Reasons To Be Cheerful: Active Travel Funding Is Coming!

Yes, we like mountain biking, but more people on all kinds of bikes is good for the bike industry and for mountain biking. The Guardian is reporting t …

By stwhannah

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Reasons To Be Cheerful: Active Travel Funding Is Coming!

There’s already a thread on this here.

Thanks @Kramer ! Just saw that and didn’t have the tech to join the two together 🙂

It will only really take off if driving is made inconvenient for the able bodied for short journeys.

From what I have seen it looks like a lot of funding for cycling infrastructure is part of road building schemes. This means the cycle path goes where the road goes. So the east Leeds bypass has a great cycle path but who cycles on a ring road. Adding miles to a car journey makes sense if it reduces congestion but cycle commuters need the shortest option. People will then complain that no-one uses the bike path so all bike paths are a waste of money.

There’s some further explanation on the Streets Ahead pod https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/streets-ahead/id1507602653?i=1000665994478

It being tied up to road schemes isn’t perfect but its a lot easier to integrate a decent path into a new road that retrofit onto our existing roads.  When I lived in Perth (the hot version) I was really surprised how good the cycling infrastructure was as Australians seem to hate cyclists even more than we do + its blinking warm. BUT, pretty much any major road that gets built or any piece of major infrastructure at all has cycling provision built into it.  All of the freeways have some degree of traffic free bike path and the rail lines as well which are pretty handy.