On 5 May, the polls will open for Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, local, mayoral, and Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC, England and Wales) elections.
To help voters identify their pro-cycling candidates, Cycling UK’s President, broadcaster Jon Snow, has written to the contenders in devolved and PCC elections, suggesting ways to support cycling if they get in. We’re publishing their responses on our Vote Bike portal and, in the case for Wales and the PCC elections, be calling on our supporters to write to their candidates as well.
If you are a member of a local campaign group and would like us to publicise your actions, please contact our Space for Cycling campaigner, Tom Guha.
If more elected members at all levels were true champions of cycling, maybe Cycling UK wouldn’t be so disappointed by the Government’s first draft Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy (CWIS, England), now out for consultation.
Yet again, pitiful funding is its major downfall: instead of the recommended £10 per head for cycling each year (rising to £20 as cycle use goes up), the draft strategy ear-marks only £300m for 2015-20 - just £1.39 per person outside London.
Although Cycling UK commends CWIS’s laudable aim to normalise cycling and walking by 2040, we’re also unimpressed by its draft target to double cycling trips by 2025. At that rate, English cycle use would only reach Dutch levels (27% of trips) by the start of the 23rd century.
If ministers are serious about their stated aims, they need to reallocate some of their £15bn motorway and trunk road budget towards cycling and walking. That could help tackle congestion, pollution, physical inactivity and climate change, whereas roads spending will do the exact opposite.”
Roger Geffen
Cycling UK Policy Director.
British Cycling’s policy adviser Chris Boardman agrees: “The truth is that without sustained funding, this strategy won’t be worth the paper it’s written on”, he said.
Cycling UK will be mobilising a CWIS campaign in the coming weeks, to try and strengthen the strategy's final version. Keep watch on this website.
CWIS consultation deadline: 23 May 2016.
“My name is Tom Guha. I have a background in environmental and human rights campaigns and have been an avid cyclist ever since childhood, so am excited to get stuck into the Space for Cycling campaign.
“As many Cycling UK members will be aware, Space for Cycling is a national campaign, in which we work closely with local campaign groups to demand better cycling provision.
“Your local campaign may focus on a particular route or piece of infrastructure. Or you may be demanding better Space for Cycling more generally. Whatever your demands, we are here to support you."
Tom Guha
Cycling UK Space for Cycling Campaigner
“In turn, your campaigning supports us in our national work – as we ask the Government to provide better funding, accept clear design standards and show real leadership and ambition regarding cycling.
“By working together, I hope we can form a healthy dialogue between campaigners and Government – and hopefully see proper Space for Cycling implemented across the country.
“We're still in the early days of developing a strategy, and are inviting campaigners to help us do that at a workshop event in Leicester on 21 May. If you have any ideas you’d like to share with us in the mean time, please don’t hesitate to get in touch."
Is £50 million a year, divided between 100+ councils, enough to repair England’s potholes and make cyclists’ journeys safer, particularly on the local roads they tend to use? No, says Cycling UK, it’s ‘like using a sticking plaster to fix a broken leg.”
It's not all bad news about potholes, though. Cycling UK has been working with technical and scientific experts to devise a new non-Newtonian substance that can fill defects at a tiny fraction of the cost of established repair methods. We revealed these timely findings on 1 April (equally timely, please note).
Citing dangers such as increased air pollution, heatwaves and the spread of disease vectors like mosquitoes, the Alliance says that healthcare professionals are in a good position to help reduce the financial pressures on the NHS and the wider impacts of climate change by supporting their patients to take up simple measures like “walking or cycling instead of driving”.
Members of the Alliance include the Royal Colleges of: General Practitioners; Nursing; Obstetricians & Gynaecologists; Physicians; Paediatrics & Child Health, Anaesthetists; Emergency Medicine, and Psychiatrists; Royal Society of Medicine, Faculty of Public Health, Climate and Health Council; BMA, BMJ, and The Lancet.
Two out of three parents worry about children breathing London’s dirty air, according to a YouGov poll commissioned by environmental lawyers, ClientEarth. The survey also suggests that Londoners believe air pollution is the biggest health threat they face as residents.
ClientEarth successfully took the Government to the Supreme Court last year for failing to meet its obligations on clean air. As a result, DEFRA had to produce plans to meet the UK’s legal limits, but ClientEarth does not believe they are good enough and is preparing for another court battle.
Cycling UK promotes cycling for its health and environmental benefits, not least because it is a non-polluting mode of transport, and supports ClientEarth’s Healthy Air Campaign.
Our road safety and legal campaigner, Duncan Dollimore, looks at these difficult questions following the recent conviction of 80-year-old George Barrett for causing the death of cyclist and Cycling UK member Ian Jobson by careless driving. Barrett’s eyesight was reportedly a major issue in the case.
Through our Vote Bike 2016 campaign, you can check out the cycling-friendliness of your candidates and/or quiz them (the actions you can take are tailored to where you live and what elections are taking place there).
Executive summary, plus full report with annexes describing Stage 1 of the National Propensity to Cycle Tool project. The work, undertaken for the DfT, aims to create an online tool to predict cycling levels in local authority areas, given a number of scenarios.
Cycling UK believes that, when complete, the tool will be immensely valuable to local authorities and campaigners alike.
So far, the prototype uses data from the Census 2011 to predict commuting potential against three scenarios: ‘Government Target’, ‘Gender Equality’, and ‘Go Dutch’ (an e-bike scenario is on the way). The focus on commuting (which tends to be dominated by fit males) means that the current tool is inevitably slanted towards urban networks, but further development should ensure that it is applicable more widely, and cover other journey purposes such as shopping and cycling to school.
An independent evidence review, commissioned by DfT, focusing on the evidence of the wider economic benefits of cycling as a mode of transport, such as retail revenue, employment effects, and public spending efficiencies.
The review verifies the value of cycling - and the fact that it has largely positive impacts for people and the places where they live - but concludes: “… it is less clear what the exact nature of that value would look like: the valuation and monetization of the complete range of potential benefits of cycling do not appear to have been widely considered.”
A report for practitioners and commissioners of cycling programmes offering options for evaluating the economic and social impacts of investments in new or improved cycling infrastructure. The DfT is encouraging interested authorities to contact them about potential schemes which can use this framework.
A report full of facts, figures and updates three years on the Mayor’s Vision for cycling.
It confirms that the cycling budget for London per head of the population is far, far more generous that the c£1.39 (see headline) almost everyone else gets in England: “This year (2015/16), we will be spending around £145 million, roughly £18 a head, on a par with Germany and almost equivalent to the Netherlands. We are spending more on cycling than the rest of the UK put together.”
It also backs up the ‘safety in numbers’ theory, i.e. combined with improved conditions, the more cyclists there are, the safer cycling becomes: “… even as the numbers of cycle journeys have risen sharply, cycling casualty rates are the lowest ever recorded. In 1989, the worst year, 90 million cycle journeys were made in London, of which 33 ended in death. By last year, around 270 million cycle journeys were made in London, of which nine ended in death.”
Diversity has benefited too: “The proportion of black and minority ethnic Londoners who cycle frequently (three days a week or more) is now the same as the proportion of white Londoners who do. The proportion of Londoners from the DE social classes who cycle frequently is also catching up with the average.”
In his foreword, outgoing Mayor of London Boris Johnson says:
“The East-West Superhighway will be able to carry 3,000 people an hour. That is the equivalent of putting four extra trains an hour on the District and Circle Tube lines running beneath the route, at a fraction of the cost in capital works and disruption. It is the equivalent of running 41 extra buses an hour, at a fraction of the cost in road space and emissions. And it is the equivalent, at the average rush-hour loading, of the passengers carried by 2,100 cars.”
Above all, cycling in London has never been more normal. Within a few years, at the current rate of growth, people commuting by bike to central London will outnumber those commuting by car. Already, in the centre, a third of all vehicles on the road during the morning rush hour are now bicycles.”
Boris Johnson
Outgoing Mayor of London
In his foreword, Andrew Gilligan, Cycling Commissioner for London, also has some interesting reflections on the experience of introducing major new cycling infrastructure to the capital:
Much of the opposition to cycling schemes is based on a belief that motor traffic is like rainwater and the roads are the drains for it. If you narrow the pipe, these people say, it will flood. If you block one route, they say, the same amount of traffic will simply flow down the next easiest route. But that seldom or never actually happens in practice. Because traffic isn’t a force of nature. It’s a product of human choices.”
Andrew Gilligan
Cycling Commissioner for London
The report finishes with a section on priorities for the future, i.e. what the outgoing mayor wants his successor to carry forward. These include cycle hire, training for children, mini-Hollands, junction treatments, rail interchange, superhighways, the safer lorry scheme and using the congestion charge smartly “to discourage discretionary car journeys and encourage freight operators to consolidate their deliveries.”
Major report from WHO prompted by the increasing prevalence of diabetes around the globe. Highlighting the importance of promoting physical activity to tackle the problem, the authors say: “The physical or built environment plays an important role in facilitating physical activity for many people. Urban planning and active transport policies can ensure that walking, cycling and other forms of non-motorized transport are accessible and safe for all.”
See our Tom Guha's blog on the findings and how more cycling could help.
Fact sheet summarising data collected by the National Travel Survey (England) on linked trips for different purposes (“trip chains”) during the morning peak, e.g. breaking a journey to work to take a child to school, or taking children to school, returning home and then travelling to work.
Finds that most travel in the morning is direct to work; when trips to work are not direct, the main reason is to take a child to school: and women are more likely to combine other purposes on their way to work.
Four-page briefing highlighting the low priority the justice system gives to the crime of speeding. Looks at impacts, incidence and enforcement, and sets out RoadPeace’s recommendations.
A guide primarily for staff working in education settings, but also for those with interests in local public health and road safety.
It underlines the importance of emphasising the benefits of active travel alongside managing risk and promoting safety, stating: “All too often, it is easy to over-stress the dangers and inadvertently give the message that children are safest when travelling to school in the car, and lose the personal and health benefits of walking and cycling to high school.”
It also stresses that reducing the chances of children being hurt involves a combination of measures, i.e. safer road design and improved driver education and training, not merely ‘teaching children how to cope with the traffic environment’ alone. It advocates, for instance, school travel plans, working with the local authority on walking and cycling routes, and Bikeability training, and offers a number of case studies along with some useful facts:
Compiled with the help of Sustrans.
By Anna Goodman, Esther M. F. van Sluijs, and David Ogilvie
The results of a ‘natural experimental study’ using information on over 3,000 children aged 10–11 years participating in the nationally-representative Millennium Cohort Study, whose schools offered Bikeability in 2011–2012.
Concludes that: “Offering high-quality cycle training free at the point of delivery in English schools encourages children to do cycle training, but we found no evidence of short-term effects on cycling frequency or independent cycling. Future evaluation should investigate longer-term effects on these and other stated Bikeability objectives such as increasing cycling safety.”
TABS (The Association of Bikeability Schemes) questions the findings, highlighting research that has shown that half of parents and children report the child cycles more often after Bikeability than before, and have acquired a range of personal skills, such as better hazard perception, confidence and overall co-ordination.
Infographic explaining the benefits of physical activity for adults and older adults, in the context of the UK Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines.
Sitting on the sofa too much gets a big cross, while cycling is awarded a big tick as a moderate activity for a healthy heart and mind.
Gather at the Meadows in Edinburgh for the fifth mass ride (or walk, if you prefer) on Holyrood, starting 12 noon.
The Holyrood elections makes this year particularly important, so Pedal on Parliament (PoP) is joining forces with We Walk, We Cycle, We Vote and many other active travel organisations to present a united front to Scotland’s politicians to put active travel on the agenda for the next five years.
Although PoP is making a serious point about making cycling safer and easier, the day itself will be light-hearted.
Throughout May, Living Streets will release 20 easy ways to fit 20 minutes walking into a daily routine. Take the pledge!
Open to both professionals and volunteers, this conference is for anyone who has an interest in cycles and wants to make Britain a better place for people to ride them.
A chance to:
Two-day conference and exhibition event. Offers plenary presentations by high-profile individuals throughout the UK and beyond, with expertise and influence in cycle policy, promotion and infrastructure. Product and service suppliers to the sector will also be on show.
The organisers are currently calling for papers.
The Association of Bikeability Schemes' annual conference, to be held in conjunction with the wider Cycle City, Active City (see above).
With new funding to revive the national Space for Cycling Campaign, we are looking to develop it collaboratively with local campaign groups, Cyclenation and the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain.
Cycling UK therefore invites campaigners to a day of development workshops designed to help shape Space for Cycling's future.
We look forward to your ideas, skills and passion at an event that is more about developing the Campaign than a learning opportunity. It’s aimed primarily at campaigners, but anyone with a professional interest in promoting cycling at local level is very welcome to join us and contribute from their perspective too.
The key themes of the day are:
Alongside many others, there will be input on policy from Senior Lecturer in Transport at the University of Westminster, Dr Rachel Aldred, and from Dr Robin Lovelace on the National Propensity to Cycle Tool (see 'new publications' above).
We are also planning some activities for the Friday evening (20 May), for those wishing to stay on from the Cycle City Active City conference (see above) or travel the day before.
Free or £5 donation. Please book.
A conference to share best practice in managing road risk, including protecting vulnerable road users, engaging drivers with safety, and managing high-risk drivers.
The agenda will feature presentations from both public and private sector operators, representing car, van, truck, and mixed vehicle fleets. Paul Kitson, cycle injury lawyer at Slater & Gordon and Cycling UK, is amongst the speakers.
With mandatory 20 mph speed limits across roads in Edinburgh planned from July 2016, this event will feature presentations from politicians, transport planners, public health experts and road safety organisations about the lessons learned from around Europe, Scotland and England.
Early bird discount (deadline 8 May 2016).
Organised by 20's Plenty for Us, and hosted by Edinburgh City Council.
Bike Week will soon be here, and more people than ever before are expected to enjoy events all over the country. It’s the perfect opportunity to demonstrate what a fun, healthy and convenient way cycling is to get around, especially for commuting to work – which continues to be the central theme.
If you're organising a cycling event during Bike Week, remember to register your event at www.bikeweek.org.uk so that you can benefit from FREE public liability insurance, promotional material and event registration on a national site that attracts thousands of visitors.
