Cycling UK Forum

thirdcrank wrote:Incidentally, anybody who's been on the forum a while might suspect something sinister. She thought my name was Gar.

You should have said "Sorry. Actually I'm Handalling Harry"

Guy951 wrote:

thirdcrank wrote:Incidentally, anybody who's been on the forum a while might suspect something sinister. She thought my name was Gar.

You should have said "Sorry. Actually I'm Handalling Harry"

Good old Gareth Howell!
Gar, then Handling Harry.
I wonder what he's doing now? Annoying some other people perhaps.

He had a website, but it's long-since gone.

The best method I have heard for dealing with telephone chuggers or cold callers is to interrupt their babbling mid stream and say "Can you hang on a minute, I've just got to deal with something" Then leave them hanging on the other end of the phone whilst you make a cuppa or something.
Cold callers usually have a quota of calls to make in a space of time and the one thing they can't afford is wasted time on an individual phone call. On top of that they telephoned you so are paying for an extended call.
They'll soon hang up.

TonyR wrote: Unfortunately they were not even well informed and swore that Sustrans maintained their network and they weren't handed over to the local authorities to look after (or not).

Is this not the case?
Sustrans are engaged to design/construct some routes which on completion are handed over to the local authority for ongoing maintenance(or not-as you say!). They also take over land and construct some routes off their own bat and their team of volunteers maintain them, these tend to be known as Sustrans routes and are the ones the canvasser would be referring to.
I think there is often confusion among the travelling public as to which cycle routes are Sustrans owned and maintained, and others which Sustrans may have had an involvement in design/construction but the local authority has ownership and responsibility for maintenance.

Yes; I clarified that with someone on this forum at one point. e.g. There's a section of the C2C in County Durham which was tarmacced recently and that's because Sustrans took ownership of the route and did it themselves, but it's only a very limited section (about 8 miles I think) and the council own and maintain the rest.

So Sustrans owns significant amounts of land? I wasn't aware that they did much in the way of construction tbh. I figured their volunteers were just in charge of signage. So they have their own engineering department which builds bridges and tarmacs cycle paths?

Bicycler wrote:So Sustrans owns significant amounts of land? I wasn't aware that they did much in the way of construction tbh. I figured their volunteers were just in charge of signage. So they have their own engineering department which builds bridges and tarmacs cycle paths?

I doubt their own people go out and tarmac the paths, no doubt they contract an construction firm to do that!

Sustrans has a sister charity, Railway Paths Ltd, which owns (ex-railway) paths itself and manages Sustrans' land: http://www.railwaypaths.org.uk/. There are certainly engineers at Sustrans (and managers with an engineering background), though whether they work for Sustrans or RPL I'm not sure. I rather like the (true) story that one Sustrans office now contains both a (former) county council highway engineer who once worked on a big early-90s road scheme, and an environmental activist who was camped out opposing it...

Bah! Just been phone chugged (as former member)

How to lose friends....