FEATURE
across the country every two years via the Walking and Cycling Index.
“Many more people want to cycle but don’t, for reasons including safety,” said Toms. “For example, 70% of people say they’d walk or cycle more with less pavement parking, and 79% of people support the creation of 20-minute neighbourhoods. So there’s more and more reasons, all the time, pointing towards the shift that we need to make in urban mobility away from private motor vehicles and towards micromobility. “And we’re on that journey at the moment towards cargo
bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters coming into the mainstream and being one of the many ways people get around for short journeys in urban areas.” How to give that mobility shift greater momentum?
Adam Tranter, the West Midlands’ first cycling and walking commissioner, has some ideas.
Rachel Toms from walking and cycling charity Sustrans
committee, told MPs that his organisation wants to be funding 3,000 miles of active travel routes by 2025. “We want to interact with 2,000 projects,” he added. “We want to be involved with at least 1,000 new housing developments, and making those all work better.”
Give the people what they want Housing developments are a priority for cycling and walking charity Sustrans, too – something it has already written to the new Prime Minister about, said Rachel Toms, its director of urbanism: “We’re asking the Government to put stronger legal duties on planning authorities to play their part in cutting carbon emissions and meeting the UK’s legally-binding net-zero commitment by making it a legal requirement for local planning authorities to play their part… We’ve written to Liz Truss calling on her to protect and increase long-term funding for active travel and enshrine 20-minute neighbourhoods into planning law [for all new housing developments].” Toms defines those neighbourhoods as giving people
“access to all the key ingredients for day-to-day life – schools, shops, services, healthcare, parks, clubs and cultural activities – within a 20-minute round trip from home via walking, cycling or public transport”. Unsurprisingly, communities like this are a popular concept when Sustrans talks to people
“What I’ve learned is probably most applicable to e-bikes,” he said. “E-bikes could be really transformational. We see it in the West Midlands Cycle Hire Scheme, they are incredibly popular – more so than standard pedal cycles, even though they’re more expensive to hire, we’re getting more usage and more miles proportionally from them. So we know that’s what people want. And I’m minded to give the people what they want. If it’s e-bikes as opposed to bikes, and they’re [seen as] ‘smart’ or ‘hi-tech’, then that’s where we need to go. “And for the same reason we need to embrace e-scooters. They’re not technically that special, or fundamentally that good! You ride an e-scooter for a long while and you might be like: ‘It’d be better if I was on a bicycle, because the wheels are bigger, it’s more comfortable and I can carry stuff.’ But people want e-scooters. So we should give them that. Because if they start with that, they might end up saying: ‘What I need is a cargo bike.’ Or: ‘What I need is an e-bike.’” There is, Tranter said, a huge amount of work to do in his position. But not where he expected. “Before I took this job, I thought I’d spend the first six months trying to ‘win the argument’ and get that political will,” he said. “And I’m lucky, because my boss – Andy Street, the [Conservative] Mayor of the West Midlands – is really on this agenda, and part of the reason for appointing me is to move it forward quicker. And a lot of the leaders of the local authorities – take Birmingham, for example – are also leading the way here.
“So when you look at what’s stopping us and where we need to be, it’s the scale of change required. You have to
‘E-BIKES COULD BE REALLY TRANSFORMATIONAL. WE SEE IT IN THE WEST MIDLANDS CYCLE HIRE SCHEME, THEY ARE INCREDIBLY POPULAR’
8 | August 2022 October 2022
www.bikebiz.com
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