£600,000 from cycling England and matched by the local council totalling 1.2 Million.
The money is said to have gone on;
Improving cycle lanes
New cycle lanes
20MPH town speed limit.
Right!
A 1/4 mile section of road has been painted green for bikes, it's not a lane and it has been painted over pot holes and drains it's so bad most cyclists wont ride in it.
New cycle lanes! news to me and every other cyclist I know.
20MPH speed limit. That was happening anyway. SBDC removed all the trafic lights and reduced the speed limit and put in speed bumps.
I do know that 51k was spent on extra shelters for the local train station. But that's it. Any idea how I can see where 1.2 million went?

The rest will have gone on paying some "consultant" to decide which colour of green paint best hides the potholes.

If it's anything like where I used to live it'll have gone on signs for every other lamp-post which said "Cycling in our city, coast and countryside" and "Lancaster – a Cycling Town"

They did resurface one stretch of cycle path using some weird material made of crushed glass. Yes, some genius decided that crushed glass would be the best thing available to surface a cycle path.

The mind boggles.

I've made cycling towns of Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrooke, and by gum, it put them on the map…

Yep. It'll have gone into design, drawing up contracts, safety assesment, and provision (probably) for any insurance incase anyone sues them.

51k for shelters? JEEEESUSS. You could build a small house to house them in for that price?!!!

London Borough of Enfield had to return a small fortune to Transport For London given to provide a cycle lane highway from Oakwood to Sewardstone Road as they couldn't be arsed to use it properly 🙄

Your on to something there delve deeper..
Then name and shame
Me smells scandel

£1.2 million is nothing, 😀
if u think that is bad look at bristol cycling city,
it has something like 25 million
and the only thing of note is a converting a 2 way bridge (10 metres long) into one lane motorists (controlled by lights) and the other into cycle/pedestrian path,
however it's slightly pointless as in one direction you have to cross in front of traffic twice to use the lane,
thus making it more dangerous!
genius road planning

Sounds like Darlington has done quite well with its cash them. We've some good stuff on some routes. Still lots of bad bits, but sounds better than a lot of towns.

crazy-legs was the Lancaster-Morecambe cycle path part of the scheme or was it already there? That is the one decent cycle path imo – use it to work most days and it's great apart from some of the numptys on it.

Leighton Buzzard.
Ruth Kelly was bigging it up. But I'd say the improvements have made it more dificult for cyclists.

If you're where your profile says you are, the application they submitted to become a cycling town is here:

http://www.leightonlinslade-tc.gov.uk/Documents/Big%20Plan/CYCLING%20TOWN%20%20CITY%20Application%20Form%202008%20FINAL%20v2.pdf

Reading through it, it doesn't look like they were bidding for capital investment, i.e. new infrastructure, as they expected to get that from elsewhere, but more for travel plan officers, cycle training and that kind of thing.

Also, you're only one year in, the money will be spent over three years, and one thing about councils is they tend not to be able to spend money quickly, having a lot of red-tape to get through before they can actually spend anything (same goes for Bristol, they only won last year, so I'm not saying they WILL use the money effectively, but if you want £25 million to be well spent, it doesn't happen quickly).

It's worth finding out what local campaigning groups there are, and what public consultation groups there are as well. My council has a cycle user group for example, where local cyclists can have their say on things the council are planning to do. There's no guarantee any attention will be paid, but at least we get heard, and sometime manage to improve things or head off schemes that looks good but are actually dangerous.

Unless your councillor is particularly interested in cycling I wouldn't expect to get much out of them, it's the workers in the revelant departments inside the council who are more likely to be of use. If they won a cycling town bid, they'll at least have a cycling officer, possibly a whole department, and they'll be desperate to try to convince you the money is being well spent, so try contacting them.

I remember looking at the bid for Nottingham when it was trying to get the funding that Bristol ended up getting. Vast majority of the money was allocated for 'encouraging' people to take up cycling. Very little on infrastructure.

Nobody seemed to cotton onto the fact that no matter how much money you spend trying to encourage people to cycle, if they get out there and find cycle routes that stop dead, missing signs, bad surfacing, dangerous cycle lanes etc a lot of people aren't going to keep on cycling. Their idea seemed to be that once there was enough people cycling the infrastructure could follow, seems totally backwards. I think if you put decent facilites in place people will start to use them without the need to spend 1 million pounds sending people into schools to encourage them to cycle.

http://www.woking.gov.uk/news/archive?item=0000485A216E.C0A801BA.000017E3.0003

Woking got the second largest amount in the country (after Bristol). So far I've noted two cycle signs (suggest a road route with no cycle lane) and they had a road race in the town which stopped me getting to my house for 2 hours.

Super.

Classic feature of ring-fenced budgets. Made to look like an "extra" budget for a specific task, but is actually a way to move potentially allocated money to something else.

Wouldn't be surprised if there'd have been a 1M budget, but cos CE cough up 600k, the council match it and move 400K to something else, and then spend half of it on publicity and consultants and writing reports for central govt.

If you got a 1.2M budget, at least do the decent thing and head hunt a dutch or danish city planner. Will have the vast majority of the 1.2M left and they already have expertise in planning bike friendly cities.

crazy-legs was the Lancaster-Morecambe cycle path part of the scheme or was it already there?

That was already there.
I'm being a bit harsh actually, Lancaster has some good cycle facilities and, as you say, the Lancaster – Morecambe path is very good. Cycling is now also allowed on Morecambe Promenade much to the annoyance of all the nimby's writing in the local rag – they don't want cyclists on the road cos they get in the way, they don't want them on the Prom cos they'll be mowing down children and the elderly indiscriminately. :-/

Ewan its probably been absorbed/spent elsewhere. If people question/complain it'll reappear.

Thats nothing my town of Southport supposedly got 5 million and so far we have seen sod all apart from a leg of the tour of britain that came along Lord street and shut the town down for a day costing all the shops a fortune

Anyone local to Barrowford, Lancashire might have seen the track which was built by the council and serves no purpose to anyone. It cost the council £45,000 and it boils my p*ss. This was even done after I tried to get involved to show them the way with BMX/pump style tracks….

Needless to say every time I drive past it on the M65 its always empty!

On a slightly diferent subject. There's a stretch of Sustrans near Woburn that has been laid with nothing but sand. I remember riding it for the first time with the MBR guys it took our best efforts to keep going on the flat bits, how mere mortals manage god knows.

All around Bristol there are big glossy yellow signs up saying something like 'cycle path improvements as part of…'.

I went to one of the local demonstrations of what they are doing. The staff were very nice, but clearly the projects were a total waste of money. All of them I was shown consisted such things as putting up new signs and lowering curbs on cycle lanes that should have had them lowered when they were created – that being in all cases, many years ago as none of them seemed to be new. Just more road markings. The one place where there could have been a big safety improvment was totally ignored as "putting a pedestrain/cyclist tunnel there wont happen for year yet". But its a school and commuter route that is quite high risk when using.

Too much money is being wasted on 'visiting individual people in their homes to tell them the best cycle route to work'. Lets face it, if they cant be bothered to get out an look for themselves, they are never going to get the energy to bike to work or any other place. Its criminal that Bristol got this money. Its not deserved. As someone said above, we need new routes, traffic free if possible not a fresh coat of road paint and palming off. Even adult or family 'learn to ride a bike if you can't' sessions would be more use.

I dispair.

The main bit of path on that map posted above isn't even signed. I've cycled it, but I've always been ready for some abuse as there is no way of knowing it's a legal cyclepath. And it has those maze type barriers at each end which require you to dismount and man handle your bike through.