Re: If you had 5m to spend

POHB wrote:

So how would you folks spend 5m on improving cycling in your area? 

- Cycle training schemes - adult and child.

- Many Sheffield stands all through the city centre and shopping areas, distributed in, say, pairs or fours every hundred yards or so, for short-term parking. Preferably covered. In keeping with the area.

- Long-term secure cycle parking facilities at transport interchanges; bike lockers (both lockers to wheel bikes into and secure, and small lockers for personal kit). There are logistical problems with these things - can be used as shelters for the homeless, etc - that need to be addressed.

- TV/advertising campaigns to promote cycling and warn motorists of the dangers they inflict, informing them that cyclists are often going really quite fast, that they sometimes filter down queues on both the inside and the outside, that you cannot waive someone else's right of way, that cyclists have a right to be on the road and don't need to use cycle{paths,ways,tracks} if they don't want, etc. [1]

- Education for councillors and traffic engineers so that they don't impose daft schemes, like closing off roads that then require a 1/2 mile diversion when it would be perfectly safe to have a bike bypass of the blocked end of "fake" one-way streets, etc.

- Enforcement of traffic law, particularly illegal parking and obstruction of what cycle lanes exist.

R.

[1] This is a bit of a gut reaction, and I don't have any empirical data to suggest that advertising campaigns [2] have any effect. If they do have a beneficial effect, that's great. If they don't, then I'll retract this suggestion.

[2] Such as the "Think once, think twice, think bike" motorcycle campaign of the 70s.
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