About a decade and a half there was a lot less the habit of cycling in London and no segregated cycling paths like this one along the Thames (the best "cycling paths" were just narrow blue lanes painted on the side of the road, and that was just inner London, outside of which "cycling paths" quickly degenerated to literally tiny signboards with a stylized bicycle figure on little poles alongside the street every 300m or so - it's how Boris Johnson could claim he had done thousands of miles of "cycling paths" as a Mayor Of London.

I vaguely remember a Tube strike from back then and basically it was long lines of people waiting for buses and a lot of people choosing to walk (you can cross inner London from one end to the other in a bit over an hour if you're walking at a good pace), especially on the North-South axis.

This looks way better and it's nice that the uptake in cycling has kept increasing after I left (about 5 years ago) to the point that people now feel so safe doing it that so many are choosing to do in this situation - back when I was doing it most people felt too unsafe cycling in London (for the obvious reason that cyclists had to share the road with vehicles and in the early days drivers weren't yet used to having bicycles around and didn't check for them, something that changed over the years as cycling became more common there).

That said, this is all in central London (if I'm not mistaken the video starts right at the crossroads by Westminster Parliament and everything else is taken along several points of this same cycle path along the Thames, all in central London) and I doubt the picture is the same further out, for certain in zones 3, 4 and beyond, but maybe also zone 2,