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Paths of Worry

© John Stuart Clark

Recent and rare research into the public's attitudes to cycling has confirmed what campaigners, planners and commentators have long suspected. The main deterrent against greater bicycle usage in the UK is the "fear of danger from motor vehicles."

Although those interviewed jumbled up their concerns about being injured with observations about noise, fumes and the stress of busy traffic, the general message is unequivocal. Citizens perceive the blacktop as a dread zone. Understandably, they are steering well clear of it unless, of course, they are sealed in their cozy impregnable cars, contributing to the nightmare. It is logical, therefore, to presume that providing a safe or separate travel environment for cyclists will entice more people to leap on their bikes and pedal into work.

In the late Eighties, the DoT (now DETR) caved in to pressure from the cycling lobby and 50% funded the building of five experimental urban cycle networks. Greater Nottingham's was the largest. Though far from a "network", planners came from near and far to check out progress on a handful of impressive lengths. Some cycled (on bikes provided by Raleigh and supported by the Cycle Co-op's mobile breakdown service). Most went by coach and strolled sections.

So began the slow painful process of enlightening local authorities in the wisdom of investing in a cycling infrastructure. It has been a long hard struggle against motor-myopic civil servants and politicians who have been dancing to the deafening tune of the auto industry since the late 1960's, but progress has been made. The evidence is there to be inspected in towns, cities and rural blackspots across the land.

It is difficult to generalise about a statutory initiative that is amorphous and at different stages in its development, authority to authority, but you can count the number of urban centres in the UK with a comprehensive cycleway system on the fingers of one mitten. In that respect, the phenomena that is Milton Keynes is far from a joke. The City of York, where an exceptional 20% of utility trips are made by bicycle, is the example many authorities aspire to.

While advanced stop lines and priority lanes have been painted on most radial roads, "Britain's Best Cycling City" is still far from accessible by bicycle. Some parts of the suburbs are well served by meandering cycleways or on-road lanes but, within its ancient walls, pedestrianisation of the old city prevents any cross-town cycling during the day, and there are no safety provisions for crossing the three bridges linking north and south, two of which carry the inner ring road.

The system is largely a product of planners identifying where there is space to carve out a cycle route, rather than identifying where cyclists wish to ride between, then carving out space to accommodate them. York's high percentage of bicycle use is less to do with cycling provision, more a result of flat terrain and the cautious behaviour of drivers familiar with cyclists. The verdict of local folk seems to be that pedestrianisation threw out the baby with the bath water. Otherwise, "Close but not the big cigar."

Design by default is the story behind the cycling infrastructure set down by urban authorities across the country. In this respect, the Cycle Audits demanded by last year's National Cycling Strategy are an important undertaking. The object is for every authority to review the cycle-friendliness of all infrastructure proposals and to re-evalue present cycling provision. Guidelines for the modus operandi of the audits are currently being devised by private consultants, David Davies Associates, and the large majority of local authorities have expressed enthusiasm for the initiative.

Central government do not keep track of resources targeted for cycling, so the sum total of public money that has trickled through to local authorities is difficult to assess. It is estimated, however, that in 1996 cycling saw about £4 M of the total £80 M allocated to transport packages. This compares poorly with the £42.5 M awarded three years ago to the civil engineering charity, Sustrans, from the National Lottery's Millennium Fund. Ring-fenced to finance 2,500 miles of their proposed 6,500 mile National Cycle Network (NCN), the Millennium Project is steaming ahead of schedule and currently boasts 1,430 miles of the Network open to cyclists.

Since their inception in the late Seventies as a guerrilla action group against official indifference to West Country cyclists, Sustrans has grown into a vast organisation employing over 80 full-time staff with a network of ten regional offices. Their list of patrons is splattered with Sirs, Rt Hons, and individuals like Dervla Murphy and Chris Boardman whose contributions to the cycling world are legion. Director John Grimshaw keeps a firm grip of the reins, is a man of vision, and has a hot line straight to the heart of the Glenda Jackson MP.

In his own words, "The Network is a key part of any strategy to encourage cycling in the UK. Its purpose is to create high quality routes which will enable those who currently don't cycle to start doing so. It will create safe routes to schools and, by passing through the centre of each urban centre along its course, will create two high quality routes to many towns and cities in Britain, forming an integral part of the local authority cycling programme there."

Although they run work camps, Sustrans builds few cycleways itself. They are essentially a service to local authorities, scouring European and UK environmental, leisure and tourism sources for funding, providing engineering guidelines, producing surveys and feasibility studies, and rattling off all the PR glossies and press releases it takes to keep the NCN in the public eye. What appears on the ground is a collaboration, 20% funded by Sustrans, the rest by local authorities, and built by private contractors.

42% of the NCN is projected to run on all-purpose roads. In some parts of the country routes will overlap with the National Byway, a projected 3,000 mile leisure circuit (and loops within the circuit) around England and the Scottish Lowlands. Sponsored to the tune of £1/2 M by Rank Hovis, it comes trailing endorsements from all the right politicians, and is professionally packaged by PR consultants Walker Williams. According to Account Executive, Debbie Harvey, the initiative is "principally concerned with opening up Britain's countryside."

For anybody who thought that the countryside was closed to them, this is essentially a signposting exercise, ostensibly routing tourists on quiet country roads linking heritage sites, mapped by AA Publishing. There is no intention to do any engineering along these routes to make them safer or improve surfaces, and the rumour that they will be lobbying for a 20 mph speed limit was not a plank of the Byway's prospectus Debbie Harvey was aware of.

From Hovis' point of view, the National Byway ensures thousands of road junctions will sprout cycle route signs adorned with an ocre corn logo set against a rustic brown background. The first ones were put in place, in February, in Hampshire. It also ensures that the public will be party to a tasteful brochure and quarterly newsletter extolling the credentials of Hovis ("Backing cycling since 1899" apparently), dripping with the corporate colours, and featuring yummy pictures of parts of the country that will entice foreign cycle tourists possibly more than British bikers.

The fourth and final front in the march to provide segregated and/or safe routes for cyclists is a recent initiative between British Waterways and the Cyclists' Touring Club (now the ctc). Canal towpaths have always been a convenient and enjoyable thoroughfare for cyclists, often illegally so. For 30 years, British Waterways have operated a free licensing system (primarily because towpaths are not ROWs, but also to monitor numbers) and provided a National Information Pack identifying towpaths suitable for cyclists.

Last year they slapped a £12.50 toll on riding the Kennet & Avon canal and the ctc went ballistic. A short-term experiment policed by Rangers on bikes, it is intended to provide information about the practicality of operating tolls. As John Davis of British Waterways is at pains to point out, their preferred option is "towpaths free at the point of use'" but they need the research to argue the case that tolls don't work.

They badly need cash however. The new concordant with the ctc is based on the agreement that the towpaths of Great Britain offer walkers and cyclists a valuable network of traffic-free routes, or would do if resources were allocated for their development and maintenance. At present towpaths receive no ear-marked funding and their condition tends to reflect the state of the canal beside them.

The "Statement of Joint Commitment" calls for an assessment of the network, the establishment of technical and safety standards, and the promotion of canalside cycling by planning authorities incorporating towpath routes within their local and regional transport plans. Selected lengths are already integral elements of local authority and Sustrans routes, but this proposal calls for a major overhaul, pointing out that 47% of the population lives within 8 kms of a canal or river bank.

Although research is on-going, the proposal is essentially a submission to the DETR, one of many under consideration pending the announcement of Labour's integrated transport strategy. Richard Lee of Angling Times foresees "no need for conflict. Provided the towpath is properly managed and is wide enough, there should be no more than the usually petty friction between anglers with long carbon fibre poles (extending behind them) and impatient cyclists." Would that all segregated cycling initiatives were so free of opposition from their natural detractors.

On the surface these four initiatives deserve to be applauded and cyclists are right to be grateful. If nothing else, they are an important contribution to the growth of a UK cycling culture. For some time, however, hushed tones have been expressing concern. Perverse as it may seem, the main detractors of the blossoming infrastructure for cyclists are cyclists, both on the ground and in the "trade."

There are nut and bolt problems, like design failings. The difficulty with creating travel corridors exclusively for minorities is designing border crossings that enable all the desirable minorities to get in, while keeping all the undesirables (minorities or otherwise) out. This is the old chestnut of cycleway access barriers that effectively exclude motorbikes but also prohibit wheelchairs, tandems, recumbents, trikes and trailer bikes. True, these are a minority within a minority, but they are vociferous and their numbers will swell as the number of cyclists swells.

Once in the exclusion zone, there is the problem of continuity, particularly in urban areas. We can all point to cycleways that lead riders to the back end of nowhere or appear and disappear like a magician's rabbit. UK cycleways are a retrofit and fighting for elbow space. Unlike on the Continent, where a core of the network has long been established and cyclists often have priority, our dedicated routes are continually severed by side roads, entrance ways and pinch points where drivers have priority, if only by their strength of purpose. The incessant stop-start cycling experience forces many riders back onto the main drag, infuriating motorists aware that cycle paths have been provided and ignored.

Out in the countryside, there are other problems of continuity. Since they first opened the Coast-to-Coast, Sustrans have been mapping and promoting cycle routes that are at an "interim standard" or, in a word, incomplete. Three years ago Judith Chalmers walked a few hundred meters of the C2C for Wish You Were Here..., encouraging hundreds of thousands of viewers to "have a go." The following year Holiday did the same for the Carlisle-Glasgow length of the Network. Both routes still have sections that are unsuitable for novice cyclists and, in the most unexpected places, are positively dangerous.

With signposted routes on all-purpose roads, there is the different problem of drivers exploiting the quiet highway as somewhere peaceful for a Sunday pootle. Michael Breckon of the National Byway thinks this is a misplaced fear based on the belief that the AA will mark the Byway on their drivers' map, which they wont. However, residents in the Chalke Valley, south of Salisbury, maintain that the routing of the Wiltshire Cycleway through their rural idyll has indeed attracted more traffic. They are delighted to see more cyclists, but are now pressing for traffic calming.

The overall success of the cycleways initiative has raised less mundane problems in unforeseen areas. Some of the more popular leisure stretches have become enterprise zones, with all the attendant problems of vested business interests. In high summer, the Camel Trail between Padstow and Bodmin is packed bar-end to bar-end with day trippers out for a spin on hire bikes. The 11 mile trail is serviced by no fewer than seven hire outlets licensed by the local authority. In 1996 the £20 per bicycle flat fee licence was put out to tender. As a result of new money placing an anonymous bid clearly designed to squeeze small operators out of business, it has now risen to £50.

This generates £30,000 annually for Cornwall County Council, ostensibly for maintenance of the route. Last year they spent just £3,000 on repairs during the six months of the off-season. The Camel Trail is currently in desperate need of remedial work and, understandably, bike hire companies are not happy. Aside from questioning where the licence fee is disappearing to, there is the point that while the fee is the same across the board, the business rates paid by companies operating from shop premises is wildly different to those paid by firms operating from warehouses and containers.

To our credit, what cycle campaigners predicted would happen, has happened. The provision of routes for cyclists has stimulated employment in ancillary industries, but the service bike hire companies provide is now in question. To ride a length of firm track where there are few or no hills, customers are plonked on the latest MTB with almost no instruction in how to use the baffling array of grip-shift gears or adjust a seat pillar. Where a three-speed utility bicycle would liberate novices to concentrate on steering a straight line and holding their balance, holiday makers frequently find themselves grappling with ill-fitting, shin-grazing machines that do nothing to promote the joys of cycling.

With the demise of Cycling Proficiency and precious few adult cycling classes available around the country, John Grimshaw is right in emphasising the need for safe learning grounds for novices. But as John Franklin, author of the HMSO's Cyclecraft, points out, "It is a grave mistake to think that (rural off-road paths) are a stepping stone to safe cycling, for they are much more likely to develop the kinds of habits that make a cyclist more vulnerable." He notes that three riders were killed last year on the cycle paths of Milton Keynes, but only one on the roads.

Public awareness of the greater scheme of things is another weak point. With over 360,000 people a year making use of the Camel Trail alone, it must disturb Sustrans to learn that the majority of cyclists enjoying segregated leisure routes are oblivious of their developing Network. In a telling piece of research recently conducted by RSL, interviewers positioned on key cycle trails discovered that "there was relatively little awareness of initiatives to promote cycling, such as National Bike Week and the Millennium Commission's grant to the National Cycle Network." For all the £267,000 they spent last year on designer magazines, annual reports, maps and information sheets, Sustrans are failing to get their vision of an alternative transport network across.

National Bike Week (NBW), the largest annual PR exercise in the cyclist's calendar, was cash-strapped last year after loosing the £100,000 sponsorship previously put up by Rank Hovis. While failing to make much impact in the national media, Hovis estimated that local TV, newspaper and radio coverage was worth around £4 M when they sponsored the event. They were impressed and, according to rumour, wanted the event renamed the "Hovis Bike Week". NBW didn't, so they parted company in 1996. Rumour also has it that the National Byway caught wind of the disagreement and poached the Hovis money away from NBW.

In fact, sponsorship deals usually only last for a couple of years. According to the ctc, having had three years backing from Hovis, the company felt it was time to walk away from what was evidently a very good deal. According to National Byway, they simply fitted the wholesome Hovis brief and duly scooped up the old NBW sponsorship, plus an extra £400,000 and backing for ten years. Whatever the truth of the matter, the truth of the rumour is that a lot of cycling promotion schemes are scrambling for pennies from a relatively small pot.

Public money for promoting cycling is at a cross roads. For the second year running, the Minor Works budget that councils heavily drew upon has received no allocation, and looks like disappearing. The amount allocated to the package system, however, has increased, but much of that is already ear-marked for road schemes on-going from the Tory regime. As these reach completion, it is hoped more funds can be directed towards sustainable modes like cycling and walking, but there is always the chance New Labour will take the opportunity to simply slash that budget as well.

At a recent presentation of progress on the East Midlands section of the NCN, regional representative Nicola Jones forcefully refuted the suggestion that Sustrans were taking local authority funding away from more pressing cyclist needs in the City of Nottingham. Local Cycling Officer, Chris Randall, explains that a sizable proportion of the estimated £950,000 for the Greater Nottingham section will come from non-highways budgets and, hopefully, corporate sponsorship. He agrees that the NCN route has shifted the focus, but only to parts of the city that fit into the authority's general cycleway objectives.

Cycle campaigners in Melton Mowbray and Plymouth claim to have proof that their urban network is suffering because limited cycle funding has been sucked into the Sustrans vortex. Although a recent publication by the DETR, Sustrans and the Bicycle Association identified over thirty public pots of gold that organisations could dip into for cycling initiatives, there is little doubt that the NCN is a magnet for a disproportionate amount of public money. Sustrans are seen by almost all transport planners as the principal force in cycling promotion - sussed, efficient, and a lot more capable of delivering than they are. Sustrans are "enablers" par excellence. Why look further?

Amongst the raft of organisations sponsoring Sustrans is the Bicycle Association (BA), trade representatives for the manufacturers and an organisation that perhaps ought to look further. Last year they introduced a levy on new bicycle sales, an excellent idea that could benefit a large number of small under-funded schemes around the country promoting cycling. The £300,000 raised so far through the levy is targeted specifically and exclusively for Sustrans, however, but then that's why it was set up.

In 1996 the DoT released a one-off award to 62 projects under the £1.8 M Cycle Challenge scheme. Unless you include trip-end facilities, none were for infrastructure projects. A year on, "Evaluating Cycle Challenge" by the Institute of Urban Planning, Nottingham, reveals that this pump-priming money produced an excellent return in project development and the stimulation of ideas for furthering public awareness of cycling. But as Hugh McClintock observes in his summary, "How much are such initiatives likely to continue...unless more funding is available?" Given their brief to promote the broad front of cycling and therefore sales, maybe the Bicycle Association should be thinking twice about putting all their projected £1 M levy returns into one organisation?

But undoubtably the most worrying aspect of this concentration on building a cycling infrastructure is the discovery that "strategies such as (the) provision of safe cycle paths were not sufficient to induce a change in anticipated behaviour." The behaviour in question is the British public's mainline addiction to their cars, and the conclusion comes from Attitudes to Cycling, a ground-breaking piece of research produced last year by the Transport Research Laboratory. According to those interviewed, no amount of cycle paths, ways, tracks or designated routes will alone encourage them to leave the car in the garage and pedal to the supermarket.

This cuts to the heart of the matter. Whatever cycle campaigners might suggest, the object of the exercise and of the National Cycling Strategy is not to increase bicycle use per se. The object is to return our towns and cities to the people. To remove or restrict the monster that has eaten up vast tracks of the urban landscape to make room for itself, along the way destroying communities and small businesses, polluting 24,000 people a year into an early grave, and insulating the population from the human habitat to such an extent that we are in danger of becoming a nation of paranoiacs.

Without impacting on car dependency, our planners are in danger of creating linear theme parks for bikes, where drivers go to enjoy a little fresh air and exercise - a sort of Centreparcs for pootlists - in the process exporting the horrors of the city to the country. It is already happening in the Peak National Park, where the popularity of the High Peak and Tissington Trails (amongst other attractions) has lured a crippling volume of motor traffic. More than once the Joint Planning Board has had to seal off the Park to contain the flood.

Nobody questions that cycling is part of the solution to recreating people-friendly cities. So too is walking. While you would imagine we were natural allies, the harshest critics of cycleways (outside of cyclists) are pedestrians. There is a good argument that legal pavement cycling has encouraged illegal pavement cycling, and the plethora of letters to the press complaining about the menace. As Terence Bendixson of the Pedestrian Association explains, "Bicycles are vehicles charged with dangerous kinetic energy. Local authorities are mistaken in believing that, because walking and cycling are green, they are good companions."

He makes the point that cycle lanes should always be apportioned from all-purpose roads, "even though lack of space means this may restrict motor traffic. Car drivers are, as a result, forced to pay more attention to cyclists and reduce speeds, thus increasing safety for cyclists." As Attitudes to Cycling discovered, seeing cyclists and cycling provision on the roads has more chance of encouraging motorist to reevaluate their behaviour than removing us from our rightful travel zone and tucking us out of sight.

Britain is well endowed with over half a million miles of cycle routes, and that's just on all-purpose roads, forget about public bridleways and tracks. It is imperative that we move away from this obsession with exclusion zones and dedicated routes. While the achievements to date are commendable, and the work must continue, there is a real danger that the car culture will continue to rule supreme unless we broaden the battle lines to encompass other, equally important but severely neglected aspects of cycling promotion.

Attitudes to Cycling points up a three pronged assault on Britain's car dependent, one of which is providing a cycling infrastructure. They warn that "failure in one area will seriously undermine efforts in the others." In the course of muscling through infrastructure improvements, measures to promote organisational change and changes in our individual and social behaviour have barely been addressed. The ctc are right to fear that cyclists could become even more dispossessed, restricted to riding along long, thin, probably very attractive ghettos.

This raises the final and possibly most important question of public accountability. Local authorities are accountable to us through the ballot box and a convoluted system of community consultation procedures that have been weakened since the Conservative's reorganisation of city and county halls, but is currently being simplified by the Best Value approach of Labour. The National Byway is a limited company accountable to their Board of Directors, which include Hovis and the ctc. Sustrans is accountable to the Charity Commissioners and the Millennium Commission, but only for related parts of its brief.

In August last year, paid up supporters of Sustrans topped the 30,000 mark. By the Millennium they aim to have 50,000, but these are not members and certainly not all cyclists. There is no AGM where card carriers can voice their concerns and influence policy. It is definitely an organisation led from the top down and, while this undoubtably accounts for its immense success, there is growing disquiet that they are vulnerable to the sort of abuses that discredited WWF and Oxfam five years ago.

Is it time the government placed all those who are eking out empires on the back of providing an infrastructure for cyclists under the vigilant eye of an Oftbike? Or should the National Cycling Strategy working groups be given teeth? Whatever the answers are to all these concerns, it is an exciting time for cycling in the UK, and you are an unwitting partisan in a quiet revolution.

END