At the beginning of February, Sustrans organised an event called 'Bringing Copenhagen to Birmingham', inviting speakers to talk about the importance of promoting cycling and the best ways in which to do that.
Birmingham Cycle Revolution (BCR) is celebrating the return of National Bike Week from 13 – 21 June with an entire week of pedal powered fun.
Bike Week is an annual, nation-wide opportunity for organisations to promote cycling and show how easily it can become part of everyday life. The dedicated week aims to get people to give cycling a go all over the UK, whether this be for fun, as a means of transport or to get fit.
For the council elections Push Bikes, the Birmingham cycling campaign group, is carrying out a survey of the views of candidates on sustainable personal transport. Sustainable doesn't just mean environmentally friendly, it also means scalable (to cope with increasing demand), and affordable.
In October 2013 Birmingham City Council published the Birmingham Mobility Action Plan green paper, which says:
Birmingham City Council's bid for another £22 million of Cycling Ambition Grant money has been successful. This is great news, and will help Birmingham to make some real change towards a more sustainable transport system.
The first Birmingham City Council Cycle Forum for 2015 was held on Wednesday 25th February. The presentation slides from the forum should be available soon on the Birmingham Cycle Forum website but here is a summary of what was presented.
Following an announcement by Nick Clegg MP at the end of November 2014 of a further £114 million for the 8 cities who received Cycle City Ambition funds in 2013, Birmingham City Council (BCC) has submitted a bid for a further £22.1 million, matched by £7.9 million of local funds. This is phase 3 of the Birmingham Cycle Revolution (BCR), as a further £8 million for phase 2 was secured by BCC last summer (although these two pieces of funding will run side-by-side). The decision on this bid will be announced by the DfT in March, and will be reported on our website.
The Birmingham Cycle Revolution followed hard on the heels of the Transport, Connectivity & Sustainability Overview and Scrutiny Committee report, which was highly critical of cycling provision in Birmingham:
Birmingham city council has published its Transport, Connectivity & Sustainability Overview and Scrutiny Committee report into cycling and walking in the city. Push Bikes welcomes this as a significant step towards making Birmingham less hostile for cycling.
Push Bikes made two submissions to the Scrutiny Committee:
