Comments on the Surrey County Council Cycling Strategy

For the original see http://tinyurl.com/q9f83cb

It would be a surprise if it wasn’t a disappointment, so many cycling strategies and plans have come and gone, whether national or more local, and very little happens.   Where it does, as the TfL Cycling “superhighways”, there seems to be more hype than delivery.

The foreword is encouraging, talking about every child in Surrey being able to ride a bike and cycle safely to school, as well as increasing cycling for transport purposes.  If that objective were to be achieved, it would be a huge change in cycling infrastructure provision and would necessarily facilitate a much higher modal share for cycling in Surrey.  But once we get into the detail it goes downhill.

International comparisons and UK experience shows that the only way to change cycling modal share significantly is high quality infrastructure, as in the Netherlands.  Training and promotion of cycling may give a brief short term effect, but soon those encouraged into cycling find the road environment too hostile and frightening, and the new (or refurbished) bike is left to rust in shed or garage.  And no sane parent will let their children mix it with high speed motorised traffic when they have a car to take them safely to school, even if they would far rather let them go on their own if it were safe.

Almost immediately we are told that money is scarce and there are no actual funds for this proposed transformation.  Much is made of bidding for funding from various sources, but without serious funding, high quality infrastructure and changes to Surrey’s Highways network  

Very few numbers are put forward.  It would be good to have an objective for modal share and the current modal share for cycling.  This would enable a series of targets for modal share to be set over the 15 years of the strategy.  For example, if the modal share now were 1%, which is less than the national average of 2%, a target of 16% modal share by 2026 would entail a 1% increase for each year of the strategy, and it would be clear whether this was being achieved. 

If the target were a modal share of 16%, it would not be unreasonable to allocate 16% of the SCC Highways budget to cycling schemes each year, rather than assuming it is all to be spent on motorised transport.

There is no definition of a “busy road”.  The London Cycling Campaign (LCC) defines  a busy road as one with more than 2,000 PCUs (Passenger Car Units, with multipliers for large vans, buses, and HGVs)  per day and an 85 percentile observed speed of below 20mph.  For busy roads, separated cycling infrastructure is required, or some treatment to make it not busy. http://tinyurl.com/orrdzng

The strategy has:

• Two political/ organisational points – which boil down to the strategy being conditioned by local conditions and consultation and that SCC will work with other stakeholders.  I assume that “Local” in this context means the district/borough council area local transport committees, which typically consist of 2 or 3 county councillors with officer support and consultation from relevant borough and parish councils. 
• A commitment to provide cycle training.
• A commitment to promote cycling with maps, adverts, and so on.
• A commitment to promote safety – by training and awareness, and enforcement of highway law.
• 2 points about managing and encouraging sport cycling
• A rather meaningless point about “capturing economic benefits”
• And one commitment to infrastructure – but only subject to funding, feasibility, and lack of local objections.

When we get into the detail of the infrastructure to be provided,  there are several good points and if a significant amount of infrastructure is built according to section 6.1 of the strategy, that will be a major improvement.

However, I can’t help feeling that nothing will change.  Training, promotion, encouraging motorists to be nice to cyclists, is all relatively politically easy.  But if it would change anything, we would already have a high modal share for cycling.  it only needs a few distracted, impatient motorists to overtake too close, left hook a cyclist or otherwise use their heavy vehicle to intimidate and bully a vulnerable bike rider – for another cyclist to decide that actually, it’s not safe enough – or to end up in hospital or dead.   Infrastructure, high quality cycle track provision,  is the only thing that will make a long term difference; the rest is politically easy, but useless.

It’s no more than a way of spending any funds that are found, as well as an excuse for pointless meetings and reports.  If the funds, however small, were actually spent on cycling, something might be achieved.