THE BIG INTERVIEW
Cycling UK campaigns to raise awareness about the many benefits of cycling
code that popped up in January. We then had quite a lot of communication work to rectify that in February and March, and we’re planning to do a further clarification campaign over the summer. Having the changes was a great campaign, but then there’s a further communications campaign that we’ve had to do since. “The new coalition Government in Scotland has agreed to a commitment of 10% of the total travel budget to be spent on active travel, so that’s going to be a really significant budget by 2024/2025. I think that is important because a lot of the work in cycling shows that infrastructure investment is the thing that really gets people cycling. “It helps them feel safer, it helps us to feel like it’s a really important part of our lives in our towns and cities. That’s a really important point and we really hope that’s going to translate into much better cycling provision in Scotland. That was quite a big thing for us last year.” Cycling UK’s history dates back to the 19th century, when it was founded as an advocacy organisation for cyclists, first as the The Bicycle Touring Club (from 1878-1883), later evolving to becoming the Cyclists’ Touring Club (from 1883 to 2009), and from 2016 as Cycling UK. Today, the registered charity aims to promote cycling, both
as a means of transport and as a sport, while also campaigning to improve infrastructure and safety. “Recently, we’ve had our Shoreham success,” added
Mitchell. “We took West Sussex County Council to court because they removed a bike lane without proper consultation. It was quite a popular bike lane, it went between schools and lots of families were using it. That was actually quite a big and costly piece of work for us, we actually did
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a lot of fundraising around it because the first time we challenged it we weren’t successful, so we had to go back on appeal. We were found on appeal that the council accepted that they’d acted unlawfully and they paid our costs. “The key thing for us was it sends a message to a broader
group of councils that it’s not okay to just remove cycle lanes. For us, that was the broader objective, that there’s something there that would prevent councils doing something similar in future.”
Shining a light Mitchell became Cycling UK’s new chief executive back in 2020, taking over from interim chief executive Pete Fitzboydon who was appointed following the departure of Paul Tuohy. On what she’s been particularly proud of over the last
year, Mitchell said that while the Highway Code was one of the biggest successes, something she personally thought was effective was a campaign around the COP26 climate change conference in late 2021, which highlighted the role that cycling can play in preventing climate change. “We projected a figure of a bike onto lots of buildings
around Glasgow and we got quite a lot of traction around that. We tagged it as shining a light on an overlooked emissions reduction vehicle, the bicycle. “We have this tagline ‘this machine fights climate change,’ and that was really successful. It was picked up internationally as a result of COP26, so that’s an example of something that’s actually really small but just a bit of creative thinking in our campaigns team that allowed us to do that bit of awareness raising, which is great.”
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