Counting cycle parking in a mixed use London block

Cycle parking standards in London are minimums, they are applied use by use, and the totals are added rather than shared. That is the whole method. A mixed use block gets the residential requirement in full, plus the requirement for each commercial use in full, and long stay provision cannot be set against short stay or the other way round. Most of the shortfalls picked up at application stage come from a designer who netted something off.

Policy T5 of the London Plan 2021 carries the requirement, and the numbers sit in Table 10.2 of the Plan.

How the standards are structured

Each land use has its own metric. Residential is counted per dwelling and varies by unit size. Commercial uses are counted per square metre of gross internal area, with different rates for offices, retail, food and drink, leisure, education and industrial uses. Some uses have a stepped short stay rate, where the first tranche of floorspace generates spaces at one rate and anything above it at a lower rate.

For every use there are two separate figures. Long stay is for residents and staff: secure, covered, accessible and intended for cycles left all day or overnight. Short stay is for visitors and customers: close to the entrance, convenient, usually a Sheffield stand on the public side of the door.

Boroughs can and do set higher standards in their own local plans. The London Plan figure is the floor, so check the borough policy before you fix the layout.

Deriving the residential count

The residential long stay standard is one space per studio and one-bedroom dwelling, and two spaces for every other dwelling. Short stay is one space per 40 dwellings.

An illustrative worked example. A block of 60 flats made up of 20 studios and one-bedroom units and 40 two-bedroom and larger units generates 20 plus 80, so 100 long stay spaces. Short stay is 60 divided by 40, which is 1.5 and rounds up to 2.

Round up, always, and round at the level of each use rather than at the end. Two uses each generating 1.4 spaces produce four spaces, not three.

The unit mix therefore drives the store area, and the store area is not small. A hundred spaces at realistic stand spacing is a room of meaningful size with its own access route, and it has to be found in the plan at the same time as the bin store and the plant. Testing capacity without it is how schemes lose a unit at the design stage, which is a theme of our note on the design-led approach to site capacity.

Adding the commercial uses

Take the rate for each commercial use from Table 10.2, apply it to that use's gross internal area, and add the result to the residential figure. Keep long stay and short stay separate throughout.

Three points catch people out.

First, the floorspace measure is gross internal area for the use in question, not the whole building and not net lettable area. Second, a flexible consent covering more than one use class needs the requirement calculated on the use that generates the higher demand, because the condition has to work whichever use arrives. Third, ancillary floorspace counts into the use it serves rather than being excluded.

Where the ground floor is let as a single shell unit with the end use unknown, say in the transport submission which use you have assessed against and why, and show that the store has capacity for the worst case. An officer will accept a reasoned assumption. An officer will not accept a blank.

Long stay and short stay are not interchangeable

This is the error that produces refusals rather than conditions. The two types of provision answer different needs and have different specifications, and a surplus of one does not cure a deficit of the other.

A single large basement store does not provide short stay parking, because a visitor cannot get into it. Equally, a row of stands in the forecourt does not count towards the residential long stay requirement.

Store location, access and gradients

The store has to be usable by someone pushing a loaded bicycle, and that is a planning matter because it affects whether the provision is real.

What the transport officer looks for:

1. A route from the street to the store that does not involve steps. Ramps need a gradient a person can push a bike up, and a short steep ramp is worse than a longer shallow one.
2. Doors wide enough to pass a bicycle through without lifting it, held open or on a hold-open device, with level thresholds.
3. Where a lift is the only route, a lift car long enough for a bicycle plus a person, and enough lift capacity that cyclists are not waiting through a peak.
4. Ground floor or upper basement location in preference to deep basement.
5. Lighting, natural surveillance and access control.
6. A proportion of long stay spaces sized for larger cycles, including adapted cycles, cargo cycles and trailers. Take the current percentage and the space dimensions from the London Plan Guidance rather than from an older project.

Cycle stores and refuse stores compete for the same ground floor frontage, and refuse has its own carry distances to satisfy. Resolving both together is easier than resolving them in sequence, as our note on the Waste Management Strategy explains.

Stand types and the spacing that counts

A space only counts if it is usable. Sheffield stands laid out at the spacing recommended in the London Cycling Design Standards count without argument. Two-tier racks count for long stay, with the caveat that boroughs often expect a proportion of ground-level spaces for users who cannot lift a bike, and that the upper tier needs assisted gas struts and headroom.

Semi-vertical and vertical wall hooks are a harder sell for long stay. They reduce the usable population and some boroughs decline to count them at all. Where you use them, count them separately in the schedule and explain the mix.

Two practical dimensions decide whether a store works: the spacing between stands and the clear aisle behind them. Draw both at a scale where they can be checked, and dimension them on the plan. A store that is dimensionally short will be conditioned for revised details, and the revision usually costs a space or two you had already sold.

Showing compliance on the drawing

Make it impossible for an officer to arrive at a different number. A single schedule, on the drawing rather than buried in the transport note, with one row per use:

• The use, its quantum, the standard applied, the figure required and the figure provided, for long stay and short stay in separate columns.
• A reference to Table 10.2 and the borough policy.
• A plan at a scale that shows stand positions, spacing, aisle widths and the larger cycle spaces.
• The access route from the public highway marked, with gradients and door widths annotated.

Where the scheme needs a Transport Statement, the cycle parking schedule belongs in it as well as on the drawing, and where the scheme triggers a travel plan, the monitoring commitments should match the numbers you have shown. Our note on the Travel Plan covers how those commitments are secured.

Count the spaces before you fix the core, not after. You can browse the report types by category to see which transport documents the scheme will need alongside the schedule.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the current London Plan table and your borough's adopted policy with the local planning authority or a qualified transport planner before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.