The Cyclenation and CTC joint conference took place on Saturday 24th October, in Liverpool, hosted by Mersey Cycle, Liverpool's cycle campaign. Push Bikes are affiliated to both Cyclenation and the CTC, and I was one of the Push Bikes members who attended the conference. I've written a summary of the conference, and then below that I've put my more detailed notes, for those with more time to spend. The conference agenda can been found here, although we did run over on time, of course.

Conference summary:

There are three main themes that I will pull out in this summary which are: cycling and public health; cycling and creating spaces for people; important developments for cycling in 2016. At the end I’ll also note a few interesting pieces of information about cycle infrastructure that we heard about. The first two themes come from Julien Huppert’s talk where he discussed the lack of impact that cycling had made in the 2015 election campaigns. He suggested that to make cycling matter in 2020, we need to focus on the health benefits of cycling and the way in which changes in infrastructure for cycling is connected in with creating spaces for people. This was backed up by Robin Tucker, chair of the Oxfordshire Cycle Network, who argued that we need to realise that cycle campaigners’ target audience (our ‘customers’) are not interested in our internal issues, but instead have concerns of their own that we need to address. He works the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) to get cycle infrastructure built, and says that they care about the economic case for the wider community from cycling.

We heard in the morning from Professor John Ashton CBE, President of the Faculty of Public Health, who said that although there is a £120 billion bill for the NHS, there is not sufficient evidence yet on the impact that that spending has on public health! The NHS is facing a crisis and will fail if public health and prevention aren’t put at the centre of what the NHS is doing, so clinical commissioning groups must understand how best to increase exercise, and that is through walking and cycling. There is already some change in this direction, and we heard from Louise Ellman MP that Liverpool’s 20mph areas had been delivered through partnership with public health organisations. Ian Tierney, from Cycling Projects, said that nationally, the Olympic bubble has burst and activity levels have dropped back down. Prof. Ashton also mentioned that schools are now widening their range of physical activities to include non-competitive activities such as walking and cycling, because they have found that most children drop competitive sports as soon as possible.

It is important that we communicate with decision makers that cycling is for everyone and that promoting cycling can be a large part of the solution to public inactivity. There is a mis-conception in the UK that only MAMILs (Middle-aged men in lycra) want to cycle, but Dr. Robin Lovelace, from Leeds University, pointed out that wherever the rate of cycling increases, the diversity of people cycling increases. Using the example of gender, he said that although cycling in the UK generally is dominated by men, in Cambridge the split is roughly 50-50 men and women. Isabelle Clement, director of Wheels for Wellbeing, said that there were many assumptions about people who cycle - that they can get off and push or carry their cycles, that they have 2 legs and 2 hands in working order and that they are cycling on 2 wheels - that excludes many cycle users, such as people with disabilities. Ian Tierney, from Cycling Projects, who run the Wheels for All projects nationally, said that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is calling for a fundamental shift in social attitudes to being active, but that their researchers have yet to speak to any Wheels for All centres to find out what impact they are having on health. It is important that when we are making the argument about the public health benefits of cycling, that we emphasise the diverse nature of cycle users and make sure that the cycling environment accommodates everyone’s needs.

Linking my first two themes, we heard from Daniel Robinson, the founder of Peloton Liverpool, who talked about the transformative and rehabilitative nature of cycling. In order to change people’s bad habits, you need to increase their social and human capital, and Peloton Liverpool is doing that through their engagement with the local communities in Liverpool and the Liverpool probation service. Through this engagement, they have been able to give communities in Liverpool buy-in to the Liverpool cycle hire scheme, with the result that they have a damage level of only 8%, despite having hire stations in a wide range of communities. In their work with the probation service, they are able to train offenders in cycle maintenance and give them a feeling of accomplishment. They employ ex-offenders, and refurbish children’s bicycles, which are given away as prizes for academic excellence in local primary schools. One significant group of users of the cycle hire scheme he mentioned were larger women hiring the bikes to cycle along the river front in Liverpool. He suggested that they were doing this to get exercise in a safe and non-judgemental environment, as they may feel too self conscious to go to a gym.

Creating spaces for people was the theme of Simon O’Brien, the Green Advisor to the Liverpool Mayor, who has visited over 800 open spaces in Liverpool and is looking at how to create green corridors in Liverpool through utilising brown-field sites. He argued that the building of cycle routes through green spaces was a way in which to give them a purpose and build the economic case for them. As cycling becomes more widely acknowledged as a way to save public money, he thinks that it will be able to bring a budget with it which can replenish depleted budgets for green spaces. Liverpool council has made the implementation of green corridors a criteria for new developments in the city, and are looking at ways to get green buffers around these developments to help create sections of the cycle infrastructure.

My third theme is important developments for cycling to watch for in 2016. Roger Geffen MBE, Policy Director at the CTC, and Adrian Lord of Phil Jones Associates, talked about the new Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy (CWIS) that will be released in summer 2016. This will be following a DfT announcement of funds in December 2015, when we should hear some information about what money will be available, but it will be the CWIS that will be used to decide how that money is allocated nationally. This will be an important development because it will hopefully lead to an end in the stop-start funding that cycle infrastructure has traditionally suffered from and give councils the stability in their financial stream to employ and retain cycle design experts. However there is going to be a funding gap between Local Sustainable Transport Funds running out in April 2016 and the CWIS release in the summer which could result in councils letting go many cycle designers. The CWIS is likely to follow the model of the Welsh strategy, where councils are required to develop network plans for cycling in their area in order to access funds. This will be assisted by the National Propensity to Cycle Tool (NPCT) which was introduced by Dr. Robin Lovelace. This will use data on local trip destinations to map out what future cycle patterns will be like as the diversity and modal share of cycling increases, allowing councils to target their cycle infrastructure more effectively. This software will be open-source, which means that it will be free for cycle campaigners to use, and will give us extra evidence when we campaign for better infrastructure. Perhaps at next year’s conference we can have some training sessions!

Main Infrastructure Notes:

Robin Heydon, from Cambridge Cycle Campaign and chair of Cyclenation, presented some animations of junctions that he created using Aimsum. He argued that the moving animations helped people to better understand how the plans being consulted on worked, and said that this was a powerful way to put across the case for designing for cycling.

Brian Deegan talked about light segregation, which he said is important to enable the adaptability of cycle infrastructure later when capacity is reached. It is important to start any section of light segregation with a wand, to alert road users to its presence. In addition, the measures need to be inside the white line, so that if a motor vehicle hits them it is clear the driver was at fault, and so that solid white mandatory lines don’t appear to be dashed.

He also mentioned research on bus-stop bypasses in London, which found that 70% of bus-users were in favour of the bus-stop bypass, and 50% of cycle users said that they would make them more likely to cycle more often. He felt that worries about conflicts between bus passengers and cycle users were not founded on evidence, as there had been a bus-stop bypass in Camden for over 10 years where the bus passengers stepped directly onto the cycle track, yet there had been no complaints about that. The choice, he argued, was between risking a minor collision between a cycle user and a bus passenger, or forcing cycle users into the paths of motor vehicles to overtake buses at the risk of serious injury.

Full Notes:

Welcome message from Cllr Tim Beaumont, Chair of the Liverpool Cycle Forum. In his introduction, he discussed a cycle detection loop at some traffic lights that gives a 5 second head-start to cycles. He tries to race across the junction to beat the 5 seconds, but he argued that this 5 second head start also makes car drivers more aware of cycle users than they might otherwise be. He said that “[The Dutch] do the right thing often, but we [the British] do the right thing now and again.” This is something that needs to change, and he stated that his goal was that the cycle community, as it is now, will dissolve into the whole community, so that we are not ‘cyclists’ but ‘people on cycles’.

Plenary session - Making the case for investing in (walking and) cycling:

Robin Ireland, CEO of the Health Equalities Group, in his opening remarks suggested that there was no point encouraging people onto cycles unless we got the infrastructure right.

Prof. John Ashton, President of the Faculty of Public Health (a position elected by health professionals) said that cycle campaigns are public health organisations, but we haven’t grasped that fully yet. He said that public health need to pull in organisations such as ours and ROSPA to call on our expertise. The NHS has a bill of £120 billion per year, but he said that we don’t know what impact that has on public health! So we need to get a much better evidence base, and in doing so we must get a stronger economic case for public health interventions and present it better. The Faculty of Public Health manifesto (at the election in 2015?) picked up on 20mph and air pollution as significant for health, and cycling can have a big impact on these. He called for the environment to be in all policies (E3G - Environment 3rd generation), and argued for a national strategy for making strategic links between towns and cities and popular destinations, such as the a route from Leeds through the Pennines to the Lake District. He finished on a warning, though, about some cycle users who are rude and aggressive on country roads. He relayed experiences of driving his 4x4 (necessary because of the remoteness of his house) on country lanes and that even though he was careful and courteous, he found that some cycle users were rude to him. He suggested that there are issues around attitude that need to be addressed.

Simon O’Brien, Green Advisor to the Mayor of Liverpool, talked first about the difference that getting rid of his car had made to his life. He found that his quality of life improved significantly when he ditched his car. He also discussed some of the chauvinism that exists in cycling, and talked about attitudes towards his wife when she was cycling, despite her ability to ride up mountains better than many other people. He then introduced how he came to be in his current job - he had been using the media to kick the mayor of Liverpool over plans for a park, which lead to a phonecall from the mayor to offer him a job. He’s now visited over 800 open spaces in Liverpool to work out how to use those spaces, and thinks that a lot could be done to create green corridors through Liverpool by utilising brown-field sites. He also said that traditionally the built environment in Liverpool has faced away from green spaces, so that they have been isolated, and that it was necessary to open up these spaces to people. He sees building cycle routes through these spaces as one way to do that.

In the Q&A afterwards, he said that the cuts to councils had resulted in the green spaces having no budgets, but now cycling is becoming more attractive as a cost saving measure, so could bring a budget with it. Green spaces didn’t have a purpose previously, and so the economic case for green spaces comes from the increasing transport use they are seeing through cycling. Liverpool council has the implementation of green corridors as a criteria for new developments, and with the change from Section 106 money to the Community Infrastructure Levy, the council can use the planning gain much more strategically. In addition, in Liverpool they are looking at how to get green buffers around new developments, which can form part of the cycle infrastructure.

Robin Tucker, Chair of Oxfordshire Cycle Network, opened up with a slide showing the separation between customers and companies. He refers to this as ‘crossing the river’ as the river represents the divide there is between the workings of the company and of the customers. The customers don’t care about what the company is doing internally, and are more focused on their own internal concerns. It is important for companies (and cycle campaigns) to pitch to the needs of ‘customers’, not the needs of the company/campaign. Thus it is essential to understand what the ‘customers’ needs are and then tailor our message to address those needs. He said that LEPs, councils, etc. care about the economic case for cycling - he listed 4 areas: time savings; health & productivity; attractive environment; and ???. He said that from these four, we can use the CTC’s briefing on the Economic Cycle (there is a briefing leaflet on this, and fuller details at www.ctc.org.uk/economic-cycle) to work out the benefits from achieving an increased growth in cycling.

Dr. Robin Lovelace then discussed his National Propensity to Cycle Tool (NPCT). He first told us that he started cycling in Bristol when at university because of the expense of running a car in Bristol. He was surprised at how far he could cycle and then at other people’s disbelief that cycling was so easy. He said that cycling in the UK is not diverse, being overly dominated by men. Research shows that when the rate of cycling increases, the gender balance changes - in Cambridge the split is roughly 50-50. The marginal benefits of increasing cycling among ‘MAMILS’ is small, but as diversity increases, the benefits become much greater. This is something that needs to be borne in mind in campaigning. He has created his software to empower campaigners. It is open-source, so anyone can use it for free, and he argued that it is better than a lot of the other software that is currently being used by professionals! If cycle campaigners can learn how to use his software, then we can be on a par with transport planning professionals in some aspects.

I went to the extended session on Cycling and Public Health, with John Ashton and Robin Ireland. We were told that there is a divide between where the money for cycling comes from and where the savings are made. The NHS has a five year forward plan, and it is vitally important that prevention and public health are at the centre of what the NHS is doing, otherwise the NHS as we know it will be finished. Clinical commissioning groups need to understand that everyday walking and cycling will deliver exercise, rather than exercise coming through participation in ‘sport’. Schools are finding that apart from the most athletic, children do not keep up their involvement with competitive sports so schools are having to expand their range of exercise activities to cater for these different interests.

Following the first plenary session, there was a video announcement from Robert Goodwill MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport. He discussed the Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy (CWIS) which the DfT has an obligation to publish. He said that there would be a funding announcement in November 2015, leading to a CWIS consultation document in spring 2015 which will then come into force in summer 2016.

In the next plenary session, Cycling and the Political Landscape, we opened with Julian Huppert, who was previously the co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Cycling Group. He started with an overview of the all party parliamentary debates and the report that had been produced in the last parliament. He said that this was now ‘anti-motorist’, but rather ‘pro-people’. There was a need to get away from the stop-start investment that has dogged cycling for many years, and he said that the CWIS was the way forward. Cycling had failed to be an issue at the 2015 election, and had not really gotten into either the Labour or Conservative manifestos in any large way. He then moved on to consider the 2020 elections, and asked how we could make cycling matter then. He thinks that focusing on the health savings and building spaces for people is the way to go, rather than just campaigning for cycling.

Then we heard from Louise Ellman MP (Lab, Liverpool Riverside) who is the chair of the Commons Transport Select Committee. She said that cycling is not seen as a fringe activity now, which is a change from previous, and that we have policy and interest now. The question is, how do we move on from this to get more investment? There are severe cuts in non-protected areas such as transport, and this will impact cycling provision. In addition councils are facing severe cuts so that they do not have the funds available to spend. But she thinks that devolution to local areas will present a lot of opportunities, and gave the example of Liverpool funding their 20mph areas through public health organisations. She said that the Transport Select Committee were most effective when joining their voices with other groups calling for the same thing. She also said that we need to think EU-wide in some campaigns, such as lorry cab designs. This needs to be agreed at an EU wide level, and if we want change in the UK, we need movement in the EU on this. The Transport Select Committee has started a new inquiry, “Road Traffic Law Enforcement” that they would like cycle campaigners to submit evidence to (Note: the deadline for this was 12th October 2015, but the website says that late submissions are acceptable)

Next was Roger Geffen MBE, who is Policy Director at the CTC. He discussed the impact of LSTF (Local Sustainable Transport Funding) running out in April 2016 and the gap between that and the introduction of the CWIS in summer of 2016. He is concerned that many councils will lose officers during that period of uncertainty, and that this will have an impact on the ability of some councils to access CWIS funds and build cycle infrastructure.

Finally there was Adrian Lord, from Phil Jones Associates. He discussed the new cycle-proofing that Highways England is going to be delivering. There will be an Interim Advice Note (IAN) released on cycle design guidance - IANs are released by Highways England to give guidance on works on the motorways and trunk roads in England. Highways England will also be offering training to all staff and contractors on walking and cycling issues to make sure everyone is up-to-speed. For the CWIS there is currently a research and development programme, looking at the costs and benefits. The national element of CWIS will have 3 elements: decide nationally important cycling locations; identify places and map the existing infrastructure; put together a plan for spending the available cash. The local element will probably follow the Welsh example and what is going on in the Cycle City Ambition Grant cities, which means that all local councils will have to develop local cycle network plans in order to access CWIS money. There will be a Treasury spending review in Nov 2015, leading to a DfT statement of funds in Dec 2015. The CWIS and Propensity Tool will be released in Summer 2016, but LSTF is running out in March 2016 (as previously mentioned by Roger Geffen).

After lunch, there was a plenary session on Building High Quality Space for Cycling, to enable all ages and abilities to cycle. The first speaker was Adrian Lord, who introduced the TfL International Cycling Infrastructure Report (this was released in 2014, and presented at the last Cyclenation/CTC joint conference). He said that in international best practice, cycle safety and convenience is not bought at the cost of pedestrian safety and convenience, but rather from parking spaces and turning lanes. To achieve this, political buy-in is going to be needed. In addition, with the increase in cycle lanes, cycle users will no longer be able to protect themselves when passing side-roads through the actions recommended by Bikeability, so legal protection is needed. The UK should follow many other EU countries in the legal protection granted to pedestrians and cycle users.

Then we heard from Robin Heydon (from Cambridge Cycle Campaign and Cyclenation). He first said that we have to remember who we are designing cycle infrastructure for, and stop designing with the assumption that the users will have completed Bikeability training. He said that removing centre lines on streets is a cycle-friendly move, as it reduces motor vehicle speeds, and that we should stop building ASLs, as these match the blind spots of HGVs. In Cambridge, Robin has been using Aimsum (transport simulation software - https://www.aimsun.com/wp/) to model junctions that have been put up for consultation. He models the junction first as the consultation suggests, and then he models the junction with space for cycling built in. These visual animations help people to understand the transport plans much more easily, and demonstrate the increases in capacity that can be made through designing for cycling.

Following this, we heard from Isabelle Clement, who is director of Wheels for Wellbeing, who provide a voice for disabled cycle users in London. She said that we need to think beyond the bicycle, and accommodate people with disabilities. She started hand-cycling 15 years ago in order to keep up with her children who had started to ride their bikes in the parks. She found that there were many assumptions about cyclists - that they can walk their cycles and carry them, lifting them over obstacles; that they can stand on their pedals, to give more shock absorption; that they have 2 legs and 2 arms/hands in full working order; and that they ride on only 2 wheels. These assumptions mean that cycle infrastructure is too narrow, with dismount signs, steps with wheeling ramps, traffic control measures such as speed humps and often nowhere to lock up non-standard cycles. It is important that we sell the idea that anyone can cycle - there is no such thing as ‘I can’t cycle”, as long as the right infrastructure is provided. She also pointed out that while she doesn’t get challenged in her wheelchair with handcycle attached, cycle users on other cycles who have less visible impairments do get challenged and abused.

Brian Deegan, the principle technical specialist at TfL, was next and talked about design guides. These are not just about standard infrastructure but also about making the right choices of what infrastructure to install. Light segregation is really useful in discouraging encroachment onto cycle lanes, as paint on its own doesn’t work. It is essential to start any section of segregation with a wand, which makes the physical measures visible to people driving along. The physical measures must be just inside the white line, so that if they are hit, it is clear that the vehicle was breaking the rules and also to ensure that the white line does not appear to be dashed. Car parking is really effective in slowing down other vehicles, so it is good to use as protection for cycle lanes. Then he talked about ‘hold the left’ junctions, which TfL is introducing in London, and which are effective in reducing left-hook collisions. Following that he discussed bus stop bypasses, which he said were a choice between presenting pedestrians with a risk of minor injuries with a bus stop bypass, or presenting cycle users with a risk of serious or deadly injuries as they overtake buses by moving into the path of moving motor vehicles. He told us about a bus-stop bypass in Camden which had had bus users stepping straight out onto the cycle track for 10 years without a single complaint. Research done on CS2 has found that 70% of bus passengers are in favour of the bus stop by-passes installed there. They found that the small kink in the cycle track just before the bus stop by-pass did nothing to reduce the speed of cycle users, so it is better to have a gradual curve into the bus stop bypass. They also found that 50% of cycle users said that bus stop bypasses would make them more likely to cycle. He then talked to us about capacity of cycle infrastructure. In 2000, when a bi-directional 2.5m cycle track was introduced on Royal College Street in Camden, the track reached capacity in 6 weeks, from a baseline of zero! He said that capacity issues for cycle infrastructure would occur almost immediately after the infrastructure was built. Therefore it was important for infrastructure to be adaptable, and light segregation would provide that adaptability, as it would be easier to adjust in the future.

In the discussion, the following comments were made. Jonathan Fingland, from GMCC, said that building 3 meter bi-directional lanes on one side of the road was a good idea if there was not currently sufficient support for 2 meters on both sides, and when the bi-directional lane reached capacity, there would be greater political will to have a lane on the other side too. Dooring issues were raised, and it was pointed out that the Transport for London Cycle Level of Service tool says that if a cycle lane goes too close to parked cars, it is a critical failure. Dutch and Danish road traffic regulations include explicit instructions that motor vehicle users must not open doors into the paths of cycle users, which helps with determining liability after the fact. In Cambridge, the cycle campaign took all the relevant councillors down Gilbert Road on cycles, to let them experience the terror of going around parked cars. The Cambridge Cycle Campaign argues that main roads should not have car parking, because that is against the function of the road. Also they are arguing for the running lanes (the lane in which motor vehicles are moving) to all be 3 meters in Cambridge (in Birmingham they vary between 3 and 4 meters, or more). We were also told that TfL have done research on the effect of taking out centre lines on the speed of vehicles on a wide variety of roads.

The following plenary session was on inclusive cycling advocacy and social enterprises. It opened with Ian Tierney, from ‘Cycling Projects’, which includes the ‘Wheels for All’ project. The projects that they work on are not being noticed by the wider transport debate, and this means that their needs aren’t being included nor their benefits accounted for. They run ‘Wheels for All’ leader courses and their centres rely heavily on volunteers, for staffing centres, raising funds for the adapted cycles and maintaining the bikes. They held a “Great Pedal Away Ride” to raise funds for some of the bikes. The volunteers who support the ‘Wheels for All’ centres don’t view themselves as typical ‘cyclists’. The olympic bubble has ended, and there has been a drop in activity. Lancashire has very high levels of disability - Ian showed us a graph of the rates of disability, with Blackpool reaching a rate of 30% disability. Funding for these cycles comes from social services, not from transport budgets, so social services need to understand the benefits of these cycle. There is a new Strategy for Sport from the Department for Culture, Media & Sport that says that we need a fundamental shift in social attitudes to being active, so that it is more normal to be physically active than not. However the Active England Survey has not yet interviewed or monitored any Wheels for All centre, and so their activity is going under the radar. Activity has to be for everyone, and they are an important part of that.

We then heard from Daniel Robinson, from Peleton Liverpool. He says that he see cycling as transformative and rehabilitative. He is working in Kensington, in Liverpool, which has high levels of deprivation and crime. He argues that to change people’s habits you have to change their social and human capital, and getting people involved in cycling can get them out of their old habits. Peleton Liverpool are involved in the maintenance of the Liverpool hire bike scheme, and have a workshop inside the prison system to deliver skills training.

We then heard from Matt Turner, of CycleSheffield, who spoke about effective campaigning. Campaigning, he argued, is about harnessing a collective will to get something done. It is about changing what is possible, and should focus on motivation, not education. He drew a distinction between the ordinary activities of cycle campaigners - lobbying councillors, consulting on plans, etc. - with campaigning as an activity of engagement with the public. When running a campaign to motivate the public / supporters to act, the campaign has to be simple and straight-forward. It is also important to communicate in pictures, and if the campaign can’t be expressed through a photo, then you don’t have a good campaign. He recommended Chris Rose’s book “How to win campaigns.”

I went to the extended session on social enterprises and cycling advocacy with Daniel Robinson, to hear more about Peloton Liverpool. He is interested in people who don’t see themselves as cyclists, but as regular people who use bikes for different purposes. Peleton Liverpool maintain the Liverpool cycle hire scheme as well as promoting it and engaging with the public. The scheme has 1,000 bikes, with 800 out across the city at any one time, at 140 hire stations. The cost of this was £1.3 million, and it started in May 2014. They have had 95,000 rentals and over 500,000 miles travelled. The average journey time has been 43 minutes, and the damage levels are only 8%, which is much lower than Paris. There were big worries about how successful the scheme would be as there hadn’t been the infrastructure put in for cycling, but it seems to have been successful. He said that they have found that one of their user groups is larger women who take the bikes out for a ride along the river to do some exercise in a non-threatening and non-judgemental environment, rather than paying to go to gyms. They have a good engagement process, for example going into schools to speak about the scheme, which builds the City Bike brand recognition and prestige. They work alongside the Liverpool probation service, taking the bikes into prison workshops for people to learn how to fix the bikes, which gives a feeling of pride and achievement. Some of these people then find employment through Peloton Liverpool. Liverpool Peloton’s pitch to City Bike was that community engagement would be vital to building interest and pride in the bikes. They also have a Rehabilitation Activity Requirement, where people who have driving bans or traffic offences are required to give 1 day a week for 20 weeks, and they get turned into cycle users. Another scheme is the ‘Little Bike Revival’, where they refurbish kids cycles, powder-coat them and brand them with Liverpool Peloton and the school’s brand. These bikes are then given away as prizes for academic excellence, and the bikes are ‘bikes for life’ (well, childhood anyway) - the bikes are upgraded as the children grow, with the old bikes getting refurbished and given away again. They also get the kids to keep journals of what they are doing with the bikes. He finds that often after the kids get bikes, the parents then want to get bikes to cycle with the kids.