by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Sustainable transport charity Sustrans announced on June 13, 2009 the latest figures for cycling and walking on the National Cycle Network and, for the first time in the Network's 14-year history, it carries more than one million journeys every day. In 2008 a total of 386 million trips were made on the Network - half by bike and half on foot - just under a third of the 1.2 billion passenger journeys made on Britain 's railways in 2007/08.
The figures were released at the beginning of Bike Week (13-21 June) and will be published in the charity's Route User Monitoring Report for 2008. The popularity of the National Cycle Network for journeys to work or school continues to rise, with 96 million commuter journeys and 17 million trips to school made over the year. If these commuter trips had been made by car (given the average car occupancy in the UK of 1.6 people) there would have been an extra 60 million car journeys made on our roads at peak hours.
The National Cycle Network reinforced its "No Carbon Necessary" credentials by enabling over of a third of its users to leave their car behind - 134 million journeys were made by people who could have used a car but chose not to.
New sections and links are constantly being added to the 12,000-mile long Network but the number of journeys being made is growing faster than its length. Every pound spent on developing it brings around £35 worth of benefits compared with most other transport schemes which deliver ratios of around three to one.
Benefit to cost ratios are used by the Department for Transport to evaluate transport projects. They attribute a monetary value to a number of factors, from public health benefit (ie the cost saving of a healthier population), the savings to employers whose fitter workforce take less time off, and the time saved through shorter journeys, particularly during the school run peak periods. The costs include the investment costs of safe routes, maintenance expenditure, and losses to the Treasury that might result from tax revenue decreases due to reduced fuel sales as people switch from using their cars to walking and cycling.
It currently costs in the region of £200,000 to build a mile of traffic-free greenway of National Cycle Network.
The Network, the UK's definitive barometer of cycling and walking, is also giving people the chance to get more active and meeting expert recommendations for getting people moving around. Organizations including NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) advise that the key to getting more people active is to create the right environment for encouraging walking and cycling such as pleasant, green, traffic-free routes. Nearly three quarters of people asked say that the National Cycle Network is helping them to increase the amount of physical activity they take.
Malcolm Shepherd, Sustrans CEO, said: "It is gratifying to see this increasing and sustained use of the National Cycle Network. But it is also frustrating because, in spite of the increasingly vital role it plays in the environmental and physical health of the UK, the Network remains the only nationally important travel network for which there is no obligation or consistent level of financial support for its maintenance or development.
"Yet we face a low carbon future, escalating fuel costs, and an obesity time-bomb that is set to devastate not just our health but also our economy. While the National Cycle Network is not the only solution to these issues, these figures surely prove it should sit high on the list. And when we read that the National Cycle Network's value for money far outweighs all other transport schemes, perhaps the Network and cycling and walking in general have earned the right to benefit from proper and consistent investment and promotion."
While this “National Cycle Network” by Sustrans is fine and good and expansions of it would be better still, I shall reiterate again that what the UK needs is not just a little Cycle Network such as the Sustrans one but we need all roads to have cycle paths alongside them, in the same way as it is done in other EU countries, one of which is a neighbor just across the sea, namely the Netherlands.
It does, alas, appear that the British governments, local and central, do not appear to be prepared to do that, e.g. create cycle paths everywhere. It has been done everywhere – basically – in other EU countries, such as the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, but when this is put before the British government the answer is always that it would be too difficult and too expensive to do so.
Each and every time that kind of answer comes back from the government and it amazes me that such answers are being accepted by everyone. In those other countries it did not cost the taxpayer extra having such paths created and nor does it seem to have been to expensive. So, why do we get such excuse from the British governments?
I leave the reader to conclude for him- or herself as to the why.
© 2009
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Value for money National Cycle Network is cutting car traffic and getting more people active
