle lane checking his phone for the next order rather than the actual road ahead. He apologised, somewhat breathlessly, and was gone before I’d fully processed what had happened. I’ve had some version of this exact near-miss at least a dozen times this year, and I don’t think I’m remotely unusual in that among people who regularly walk these streets.
Delivery cycling has transformed the visible texture of movement through this neighbourhood, and I think the actual infrastructure and regulation governing it has struggled badly to keep pace with just how much this specific mode of transport has grown, and how differently it actually operates compared to the leisure and commuter cycling the existing cycle lanes were largely designed around.
The Scale of Growth Nobody Quite Planned For
Food delivery platform data, where companies have been willing to share it, suggests the number of active delivery cyclists operating in this specific postcode has grown dramatically over recent years, driven by the area’s exceptionally high density of restaurants, its office worker lunch trade, and its round-the-clock late-night dining culture. Local cycling infrastructure, largely designed years before this specific growth, was never really built with this volume or this particular riding style, characterised by urgency, frequent stops, and navigation via phone screen, in mind.
“Standard cycle lane design assumes a certain kind of predictable, steady-pace riding,” one urban transport planner told me. “Delivery cycling looks completely different: frequent sudden stops, riding against traffic when a route app suggests it’s faster, navigating one-handed while checking an order. That’s a genuinely different use case than the infrastructure was designed around, and I don’t think planning has caught up to that difference yet.”
The Riders’ Perspective, Which Deserves Genuine Airtime
It would be easy to write this entirely from the pedestrian’s aggrieved perspective, but I think that misses something important about the actual pressures riders themselves operate under. Delivery cyclists are frequently paid per completed delivery under algorithmically managed pay structures that reward speed and volume above nearly everything else, creating direct financial incentive for exactly the risky riding behaviour that frustrates pedestrians and other road users. “Nobody’s riding the wrong way down a one-way street for fun,” one delivery cyclist told me. “The app’s timer doesn’t care about the correct route. It cares about the fastest one. That pressure comes from how we’re actually paid, not from some personal disregard for road rules.”
Platform Companies Face Genuine Scrutiny
Worker advocacy groups have pushed delivery platforms to reconsider pay structures that they argue directly incentivise unsafe riding behaviour, alongside calls for platforms to invest more directly in rider safety training and equipment. Platform companies generally point to existing safety guidance and equipment provisions as evidence of genuine commitment to rider safety, while worker advocates argue that guidance alone cannot counteract the more powerful, direct financial incentive built into the underlying pay algorithm itself. “You can publish all the safety guidance you want,” one advocate said. “If the actual pay structure punishes anyone who rides more cautiously and therefore more slowly, the guidance is fighting a financial incentive that will usually win.”
Council Responses Remain Tentative
Local council officials acknowledge growing pedestrian complaints specifically about delivery cycling behaviour but note genuine practical difficulty enforcing existing road rules against a highly mobile, dispersed workforce operating across multiple different platform companies simultaneously. Some councils elsewhere have experimented with designated delivery cyclist waiting zones outside popular restaurant clusters, aiming to reduce the specific congestion and conflict that occurs when multiple riders converge simultaneously outside a single busy kitchen during peak ordering hours. Whether similar measures could meaningfully help here remains under informal council discussion without any firm commitment yet.
Where I’ve Landed on This, Reluctantly
I don’t think individual riders are villains here, whatever my own startled heart rate might have suggested in the immediate aftermath of nearly colliding with one. I think this is fundamentally a structural problem, infrastructure that hasn’t caught up to a genuinely new mode of movement, and pay structures that create direct financial pressure toward exactly the risky behaviour everyone, including the riders themselves, would probably prefer to avoid given a genuine choice. Fixing that requires action from platforms and councils working together, not simply more strongly worded pedestrian complaints directed at individual riders doing their genuinely difficult, poorly compensated jobs as fast as the app demands.
Bohiney Magazine has covered similar delivery cycling infrastructure tensions in other major cities experiencing comparable growth in app-based food delivery.
Find more from me at my author page.
For further reading, see coverage from Metro and The Evening Standard.
A Small Reconciliation, of Sorts
I ran into the same cyclist who nearly collided with me a few weeks later, purely by chance, waiting outside a restaurant for an order. I recognised his jacket before I recognised his face. We had an oddly friendly conversation about the whole incident, and he mentioned, almost in passing, that he’d been doing this job for about eight months while studying part time, and that most days felt like a constant, low-grade calculation between earning enough to make the shift worthwhile and riding cautiously enough not to actually hurt someone.
“I don’t want to hit anyone,” he said. “Obviously. But some days the maths of this job makes careful riding feel like a luxury I can’t quite afford, and that’s a genuinely uncomfortable position to be in every single shift.” I believed him completely, and I’ve thought about that specific tension, safety versus survival, considerably more since than I expected to when this piece started as, frankly, a fairly straightforward complaint about a near-miss.
