What German cities can teach us about Britain’s transport problem

“The Government has recently set out an ambitious vision in its national transport strategy. Ben Plowden and Philipp Rode argue that the UK can draw lessons from how cities in Germany are moving away from cars, and increasing cycling and publis transport use. Enjoying this post? Then sign up to our newsletter and receive a weekly roundup of all our articles. The UK government’s newly published integrated national transport strategy, Better Connected was the first strategy of its kind since John Prescott’s 1998 New Deal for Transport . Some commentators were disappointed that Better Connected didn’t include the mode shift targets promised by Labour in opposition . But it nonetheless sets out an ambitious vision: closer integration between transport and new development, seamless journeys supported by integrated ticketing, viable walking and cycling , and reliable public transport that genuinely competes with the car. It is a welcome statement of intent. But ambition without a credible theory of change underpinning an intended outcome in terms of changes in how we travel risks becoming another document gathering dust on a ministerial shelf. New research from LSE Cities, funded by the RAC Foundation, offers something useful: a grounded, comparative analysis of what actually shapes travel behaviour in “ordinary” cities. Not Amsterdam or Copenhagen, not London or Berlin, but the mid-sized, post-industrial and commuter towns that make up the bulk of urban England. The study pairs ten “typical mobility cities” in England, including Leeds, Sunderland, Coventry and Stevenage, with ten counterparts in Germany, such as Dortmund, Mainz and Osnabrück. The findings are striking, and the implications for UK policymakers are hard to ignore. Germany is changing, England is not At the national level, the two countries look broadly similar in terms of daily travel, except in two telling respects. Cycling accounts for 11 per cent of all trips in Germany versus just 2 per cent in England , and car use is seven percentage points higher here. But the trend data are more revealing still. Over the past two decades, typical German cities have seen meaningful modal shift: car use has fallen, cycling has risen sharply. In their English counterparts, modal shares have barely moved. Car commuting still dominates, cycling remains marginal, and bus use has declined. The Covid pandemic caused temporary disruption in both countries, but German cities have since recovered and continued their trajectory. English ones have not. This divergence cannot be explained by geography or weather alone. It reflects choices about land use, governance, investment and political prioritisation. Cycling accounts for 11 per cent of all trips in Germany versus just 2 per cent in England, and car use is seven percentage points higher here. The research confirms the importance of three interlocking factors that explain why people travel as they do. Decision-makers at national, regional and local level need to take these factors into account as they set about improving transport to improve productivity, reduce social exclusion and increase energy independence, First, the critical importance of urban form. Cities where jobs, retail and services are concentrated in accessible centres, like Mainz, have much greater potential for sustainable travel than polycentric cities where employment is scattered across out-of-town business parks and retail sheds, like Sunderland. Decades of planning decisions that pushed development to the urban periphery, often disconnected from public transport, have locked in car dependency in ways that are genuinely difficult to reverse. England’s weaker restrictions on out-of-town retail development, compared to Germany and Scotland, have compounded this. Second, it is not enough to provide new infrastructure to support changes in how people travel. It must be the right kind of infrastructure, designed with users in mind. The Stevenage case is as sobering as it is instructive. The town was built with a fully segregated cycle network designed to accommodate 40 per cent of all trips by bicycle . Today cycling accounts for just 3 per cent . The network failed not because it didn’t exist, but because it was designed to route cyclists away from roads, through underpasses perceived as unsafe, while car infrastructure remained fast and convenient. Mainz, by contrast, invested in infrastructure that supported cycling on the core road network, including cycle priority signals, low-emission zones and traffic calming. It made driving less convenient at the same time as making cycling more attractive. The lesson is that infrastructure supply is necessary but not sufficient: prioritisation of the interests of non-motorists is what shifts behaviour. The town was built with a fully segregated cycle network designed to accommodate 40 per cent of all trips by bicycle. Today cycling accounts for just 3 per cent. And third, governance and devolution are decisive. German cities have historically had substantially greater control over transport infrastructure, land use and local economic planning than their English counterparts. In the German “Verkehrsverbund” (transport alliance) model, regional bodies integrate fares, timetables and routes across public transport operators. Alongside investment to support walking and cycling, this produces the kind of seamless network that make active travel and public transport genuinely competitive with the car. Devolution to England’s city regions offers some hope here, but England’s fragmented, frequently reorganised and very poorly-resourced local government structures have repeatedly undermined exactly this kind of long-term, coordinated planning. What should the Government do? The research is candid that some factors that influence travel choices, including culture, class and demographics, are resistant to short-term policy influence. But many are not. The report calls for stronger restrictions on peripheral retail development; updating transport appraisal to value car-free accessibility, not just journey time savings; and deeper devolution of transport powers to mayoral strategic authorities, including adoption of Verkehrsverbund-style integrated transport bodies. It also makes a basic but important point about data: England cannot manage what it does not measure. City-level all-trip modal share data is collected routinely in Germany, but barely exists here. Increasing National Travel Survey sampling to provide greater regional granularity would be a low-cost, high-value development. None of this is beyond reach. The current wave of English devolution, and the creation of mayoral strategic authorities, represents a genuine structural opportunity. What it requires is political will to match the stated ambition of Better Connected : to treat sustainable transport not as an aspiration, but as a design requirement for how cities develop and support more productive and resilient communities. This blog draws on “ Learning from cities with typical mobility “, a policy brief published by LSE Cities in May 2026, funded by the RAC Foundation. Enjoyed this post? Sign up to our newsletter and receive a weekly roundup of all our articles. All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Image credit: Tai Dundua on Shutterstock The post What German cities can teach us about Britain’s transport problem first appeared on LSE British Politics .

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