HOW CYCLING CAN HELP AVERT CLIMATE CHAOS - CYCLING UK

 

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH, DEAR CYCLISTS, ONCE MORE*

You have to admire Cycling UK’s campaigning team. It’s August 2021 and they are setting out yet again on their never ending quest for decent government funding to make the roads safer for cycling.

But are they wasting their time?  Will they succeed before the end of the world?

Apparently “We have seven years to avert disaster” says the message on photo of the Climate Change Conference venue in Glasgow published in Cycling UK’s magazine.

In the foreground several cyclists are riding past that dire warning sign, all of them sporting big smiles! What?

Is this an echo of the previous blog about all that smiling going in to commercials? Now Cycling UK is at it, on the one hand panicking us with an end of world scenario they want to help avert while on the other, offsetting the doom laden message by portraying smiling cyclists in the foreground. Shouldn’t they be screaming in terror?

Maybe it’s all fiction, like the book Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. In  the story  the earth is destroyed to make way for an intergalactic bypass (or in our case, the £27billion road scheme the government is still insisting on).

Then in the climax, the Earth is happily restored by the Planet Maker (played by Bill Nighy) in the excellent film of this hilarious book.

But seven years, eh. No laughing matter.

Just enough time for one more Olympiad, perhaps two, a World Cup, a few more Grand Tours, to build more roads and airports, you know all the things that matter, such as driving with your bikes on the roof rack to go cycling a few miles down the road instead of riding there.

Surely we can hang on to see if cricket is successful in bidding to become an Olympic sport. Their target is the 2028 Los Angeles Games – unless California has been consumed by then.

But anyway, thank God Cycling UK have faith and still think getting more people out of cars onto bikes can play its part in reducing carbonisation which is at the root of all this evil of our own marking, since the Industrial Revolution.

Their task is to make government see it this way!

The problem for cycling is, successive governments – Tory or Labour – is that they have never fulfilled their promise, under funding cycling every time.

Cycling UK has a long history of fighting for cyclists’ rights, begun by their founders in 1878, under the title Bicycle Touring Club, renamed Cyclists’ Touring Club in 1883 until the recent change to Cycling UK.

It is because of the Club’s work we enjoy the many “freedoms” we take for granted today.

Here’s a few of their successes. –

1885: The Royal Parks of London are opened to cyclists as a result of CTC action.

1888: Local Government Act declared cycles to be “carriages” with right to use the roads, as a result of CTC action.

1950: CTC obtained removal of clause in Wolverhampton Corporation Bill which sought power to control cyclists’ use of local roads.

1968: Cyclists win right to cycle on bridleways and long-distance cross-country routes, incorporated in new Countryside Act.

1977: Cycles carried free (with some exceptions) on trains after 99 years of sustained campaigning.

1996: CTC instrumental in creation of National Cycling Strategy (launched by government and rendered pointless because there was no funding!)

2001: Cyclists Defence fund established by CTC, to fund cyclists’ rights in the courts.

2014: Successfully campaigns for strategy for cycling and walking infrastructure and by law government to provide funding to meet it, which they never have.

That last one – the lack of proper funding - has become the current sticking point this latest effort hopes to address.

And they are pursuing this with their usual vigour and passion. It’s as if they’ve forgotten they’ve been here many times before over the last few decades, and government has ducked the issue every time.

But it took 99 years to win free travel for cycles on trains, so that tells you the campaigners understand the long game. But will change come in time?

It is heartening to know that Cycling UK insists on trying to beat sense into government. They are seeking the Holy Grail of cycling, a casket containing several £billion to fund the government’s own Active Travel initiative.  For Active Travel read cycling and walking local trips instead of always driving.

The Active Travel initiative was one of those throw away lines government used to grab the headlines, this one surfacing when climate change combined with the pandemic called for a response from government.   So they allayed people’s fears with a few soundbites.  There was never any real intention to actually do anything beyond funding “pop up cycle lanes” last summer, a number of which have since been pulled out by local authorities running scared of minority groups of vociferous   motorists.

Cycling UK know they have an uphill task.  It is to be hoped their newest campaigner, Keir Gallagher, is up to speed.  Like his predecessors they say he is full of enthusiasm for the task ahead.

Good luck, Keir. Has anyone told you the country is run by a backward looking public school educated bunch of self-serving individuals called the Establishment scared that backing cycling will upset the roads lobby?

I firmly believe that doing anything perceived to be anti-car is seen as a vote loser, which explains government inaction.

This goes back to the late 1950s, early 1960s, when car ownership soared and the government of the day – Conservative – saw a vote winner.  Their mantra became that people should be able to drive where they want when they want.

This helped create the unshakable belief which still exists in the minds of many today that the roads were motor roads and anyone else using them should clear out of their way.

In the late 1990s when Labour’s deputy Prime Minister John Prescott announced his integrated transport policy to reduce car dependency it signalled the first major move by any government to address transport problems. But Prime Minister Tony Blair immediately removed transport from Prescott’s brief and his plans were binned.

The car remained king.

Which is why no integrated transport policy including cycling has ever received more than token investment?

Many fine proposals to boost cycling have never been backed by either the cabinet or the treasury.

Their latest gig is to push cycling as a means to help combat climate change.

Doubt was cast recently that our prime minister,  stand-up comic Johnson won’t even be going to the UN Climate Change Conference  in Glasgow in November, in which case, what chance he will back the call for spending big bucks on cycling?

Nevertheless, Cycling UK are not to put off.  Indeed they are encouraged by this year’s spring elections when the focus locally was on climate change and the need to try and do something to combat it.

In his report in Cycle, UK’s bi-monthly magazine, Keir Gallagher says that since the spring elections

 there has been a “steadily building cross-party consensus” across England, Scotland and Wales which recognises cycling has a key role to play in decarbonising transport.

He hopes this signals a move away from the “sometimes contradictory polices adopted by governments UK-wide when it comes to offering the public greener transport options.”

As an example he singles out the Department for Transport’s commitment to spending

 £27billion on road building in England, which would encourage greater use of cars.

He takes encouragement from Wales where new road building schemes were frozen to allow a review, with the stated intention of “redirecting investment”.

Good luck Keir Gallagher, the latest in a long line of Cycling UK campaigners to pick up the baton.

You must hope the Department for Transport will follow Wales’s example and give a chunk of that £27b to the Active Travel policy.

I’m not holding my breath.

*Apologies to William Shakespeare’s King Henry