FEATURE
More people are demanding e-bikes for their daily travel, says Adam Tranter
secure consensus, you have to have fights and push forward for change, because change is hard. But largely it’s the fact that we’ve designed solely for motor vehicles for around 70 years now. That takes a lot of undoing.” Tranter said he and his team are still learning, but there are examples they can point to that illustrate the progress they are making. “Take the [2.75km] Coundon Cycleway in Coventry,” he said. “It’s a high-quality, two-way, fully segregated, protected cycleway right into the city centre. And it’s brilliant. It’s all built to the latest LTN 1/20 standards. And the same guy who built that is building the [6km-long, segregated] Binley Cycleway, which is one of our flagship routes for the West Midlands. “So it’s getting to the point where some local authorities are
saying: ‘We should go to Coventry to see how they’re doing things,’ which is really great.”
If this infrastructure is being built for what he calls “lazy walking”, then Tranter said bike shops should be looking at what that new consumer looks like in their areas, and how they can best serve them. “And it might not be something as obvious as just having the right bikes,” he continued. “Sometimes, in the bike shops I go to, all you can see is drop-handlebar bikes. Do you need that for riding to the shops, or can you put a child seat on it? “Sometimes I think bike design in this country has catered only for an enthusiasts’ market. And even when we have sold
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bikes that are suitable for other purposes like commuting or recreation, or utility, we’ve not put mudguards or racks on them, or anything like that. So there’s a technical element here. But it’s also looking at how new potential consumers need to be supported. And that’s also related to mechanical proficiency. “I always find it kind of crazy that there’s this culture in
cycling that you should be able to fix your own punctures, and if you can’t you’re a moron. Whereas as soon as anything goes wrong with my car I just take it for a service... For some reason, in cycling – and I might be exaggerating a little – we kind of look down on those people. And that’s just silly.” Boardman is on board with the approach to customer communication: “We need to make sure our messaging is in the language of the person who is listening,” he said, “not what we want to tell them. And that is a fundamental shift. The car industry got this years ago. They show you something that looks and feels nice, and then they bolt a car onto it. They don’t tell you about the car. They tell you about what it will give you.” Tranter’s praise for Conservative leadership is also echoed by Boardman, but on a national rather than local level. Boardman said the Government did a lot of good for active travel under Boris Johnson: “The policy we have in place now because of the last PM is sensational… So we’re in a place that we wouldn’t have dreamed of a few years ago. “What happens next, who knows? But, [for] all of the issues that we talked about at the start – this is part of the answer.”
October 2022 | 9 August 2022 | 9
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