It stays open until mid April next year, but going from the graph below, it doesn’t look as if it will make the magical 100,000:
It did pretty well though and the 100,000 doesn’t necessarily matter – they sort of promise that any petititon that gets to that number will be debated in parliament but the get britain cycling report is going to be discussed on September 2nd anyway. There’s going to be another of those big cycling demos on the day.
More politics. Our local Cycling Campaign recently organised the Bristol Cycling Summit.
I felt quite inspired by it. Amongst other things, words were said about “nettle grasping”. The chair of the meeting referred to the need for “corporate collective cojones – someone is going to have to take the pain”. The necessity for “sticks as well as carrots” was mentioned, together with the absence of an “easy way out”.
Good. It really does feel as if things are about to change – maybe they have already changed and this will only become clear with hindsight. Maybe. Unfortunately my “feeling” is not necessarily an accurate indicator of where we are. I might be feeling that maybe we’re on the cusp of taking a similar route to the Netherlands simply because I haven’t been around long enough. Although I have been broadly aware of the active-travel argument ever since I bought a copy of Richard’s Bicycle Book at the end of the seventies, I have only been involved in what is really the very shallowest of activism for a few years.
It has been argued on a number of blogs (if you’re reading this, then you’ve probably come across this) that the abstract argument has been largely won. Walking-and-cycling (despite the occasional elected noodlehead of the Hammond and Pickles variety) has been a policy “fluffy bunny” at least since the early nineties – perhaps even earlier. Fluffy bunnies are cute, everyone likes them, almost nobody is actually against them, but they are not, you know, a serious grown-up animal. So what we get is a cycle of Fine Words followed by inadequate funding combined with a failure to take any decisions which might actually do anything. It was a previous turn of this cycle that brought us all the dangerous and inadequate “cycling infrastructure” that is so striking the moment one gets on a bike. As that cycle went on, the timid infrastructure was neglected and forgotten (except by anyone who attempted to use it). Now a new round has started, active travel is in the limelight once more, fine words are being spoken, more people are riding bikes, things are looking good …
So where am I? Have I wandered in at the early part of the cycle, heard the fine words for the first time and naively been inspired by them? Or is it really different this time? Or perhaps not even “different this time”, because the cycle is more of a spiral – even the crap cycling facilities have pushed things forward a little bit, we’re not where we were back in the eighties when I was a regular London cyclist?
There isn’t a doubt that the amount of cycling in both London and Bristol has increased. But what about life outside the big trendy cities? I’ve extracted this graph from the figures in one of the many, many tables in the National Travel Survey for 2012. To be exact, it comes from table NTS0304 and represents not average number of ‘trips’ but journey ‘stages’ per person per year – so it catches the people who use a bike to get to the station and so on. I’ve included walking as a comparison.
I think all one can really say about that is “hmmmmmm”. So I’ll cheer myself up by presenting just the cycling data (the data-scrupulous will notice that, as with the above graph, the scale on the x-axis is not completely consistent – but all it means is that the first bit of the line is “squashed up” and it doesn’t really do anything deceptive to the data presentation. I just didn’t feel like faffing around to correct this).
That doesn’t really make it much better, though there is, arguably – going through the ziggy bit of the line, which is what you’d expect with such low numbers anyway – perhaps, maybe, an upward trend from about 2003 onward (and I shall now remind myself about the nature of exponential growth – nothing seems to happen for ages and then, in a big whoosh, an enormous amount happens. Or you can have “tipping points” if you prefer. Anyway, I do sort of remain guardedly optimistic).
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Completely off topic comment – nothing to do with transport whatsoever. If you haven’t already read it, Where Am I? is an entertaining (in the sense of ‘mind-twistingly strange’) philosophical story by Daniel Dennett)
… are time-consuming and not terribly exciting. And although I’d much prefer to sit around and think, maybe read the odd journal article and look at some statistics (the latest national travel survey results were released recently), I have to admit that it is probably a better use of my time to stand on a bridge in the rush hour and hand out flyers to cyclists.
We were communicating the existence of the Bristol cycling manifesto petition. As explained previously the idea is to make visible the support for an improved cycling (and walking!) environment in the handsome-but-harrassed city of Bris. The support is necessary to stiffen the political will of the people with power (notably the mayor) to push things forward. The support does exist, but it is largely latent and so, boring as it is, and even with the internet and whatnot, talking to people’s actual physically present selves is still a necessary and excellent way to communicate.
Well “fail” is not the right word; they did achieve some good stuff even though they didn’t live up to the original ambition of the project. I think the CDT project is best viewed as having built some mental infrastructure – and here in Bris some useful physical infrastructure as well.
I’m writing this now because I was looking for something to push the previous post off the top of the stack (so’s I don’t look like a sluggard who leaves old news lying around) and Dave Horton has just listed some possible reasons for the somewhat disappointing results of the project. He’s talking about Lancaster, but I think his comments can be extended further. In addition to the main post he gave a numbered list in reply to one of his commenters, and I think this is worth repeating. His comments are here and here is a filleted version:
“First, the money & status associated with being a Cycling Demonstration Town was seen as more about the money & status than about the cycling (i.e. key people saw things ‘the wrong way round’;
[My comment: yes, for sure – and I bet the same thing applied to Bristol – and all the other places. But what can we do about this? We’re back to this whole nebulous thing of “changing cultures” arn’t we?]
“Second, the project’s goal to enable more short trips to be made by bike very quickly got transformed (because it is easier to do) into a focus on making the district a more attractive cycling destination (i.e. the project became about using cycling to sell the area as a tourist destination, much more than about doing the difficult things required to get local people cycling). That’s a bit unfair (I’m skipping some important detail), but I’m confident of my general point.
[My comment: presumably this only applies to specific towns which have some sort of tourist trade – not all the CDM towns had this – something to be aware of if and when “son-of-CDT” comes to pass]
“Third, people (including key decision-makers, but also ‘ordinary’ local people) were never convinced of the case for re-making the district around bikes. That’s because there were too few people articulating that level of vision and ambition, and they were too peripheral to the process. The main people in the project, in other words, didn’t believe in the product they were selling enough (and related, were not sufficiently charismatic).
[My comment: this seems to me connected with the first point. I don’t know enough to make a detailed comparison between the Bristol and Lancaster experiences, but I recall there was a definite feeling of distrust among Bristol cycling campaigners when Cycling city started – it started with a whimper not a bang. Again, what can be done – what can we do about it?]
“Fourth, that local institutional capital which did get built during the six years of the project was immediately lost when it got cut. Key council officers were made redundant, the dedicated website became neglected etc.
[My comment: in other words, the gains are being rolled back. Bristol had its stint as a “cycling city” later than Lancaster, and we are still able to draw on it. It feels like we haven’t yet slumped back into business as usual and we’ve still got some momentum, but that there are forces in that direction.]
Oh, time for a picture, I think. One of the cycling demonstration towns was Southport. I know the town and had cause to visit it shortly after its CDT term. Was there any difference? It should have been perfect for cycling – flat as a pancake and ridiculously wide roads. No difference visible to my casual eye, apart from these cute cycle stands (unsullied by actual bikes, you will note):
I’ve already mentioned the Bristol Cycling Manifesto, but here it is again.
The top line is that there is a petition that, if you live in Bristol and wish to do anything other than use a car for every single journey, you really should sign.
This is about political will, as (briefly) discussed yesterday. We’ve ended up with a mayor who seems to genuinely support cycling. (And George Ferguson seems to have more of a real clue about it than Boris Johnson did). Making the changes that will foster active travel is going to come up against both considerable inertia and active opposition. It can only be done if there is seen to be real support. From the numbers of people riding bikes around Bris that support is definitely there – but it needs to be seen to be there.
As well as the petition, Bristol Cycling Campaign’s freedom to ride campaign includes a framework for the infrastructure layout that would make the city easy to bike around. Here’s their cute map of what a decent Bristol cycling network ought to look like:
This is another way that political will can be created – you do some of the work that ought to have been done already by salaried planners, you show what things ought to be, roughly, like. You act as if the thing has already started by providing a starting point.
Did I say that I really admire people who can get this sort of thing going? I am really not an activist, I’m more of a sit-on-my-bum-and-thinkivist.
“We could do what the Netherlands did – if we had the political will”. I’ve said this kind of thing myself – and what I’ve meant is that there is nothing inevitable about our present personal transport mess, that things could have been different if different planning choices had been made, that things could well be better – if different planning choices were to be made now.
But what is this mysterious thing, “political will”? What actually causes the people who have the choice-making power to do the right thing? What makes elected politicians feel that something is “the right thing”? What heartens them to actually push things through?
I don’t subscribe to the “all politicians are scoundrels” view. I think they are in many ways like the rest of us except that they enjoy the strange game of “politics”. What I mean by this is that politicians want to be not just re-elected (so they can go on playing the game) but also to be liked and respected and to feel they have been of some use – all the things that most of us want. But (also like most of us) they usually need to be pushed into doing awkward or difficult things. So “the right thing” needs to be made easier for them.
Which is all a roundabout way of mentioning the “get Britain cycling” epetition. I’m rather sceptical about petitions, but it can’t do any harm?
Almost certainly, everyone who sees this blog has already signed, but I thought you might like to see how it’s doing. It was started in April and will stay open for one year. The idea is that it will be taken a little bit seriously if it gets to 100,000 signatures. I’ve been tracking it since the start of May and this is how it’s gone so far:
Will it get to 100,000? Hmmm. Not impossible, but not by any means inevitable. I’ll give another update at the end of July.
Of course generating “political will” might be an easier task at the local level …
Psychobikeology 