Obviously planning has a huge impact on cycling and walking - but there's also an opportunity here. Spokes had proposed a national project to create one truly cycle-friendly town or city in every local authority in Scotland. This didn't happen, but there is some cycling stuff in there:
Spokes have the details http://www.spokes.org.uk/wordpress/2013/06/spokes-national-cycling-proposal/
The government has now issued its Main Issues Report and Draft Framework and this does include [3.21-3.24] a national cycling and walking network as a proposed National Development. This is a big advance on NPF1 and NPF2, some years ago, when our submissions were rejected completely.
Unfortunately, however, this proposed National Development is based almost entirely on leisure and tourism, with only a passing reference to using a bike for everyday trips. Leisure and tourism are of course very important, but this completely misses the necessity to foster everyday cycle-use, such as for shopping, work and school, and to do so in all parts of Scotland – which was at the heart of our proposal.
In fact, our proposal would also work for leisure and tourism – and would do so more effectively than the government’s leisure/tourism-only proposal. Under our proposal, local residents who start to use a bike in the newly cycle-friendly towns would also have the opportunity and the incentive to undertake wider leisure trips, using the National Network, leading to weekends away and to ‘holidays at home.’ Conversely, visitors to Scotland using the National Network would have the benefit of cycle-friendly towns along their route, rather than being dumped from the network into potentially hostile local urban cycling environments.
Section 5.12 of the above Main Issues report does at least say that NPF3 “will reflect our ambition to significantly increase levels of everyday cycling and walking within our settlements, and this is recognised as part of the cities agenda” – yet in fact most of the Cities agenda [5.16-5.20] seems to be about major road projects between the cities (with some rail projects) and none of the proposed national developments anywhere in the document are geared to a big rise in everyday walking and cycling.
Follow the link to Spokes to see how you can respond (closes 23 July)
