True / False / Not Given

In the 1950s, bicycles were a common sight in many European cities. As car ownership grew over the following decades, however, cycling declined sharply. By the 1980s, planners in several countries were designing roads almost entirely around motor traffic, and the cyclists who remained often had to share busy streets with cars and lorries.

The situation began to change in the early 2000s. Rising fuel prices, concerns about air quality and a growing interest in exercise encouraged city governments to look again at the humble bicycle. Copenhagen and Amsterdam, which had never fully abandoned cycling, became models for other cities to follow, and planners from abroad began visiting them to study their wide cycle paths and separate traffic lights for bikes.

One of the most visible changes has been the spread of public bike-sharing schemes. Users unlock a bicycle with a card or a phone app, ride it across the city and leave it at another docking station. Copenhagen had tried a simple coin-operated scheme as early as 1995, but the idea really took off after Paris launched a much larger system, with thousands of bicycles, in 2007. Within a decade, hundreds of cities around the world had introduced their own versions.

Not every scheme has been a success. Some cities underestimated the cost of repairing and redistributing bicycles, and in some places large numbers of bikes were stolen or damaged in the first few years. Elsewhere, bikes were rarely used because there were too few safe cycle lanes. Many transport researchers now argue that a sharing scheme works best when it is introduced together with protected lanes and lower speed limits for cars.

More recently, electric bikes have added a new chapter to the story. Because they make hills and longer journeys much easier, they appeal to older riders and to commuters who do not want to arrive at work hot and tired. Several sharing schemes now offer e-bikes alongside ordinary ones, although they cost more to buy and their batteries need regular charging. Whether they will persuade large numbers of drivers to leave their cars at home remains to be seen.

Since 2020, the number of employees who work from home for at least part of the week has risen dramatically. Supporters argue that remote work saves time, because people no longer spend hours commuting, and that it allows parents to organise their days more flexibly. These benefits are real. Anyone who has spent ninety minutes a day on a crowded train will understand why few people are keen to return to that routine five days a week. For many parents, too, being at home when the children come back from school can decide whether they stay in a job or leave it.

The evidence on productivity, however, is more mixed than either side usually admits. A number of studies have found that people complete routine tasks faster at home, where there are fewer interruptions. Other research suggests that creative work, which often depends on informal conversations with colleagues, may suffer when teams rarely meet in person. It would therefore be a mistake to claim that home working is always more efficient, or that it is always less so: much depends on the kind of work involved.

One group that is too often forgotten in this debate is new employees. People in their first jobs learn a great deal simply by listening to experienced colleagues on the phone or by asking quick questions across a desk, and their small mistakes are noticed and corrected sooner when a more senior colleague is sitting nearby. That kind of learning is far harder to arrange on a video call, and organisations that ignore it may find that their future managers are less well prepared.

Many companies have chosen a hybrid model, in which staff spend two or three days a week in the office. Managers say this arrangement keeps some of the benefits of both approaches, although it has created a new problem: offices that are crowded on Tuesdays and Wednesdays but almost empty on Fridays. Hybrid working can be a sensible compromise, but only if team members agree to come in on the same days. Otherwise, people travel to the office only to spend the day on video calls with colleagues who stayed at home.