"the fact that the extra money will be administered by Sustrans' Community Links programme hadn't actually been announced."
This.
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Cycling News
Scottish Budget 2018/19
(41 posts)-
Posted 5 years ago #
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Well as long as they don't spend it on more signage, paint and park benches I will be happy.
Posted 5 years ago # -
“as long as they don't spend it on more signage, paint and park benches”
But those are (can be) part of getting more people to walk/cycle - not just about ‘commuter routes’.
Posted 5 years ago # -
So that's £36 million for infrastructure. What's the rest of the £80 million going on?
Posted 5 years ago # -
"What's the rest of the £80 million going on?"
Community Links +++?
Posted 5 years ago # -
Continual investment in state of the art infrastructure I imagine.
Posted 5 years ago # -
This thread is 4 months old, and all we seem to have are questions.
Yousaf:
"We want this extra money to create pleasant and safe routes which make it easier for people of all ages to choose to walk and cycle as part of their everyday lives."
So how are you making sure that's what you're going to get?
I don't see anything here that's strategic, or that has a vision at the end of it. Just itty bitty spending here and there.
Posted 5 years ago # -
“I don't see anything here that's strategic”
The purpose of CL is to provide strategic links that connect places that people want to go eg villages to nearest town or one place to another across a busy road or unbridged river.
So to some extent it’s up to people to come up with ideas.
I was at a cycle event at Holyrood a few years ago, someone from Sustrans was a bit excited (and slightly surprised) that they had just been asking people what they wanted and, generally, it wasn’t long distance cycle routes!
SG/TransportScotland is quite good at planning strategic road networks (whether that’s sensibly based on ‘evidence’ or not is another matter).
Local roads/transport is essentially up to LAs. Sustrans works with the ones that want to be worked with, but they usually have to find money too.
So not as big picture STRATEGIC as it needs to be.
Posted 5 years ago # -
But then, what has strategic got to do with the way the world works??
Posted 5 years ago # -
The purpose of CL is to provide strategic links that connect places that people want to go eg villages to nearest town or one place to another across a busy road or unbridged river.
So to some extent it’s up to people to come up with ideas.
That's the point. It's itty bitty stuff, but not strategic.
For example, there's no point talking about encouraging cycling while, at the same time, building more and more infrastrcture that makes cycling unpleasant. (Picardy Place, Leith Walk.)
Or, indeed, wasting money on bike lanes, while letting drivers park in them.
Without having a vision of what transport is going to look like 10 years from now, the vast majority of money will be wasted.
It'll either be wasted on "bike lanes to nowhere" - that never lead to meaningful increases in cycling. Or it'll be wasted on infrasrtucture that'll have to be torn up and replaced by something that fits a later vision.
Better to have the strategy now and only build roads and paths that fit the vision.
Posted 5 years ago # -
The local authorities are all supposed to have produced cycling or active travel strategies, which ideally would provide the vision of how these individual bits and pieces add up to a network. Unfortunately, only about half of them have, and of those that do have them, they're not necessarily all that strategic (if Dumfries and Galloway's is anything to go by). On the other hand, Glasgow have a fairly clear strategic vision and are going ahead and implementing it, with the South City Way, South West City Way etc. all the way round the city. In time, I expect this to have a pretty dramatic effect on cycling levels in Glasgow. Edinburgh I think is somewhere in the middle
Posted 5 years ago #
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