One thought on “Cycling Campaigns”

  1. Overall, I think the voice of the Campaign, and therefore an important aspect of the website, needs to be distinctively developing a cyclist’s view of transport in Darlington. There is constant talk at the Cycle Forum about being “realistic”, which is fair enough when it finally comes to doing road works, raising finance and arguing for one cycle path scheme or another. But behind such “realism” there needs to be, somewhere, a radical vision of how things will be, and indeed ought to be. The Cycling Campaign can be that vision.

    As an obvious example. Town on the Move is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on cycle paths in the next few years, a fact that we of course warmly welcome. But how do we decide which paths are more or less useful? From a council point of view, the only answer is whether the number of cyclists rises during the life of the project. But from a cyclist’s point of view it is surely whether a cycle path improves the journey from A to B. So the Campaign should develop a vision of all the important A to B routes in the town (e.g. all the main routes into the centre, getting to the station, getting to large employers, getting to schools) – maybe this is our own Campaign vision of how cycle routes really should work in Darlington – and assess the local authority’s progress against this vision. This would help us develop responses to current events in our public campaigns. These responses I see as the “hot issue” stuff of up to date home pages.

    Another function of the web site would be to keep Campaign members in touch with each other, and with Campaign events. The obvious way would be an events diary, which could include group meetings, local cycling-related events, and maybe even national/international stuff.

    One area we could extend into because of Beatrix’s links with Friends of the Earth in Germany are international examples of good practice. If you look at existing Cycling Campaign web sites, links tend to be with national organisations, though I see Cambridge have visited cities abroad on fact-finding visits (another great idea for Darlo Cycling Campaign!!) The great thing about the web is that it knows no national borders, and language shouldn’t be a barrier to at least looking and making contact. Anyway, I’m sure that Cycling Campaigns abroad would be keen to develop the odd page in English!

    And of course, we should really be part of the national cycling campaign at http://www.cyclenetwork.org.uk/index_js.html. By the way, I sent a message to them about our group.

    (from richardgrassick)

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