Pedal Power

Issue 165
July 2023

Garendon Trail Improvements

When the development of the Garendon estate was initially proposed, it featured improvements to National Cycle Network (NCN) Route 6, and this formed one of the few incentives for granting planning permission. This route provides an easy way of reaching Iveshead Academy on one side and for Shepshed to enjoy the bright lights of Loughborough – over a purpose-built traffic-free motorway bridge.

Here are some of the things promised at the time.

• There are a number of areas of woodland, mature trees and hedges within the site. There are also existing rights of way crossing the site, including the Sustrans National Cycle Route 6.
• The Hathern Road access will be designed as a secondary point of access.
• A network of pedestrian footways, cycleways and bridleways will also be delivered as part of the development.

In respect of off-site improvements to walking and cycling routes it proposed the following:

• Upgrade the former rail line between the site and Clowbridge Drive;
• Upgrade the Footpath K105 alongside Blackbrook between the site and Wesley Close; and
• Improvements to National Cycle Network/Coe Avenue Gate.

The development will connect into and reinforce existing footway and cycleway links within and surrounding the site. There will also be positive cumulative effects in terms of the provision of Green Infrastructure and open space as part of the development and the wider Masterplan.

Recently the County Council have indicated that they will not be adopting the route and any improvements will be at the discretion of Persimmon. This could mean that they just fill in the worst of the numerous potholes on the route while that part of the route not on the estate will be left as is.

If this route (and the extension towards Hathern) are to attract people out of their cars, they need to meet the NCN Design Principles which are:

1. traffic-free or a quiet-way
2. wide enough to accommodate all users comfortably
3. designed to minimise maintenance
4. signed clearly and consistently
5. have a smooth surface that is well drained
6. fully accessible to all legitimate users
7. feel like a safe place to be

Currently the route meets only the first criteria. To meet the standard it should have a width of 3 metres throughout and a sealed surface (maximising accessibility) which is free of undulations, rutting and potholes.

If the County Council is serious about promoting active travel it needs to work with Persimmon to ensure that this route is improved from end to end to meet the NCN Design principles.

Please write to your County Councillor (unless he is Max Hunt who is already on the case) raising this issue. Their email addresses can be found on the County website.

Health and Safety in Cycle Campaigning

Letter from Sophia Howard

Whilst stunt-type risks, such as would attract media coverage through photography or film are easy to avoid, there are many less obvious risk in campaigning that are harder to evade, such as vexatious litigation and sexual predation. (The infiltration of the McDonalds Libel Campaign by under-cover police officers in the 1990’s is documented elsewhere).

Burnout is an insidious gradual risk. Being ignored is soul-destroying. In my view, women are more exposed to this hazard as they tend to have less layers of socio-economic protection. It is easy to under-estimate how many months, years or decades it may take to restructure society and create remunerated cycle-related roles that are ethically and environmentally benign. Despite being unpaid, campaigning may be so compulsive as to swallow a person’s sense of social and professional identity.

I offer a (non-exhaustive ) list of needed things for bringing that mood-lifting serotonin feeling of success to the campaign foot-soldiers:-

• Research, ideally recent, and information to educate and influence.
• Academic and professional qualifications.
• Success evidences, possibly by historical contrasts.
• Internet and social media engagement.
• Feeling able to engage safely with statutory agencies.
• Constitutional clarity for aims and organisational structure.
• Ugly truth availability to overturn myths with stark reality e.g. by name withheld publication opportunity via diligent editorship.
• Social events to bond the campaign team, ideally with food provided, and at a time and venue compatible with member’s family and livelihood commitments.
• Financial resources are crucial. Having just one person, preferably with a supportive family person in the background, in a full-time paid position is a game-changer.
• Property ownership, (of an appropriate size), may protect the campaign’s financial and time resource from insecure address tenure.
• Bequests in a will may enable a campaign to step up a gear in effectiveness.
• Accounting transparency is essential.

Fraud includes causing a loss to somebody else, as well as making a deceitful gain oneself.

Misrepresentation of accounts may occur in subtle ways through non-malicious ulterior motives! For instance, somebody in a membership or finance position may stagnate or crash an organisation by responding to a personal misfortune by putting their own needs for human belonging slightly ahead of campaign professionalism, perhaps failing to claim their own expenses or turning a blind eye to misconduct instead of promptly intervening.

I have not analysed this country’s cycling organisations to figure out which one is best placed, or most easily modified, to meet the needs of campaigning to make life easier for cycle users.

I welcome views from readers and suggest that Health and Safety be an agenda item for our next Annual General Meeting on 11th March 2024.

Active travel underfunding

The National Audit Office’s inquiry into Active Travel in England has unearthed evidence that Government’s investment in active travel fell far short of what was needed to meet its 2025 walking and cycling targets – and that was before ministers made further cuts in March.

It notes that “Active travel … has a range of benefits for people’s health and the environment, including being a low-carbon form of travel.” It goes on to say that “more than half (56%) of local authorities – who play a significant role in delivering interventions – have low capability and ambition to deliver active travel projects, which has affected the quality of active travel interventions delivered with government funding to date.”

It further adds that the Department for Transport (DfT) “does not yet know if the schemes delivered by local authorities to date have been of good enough quality and does not have a plan in place to track the benefits of its active travel investment.”

When the second cycling and walking investment strategy was originally published in July 2022, it set out a ‘projection’ of £3.8bn of funding that DfT expected would be available for active travel over the four-year period of the strategy (April 2021 to March 2025). However, it was just a projection, because only £1.3bn of this was ring-fenced for active travel.

The rest came either from other DfT funding streams or from wider Government funding. While some of this funding (e.g. DfT’s own City Regions Sustainable Transport Settlement) could reasonably be expected to be spent on active travel, other parts of it are rather less certain. However, it appears that DfT knew at the time that even this total of £3.8bn was nowhere near enough.

In reply to a Parliamentary question, Lucy Frazer (Secretary of State) claimed that: “The department estimates that a minimum of £4.4bn is likely to be required to meet its cycling and walking objectives to 2025 and that a minimum of £5.5bn is likely to be required to meet the objectives to 2030.”

Figures in the DfT modelling carried out in 2022 show that the first part of this answer was itself untrue. Spending £4.4bn would only result in:

• 1.2bn ‘trip stages’ being cycled in 2025, against a target of 1.6bn stages
• An average person walking for 285 stages per year, against a target of 365 stages
• 53% of children normally walking to school, against a target of 55%
• 42% of trips in towns being walked or cycled, against a target of 46%

Cycling UK has claimed for many years that DfT was sitting on evidence which showed that between £6bn and £8bn was needed to meet its targets to double cycling and increase walking by 2025.

Since Transport Secretary Mark Harper unveiled some swingeing cuts to active travel funding in March, a large number of MPs have tried asking all sorts of parliamentary questions in order to work out the scale of the cuts to dedicated funding for active travel.

The answer, according to figures in the report, is c.£233m for 2023-25.

It’s also clear what the Government needs to do now. One option – as the NAO report itself suggests – is that it could admit that it isn’t going to meet these targets. But that would have wider implications for its ability to meet its carbon targets, air-quality targets and much else besides.

The alternative is to publish in full its evidence on what is needed to meet its targets, and then act on it.