Cyclists now outnumber motorists in City of London

This very much feels like "in addition to" rather than replacing a car, at least in the US. My wife and I (without kids) tried living without a car in one of the largest, most walkable cities in the US and it was doable, but it's just soooo much nicer to have a car. Coordinating rentals or even ride shares are a lot more tedious than jumping in a car and driving, and even if ride shares are cheaper than car ownership, I would often find myself not doing things because of the cost of ride share / car rental / etc. Further, I would have occasional ride share drivers blow me off when I really needed to be punctual, and I also had some fraudulent experiences with car share companies (upcharging me for services that I've explicitly declined and not correcting it via customer support channels).

There's also public transit, but that takes wayyyy longer to get around and it's also really dirty, crime-y, and otherwise uncomfortable at least in the cities I've traveled around in.

Lastly, cycling is probably always going to be less safe than getting around by car (we can and should improve cycling safety, but I don't know that we're ever going to get to parity with driving) and I don't know that very many people are going to want to subject their kids to that risk as their primary form of transit. I probably wouldn't, realistically.

Unfortunately even commie blocks nowadays are either becoming too expensive or get "densified" - new blocks are built in between them, often without much of a plan.

This appears to be due to induced demand - especially now that so many apartments are bought as investments and never rented out.

This bothers me because I'm in the market for an apartment and it's becoming a race against time due to rising prices.

The amount of expensive add-ons I see on the bikers and their bikes suggest to me it's good business. Helmets, clothing, and electronic add-ons are likely adding around £1,000 per annum to the cost of ownership.

Bikes prices are a bit silly though. Expensive bikes (those in the £3,000 range) are ~25% of the price of a new Dacia Sandero.

Bike theft is rampant in London, so the insurance premiums are high, too. It can cost £300 per year.

Cons? Not all offices are equipped with showers.

Second, how else are cities meant to do this? The fundamental problem is that there is a huge and rising level of driving demand[1], and limited supply. There is a scarcity of road space in London and you can't really add more. Basic economics tells you that you can manage that scarcity through some combination of prices, queues, and lotteries. Throughout most of the 20th century, we defaulted to queues, in the form of traffic jams. You can use the road at zero cost, but you'll have to wait a long time. But that became increasingly untenable as car ownership rose -- the number of cars in Britain has doubled over the last few decades. And traffic jams are themselves unpleasant: they're noisy, ugly, emit pollution, etc. So now cities are using prices too, in the form of congestion charges, taxes, and so on. That's not some punitive "stick" done for its own sake, it's just a tool used to cope with an inescapable economic reality. When you have more cars and the same amount of road, you need to deter an increasing fraction of those cars from using those roads. The "carrot" is providing alternate, more space-efficient ways to get around: bike infrastructure, public transport.

[1] "driving demand" is itself a weaselly, meaningless phrase, because "demand" only makes sense in reference to a specific price level. motorists have been conditioned by a century of car-friendly policy to expect to drive and park for free, but there's no real justification for that. just because the roads are publicly owned doesn't give them the right to use them for free, any more than state-owned railways should have free fares.