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Hackney Council has published its latest Traffic in Hackney: Annual Technical Note, covering traffic and transport data for 2025. It provides a useful picture of how people are travelling around the borough, and some important evidence about what is happening to motor traffic, cycling and road danger. Full document available here.
The headline is mixed.
Motor traffic in Hackney has remained broadly stable, while cycling continues to grow strongly. And a large proportion (over 40%) of the motor traffic on Hackney's roads isn't even travelling to or from Hackney.
The figures suggest that there is both a need and an opportunity to continue reducing motor traffic and making more space for walking, cycling and public transport.
Annual traffic by vehicle type in Hackney, showing motor traffic is not reducing
Motor traffic has barely changed
According to the Department for Transport figures used by Hackney Council, 273.3 million vehicle miles were driven on Hackney's roads in 2025. That was just 0.26% lower than the 274.0 million miles recorded in 2024. Traffic therefore remained broadly stable from one year to the next, and was 4.8% below the 2019 pre-pandemic level.
This is important context. Hackney's traffic is below its pre-pandemic level, but the latest figures don't show a continuing substantial reduction. The change between 2024 and 2025 was tiny.
Meanwhile, motor traffic across London increased by 1.1% between 2024 and 2025, which means the current trend is failing to meet the Mayor's Transport Strategy target of 27% reduction by 2030 (modelled via the London Net Zero 2030: An Updated Pathway report) which means London will breach its carbon budget and fail to live up to climate change commitments.
So Hackney is doing somewhat better than the London-wide trend, but there is still a very long way to go if we want to substantially reduce the amount of motor traffic using our roads. Our manifesto, and that of Hackney Greens, is to reduce miles driven on Hackney roads by 30% by 2030.
Motor traffic across London increased by 1.1% between 2024 and 2025
A huge amount of Hackney traffic is through traffic
Perhaps the most interesting finding in the Council's report concerns where Hackney's traffic comes from and where it is going.
The Council divides traffic into three categories:
- Internal traffic: journeys that start and finish in Hackney
- Cross-borough traffic: journeys that start or finish in Hackney
- Through traffic: journeys that start outside Hackney, pass through the borough and finish somewhere else
The analysis found that more than 40% of traffic in Hackney is through traffic.
Even more strikingly, around 85% of traffic has either its origin or destination outside the borough.
Over 40% of traffic in Hackney is through traffic
On some roads the proportion of through traffic is even higher. On Cassland Road, for example, through traffic can account for up to 65% of traffic during the afternoon peak.
These figures challenge the idea that reducing traffic in Hackney is exclusively about reducing car use by Hackney residents.
A substantial proportion of the vehicles using Hackney's roads are simply passing through.
That matters because through traffic can make residential streets unpleasant and unsafe, while providing little or no benefit to the people who live there.
Meanwhile, cycling is growing rapidly
While motor traffic has remained broadly static, cycling has continued to grow.
The Council's traffic counters recorded a 27% increase in cycle trips between 2022 and 2025.
The average number of daily cycle trips recorded at each monitoring location increased from 1,240 in 2022 to 1,577 in 2025.
Cycling is growing in Hackney
And this isn't simply the result of one or two particularly busy cycle routes.
Cycling increased at 20 of the 21 monitoring locations.
Some of the increases were particularly dramatic:
- Homerton Road: +131%
- Lordship Park: +79%
- Downs Park Road: +72%
- Wick Road: +67%
- Morning Lane: +57%
- Clapton Road: +52%
This suggests that cycling is becoming an increasingly important part of how people travel around Hackney, and that this growth is happening across a wide range of roads.
Cars are becoming a smaller share of traffic
The Council's data also shows a shift in the composition of traffic.
Between 2022 and 2025, the share of cars at the monitored locations fell by 2.5 percentage points, while cycling's share increased by 2.5 percentage points.
At some individual locations, the changes were much larger.
For example, at Downs Park Road, car mode share fell by 9% while cycle mode share increased by 10%. At Amhurst Road, car share fell by 8% while cycle share increased by 9%.
The picture that emerges is therefore not simply one of "more traffic" or "less traffic".
The way Hackney's roads are being used is changing.
More people are cycling, while cars account for a smaller proportion of the traffic recorded at these monitoring points.
Nearly 10,000 cycle journeys on Pitfield Street
One statistic particularly illustrates the scale of cycling in Hackney.
TfL's spring 2025 count recorded 9,634 cyclists on Pitfield Street between 6am and 10pm on a single weekday.
The Council notes that this was roughly the same number of cyclists as the number of cars recorded on Dalston Lane during an average 24-hour period.
There is an important caveat: the Pitfield Street figure is a one-day, 16-hour cycle count, while the motor traffic figures are 24-hour averages, so the two measurements aren't directly comparable.
But the figure nevertheless demonstrates the very substantial number of people already choosing to cycle on Hackney's streets.
Some roads still carry enormous volumes of motor traffic
Although Hackney has one of London's lowest overall levels of motor traffic when traffic is measured relative to the length of the road network, traffic is not evenly distributed.
Some roads carry very large numbers of motor vehicles every day.
In 2025, the Council's monitoring recorded average daily motor traffic of:
- 48,328 vehicles on Upper Clapton Road
- 43,309 vehicles on Lea Bridge Road
The A12 was higher still, at 78,877 vehicles per day, although this is a dual carriageway and therefore not directly comparable with most of Hackney's other roads.
This concentration of traffic is important.
The fact that Hackney has relatively low traffic intensity compared with many other London boroughs does not mean that traffic has little impact on the people who live beside or travel along the busiest roads.
Road danger remains a serious concern
The latest collision figures in the report cover 2024.
There were 719 reported collisions in Hackney, resulting in:
- 3 people killed
- 116 seriously injured
- 667 slightly injured
That's 794 casualties in total.
The people most seriously affected were overwhelmingly vulnerable road users: of the 119 people killed or seriously injured, 101 (85%) were pedestrians, cyclists or motorcyclists.
And this isn't a one-year anomaly. Since 2015, vulnerable road users have accounted for between 85% and 93% of all people killed or seriously injured in Hackney each year.
There has been progress in some areas. The number of people slightly injured has been falling, and since 2023 Hackney's serious casualties have been reducing faster than the average for Inner London.
But serious and fatal casualties remain a major issue.
A small proportion of Hackney's roads account for a large share of serious casualties
The report also highlights where road danger is concentrated.
Hackney has 261km of public roads, of which just 22km form part of the Transport for London Road Network. That's only 8.4% of the borough's roads.
Yet the TfL road network has accounted for 47–57% of Hackney's killed or seriously injured casualties every year since 2017.
In 2024, it accounted for 53% of all KSIs.
This shows that to address road danger, significant improvements are needed to both minor and major roads.
What does all this tell us?
The latest data paints a picture of a borough that is changing, but not yet changing fast enough. Motor traffic has remained broadly stable. More than 40% of traffic is through traffic. Some roads continue to carry tens of thousands of motor vehicles every day.
At the same time, cycling is growing rapidly.
So there’s a clear opportunity.
Hackney needs to keep reducing motor traffic
If we want Hackney to be a borough where people can walk and cycle safely, where children can travel independently, where buses can move efficiently and where streets are pleasant places to spend time, we need to continue changing the balance between motor traffic and other forms of transport.
The Council's latest figures show that people are already changing the way they travel.
The challenge is to make it easier for that change to continue.
That means measures such as:
- Expanding Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and Liveable Neighbourhoods
- Providing safe, connected cycling routes across the borough
- Giving buses genuine priority on busy roads
- Reducing the amount of public space devoted to private car parking
- Reducing motor vehicle speeds and improving enforcement of dangerous driving
- Improving walking routes and crossings
- Tackling the through traffic that uses Hackney's streets as shortcuts
Hackney's roads don't have to be dominated by motor traffic simply because they have been in the past. The data shows that travel patterns can change, that cycling is growing, and that traffic can be redistributed when streets are redesigned.
The question now is how quickly we choose to build on that progress.
At Low Traffic Hackney, we believe Hackney should aim to reduce the miles driven on its roads by 30% by 2030, from 2019 levels.
The latest traffic data shows both the scale of the challenge, and the potential for change.
Join us at lowtraffichackney.org and support the campaign for a safer, healthier and less traffic-dominated Hackney.