Cycling UK Forum

Bristol received a grant of £11 million from the DfT to transform it into Britain's first "cycling city". Apologies for being cynical, but now that this has been spent, can anyone honestly say that they have noticed 11 million pounds worth of improvement?

Things I have noticed:

• Cycle parking - 3400 new spaces apparently. This is good, although some of those installed near me have already been dug up and not put back (work relating to adjacent bus stops I believe).
• A 100m section of cycle path (between A4 portway and the pump house pub), which fills one gap in a cycle route, but which ultimately has another significant gap dumping you in some very ugly traffic on hotwells road.
• Some small pictures of bicycles painted on roads. Initially I had no idea what these were. Apparently they mark 'advisory cycle routes'. There may be signs somewhere telling you where these routes lead to, but I haven't noticed any. I have noticed that painting a picture effectively underneath a row of parked cars is not the most obvious way of showing people where to go.
• Random signs attached to posts saying useful things like, "Better by Bike".
• New on and off road cycle routes? Apparently they're there, but I can't say I've noticed many, apart from the odd disjointed fragment here and there.
• Cycle training - No experience of this, but sounds like a good idea.
• "Better by Bike" website, with:
• Out of date/inaccurate maps that don't show many cycle lanes and cycle paths.
• A 'trip planner' link that requires journey times before it will suggest a silly route.

So, while I'm all for investment in cycling infrastructure, I'm rather disappointed with the results in this case. Has anyone in the city noticed anything that I haven't? Something really worthwhile? Something worth £11M?

I grew up in Bristol and visit monthly. There are some quite good bit of new off-road cycle paths and goodish free maps to show where to find them.

http://www.betterbybike.info/cycle-maps

Doesn't seem much for £11m though.

Publicity budget = £10.9M
Farcilities budget =£0.1M

These are only guestimates, of course, and the publicity budget may be underestimated.

thirdcrank wrote::idea: Publicity budget = £10.9M
Farcilities budget =£0.1M

These are only guestimates, of course, and the publicity budget may be underestimated.

More like: publicity budget £0.20 M
Farcilities budget £0.10 M
Management expenses £10.70 M

Be careful what you wish for.
That kind of cash could buy you an awful lot of "CYCLISTS DISMOUNT" signs.

I sometimes wonder about those signs. I regard myself as a cyclist regardless of whether I am currently cycling or even on a bicycle. So when I walk past a "Cyclists Dismount" sign, presumably I should dismount... somehow . I have the same problem when on a bicycle, because after dismounting, the sign still applies.

diapason0 wrote: ... Management expenses £10.70 M

http://www.ctc.org.uk/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabID=4973
eg

... we are looking forward to working with the next round of bidders for new funding announced in February 2008 ...

Unfortunately, these 'initiatives' usually result in much talking and little action.

Perhaps they employed a 'strategic advisor for cycling policy', who will be holding meetings with pressure groups, once he returns from his fact-finding world tour? Why am I thinking of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, the bit with the colonization committee meeting for the Golgafinchams Arc ship 'B' .

I suspect that a lot of this money is more illusory than real. Once upon a time, politicians felt obliged to buy off opposition (eg Aneurin Bevin is reported to have said that he silenced the hospital consultants' opposition to the the NHS by stuffing their mouths with gold.) More recently, they have realised that the mere tantalising hint of a £ zillion is enough to keep a lot of pressure groups - or at least their paid staff - quiet. To the extent that anything is said, it's telling people what they want to hear, rather than some home truths.

Grants with strings of 000'000'000s are announced with appropriate publicity and quieter allegations that it's not new money and so on. There is also a lot more attention to these inputs than there is to outputs AKA results, whether they are achieved or not.

My own fear is that the two main results are completely negative. First, the doubters in the highways departments up and down the land can say "I told you so" when, to no one's surprise, gimmickry and CYCLISTS DISMOUNT signs don't = more cycling and second, anybody who sees cyclists as a nuisance hears these huge sums being bandied about and assumes cyclists will be made to ride somewhere else. This just adds fuel to the "you don't pay road tax" taunts.

The other thing to remember is not to get overwhelmed by what appears to be a very big number.
£11 million isn't actually a lot of cash:
Spread out over 5 years in a city with a population of half a million works out at about £5 per head per year.
Or a 7% of the cost of a a single road project in that so called "cycle city":
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/4736982.stm
Or the cost of building 1/8th mile of the M74

Dear T (and others),
I was a Stakeholder on the Cycling City project, together with other colleagues from CTC Right to Ride, Bristol Cycling Campaign, Sustrans and other groups. Even having a Stakeholder Group was a big step forward for Bristol City Council, and although our power was limited and our impact relatively small, we did achieve a number of changes and improvements to the project.
I am nout sure of your intention in raising this topic - Bike Radar, BBC Bristol (CC fails to double cycling numbers") and Bristol Evening Post, for example, have already had a pop at the project and asked "Where has the money gone?". There is actually a lot of information on BetterByBike http://www.betterbybike.info/cycling-city and numerous reports have been produced listing what has been done. These reports show that Cycling City has been a success and this has satisfied the purse-holders and put Bristol in good stead for getting further funding eg the initial £5m of Local Sustainable Transport Funding.
The question might better be - "Could the money have been better spent?" - and this is where the Stakeholders were not able to have sufficient impact.
If you would like to work with us to look further into how the money was spent and how future funding could best be applied and gain a better unerstanding of what was done and why then please get in touch.
Useful information that we would still welcome would be a comparison of what the project initially said it would deliver (with forecast costs) and what was actually delivered (with actual costs) - any help in obtaining this information would be appreciated.
We do have a lot of unpublished information too, but it takes time to sort it all out - again any help would be appreciated.
One major point that you seem to have missed, is that the project was "match-funded" - so you should be asking where the £22m went!!
If you are serious about taking this forward, do get in touch.
regards,
Martin McD
CTC Right to Ride Representative
secretary@bristolcyclingcampaign.org.uk