A new tool to help identify where the best places are to invest in cycling has been launched by consultant Steer Davies Gleave.
The cycling potential index aims to provide an objective measurement of cycling potential by scoring three attributes of an area: its hilliness, socio-demographics, and length of journey to work trips.
The index can provide results at different levels of spatial detail, such as an entire urban area or a neighbourhood. You can download the paper for more information on how the index was calculated, along with the full rankings of the 47 towns and cities that were surveyed.
Is it my imagination, or do two of those towns (York, Cambridge) already have lots of cycling (by UK standards)? Or is this about saying that there is more potential? Which is well and good, but I thought it would be better to look at places where there is lots of potential and very little cycling…
I think the idea of this study is to try to provide an "objective" measure of how much everyday cycling there OUGHT to be in any particular town or city. The fact that York and Cambridge already have high levels of cycling suggests that they are at least doing some things right. Reading, on the other hand, would appear to be failing miserably.
I guess it all depends on how much weight is assigned to, for example, hilliness, in putting off potential cyclists.
It is rather sad that the only way to possibly instigate a reply from a simple request as to what – if anything – was proposed / planned / discussed or organised after the campaigns AGM is to post on the “Blog”.
I intended to attend the AGM, but my work commitments prevented this and my apologies were sent well beforehand asking for the possibility of better web presence to be discussed. This did appear on the agenda as the 2009 report advises.
I would have thought that it would have been a common courtesy to report back to the instigator what the result was after the subject discussion, a simple E-mail was all that would be required, but this did not occur.
In the end I sent three emails to all the various officers of the campaign with a delay of a about a week between them asking for information and offering to help if I could in the coming year. I never got a response.
Why?
I did notice an item on the agenda was “To discuss code of conduct over email.”
Was the result of this one of “Let’s ignore all members’ requests”?
If the campaign’s object is to represent Darlington’s cyclists, this ignoring of a request, even if the reply is in the negative, has not gone anywhere near to encourage participation.
I have to state that I would much rather have preferred NOT to post this.
I'm sorry that you've not had responses, Brian.
For various reasons, that I won't go into here, several of the exec have been unable to commit the time they usually would to campaign matters and so, as with all voluntary efforts, we've fallen a bit behind with various things.
We've started to make changes to the blog, in order to make it more website-like, but it was decided that the gains made from a new site wouldn't justify the work needed, and that the burden of the work would fall disproportionately on one or two people. We'd also lose the Google Page Rank that we've built up with this blog over the last six years.
Then why was the reply to this post "Instant" when placed in the public domain?
Sorry for nearly knocking you off at the crossing on Sunday by the way.
There's no conspiracy; I just happened to be free at the time that I saw the message so I replied.
🙂
"There's no conspiracy"
Never said there was.
Well – 2 replies on the blog and two more via E-Mail.
Thanks.
This thursday's "Post AGM" (where did that come from?)is to short notice & totaly out of the blue – I'll be travelling to Portugal thr'o work.
Thursday's meeting was arranged via email between members of the executive committee.
It's the only date on which all members of the exec are able to get together in the same place at the same time. (And still requires one member of the exec to miss a previous engagement.)
It's an executive committee meeting, rather than a post-AGM meeting.
"Thursday's meeting was arranged via email between members of the executive committee."
So you can communicate via E-Mail, but only to the Excec.
It gets steadily worse.
How else would we arrange a meeting of the exec committee?
Should you have any more complaints, please address them via email.
"Should you have any more complaints, please address them via email."
Rather ironic given the problem in the first instance!