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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51453457
Hard to gauge what the actual spending is from a combined number with no time scale attached.
Still a positive step as long as it's actually new money.
250 miles of cycle lane won't go hugely far across the whole of the UK, but if they put it into just a select few areas, (e.g. all in Manchester + Leeds) it could start to show what cycle investment can do.
more detail in the Guardian version:
it's 1bn a year https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/feb/10/johnson-plans-5bn-boost-for-bus-services-and-cycle-routes
"The commitment of 250 miles nationally over five years compares with a blueprint for 1,800 miles being planned by Greater Manchester under its mayor, Andy Burnham.
The “mini Holland” schemes involve changes such as closing residential roads to through-motor traffic but allowing free access for cycling, to boost bike use and walking.
Both the cycling and bus schemes are the work of Andrew Gilligan, the former journalist now at No 10, who was Johnson’s cycling tsar in London. There had been expectations that he was planning more ambitious cycling provisions.
The £1bn a year funding for the bus and cycling plan is expected to be funded predominantly from extra borrowing."
“
The £1bn a year funding for the bus and cycling plan is expected to be funded predominantly from extra borrowing.
"
Don’t know whether the borrowing is good or bad - it’s the Gov not a personal overdraft, but shows not even taking a tiny amount off roadbuilding.
Labour also pointing out they have axed about the same amount from bus services. Giving or take £250million.
On reflection, it's a touch unfair to compare Manchester's Beeline plan in it's entirety with this investment though, from the official press release, they're pledging "over 250 miles of new, high-quality separated cycle routes and safe junctions in towns and cities to be constructed across England". The majority of the 1,800 in Manchester will be quiet routes.
I'm still just hoping that Gilligan uses his political capital to deploy his Oxford + Cambridge cycling plans from a couple of years ago. In Oxford you could probably easily double modal share in a couple of years.
@chdot it could just be populist rhetoric with no intention of action behind it, but from what the Johnson Gov has said so far, road spending isn't going anywhere any time soon. But cycle infrastructure is so comparatively cheap it doesn't need to be /can't be either/or.
So it will actually be £350m to be spent on cycling, over 5 years:
https://twitter.com/peterwalker99/status/1227226824549249033?s=21
“Hang on! Labour's Ruth Cadbury asks Boris Johnson how much of the £5bn spending on buses and cycling will be on cycling. He replies: £350m. Over five years. That's just over £1 per person per year - about 1/20th of what you need for an actual cycling revolution.”
And this is money that was already announced a few weeks ago.
Darn, I'd really hoped it would actually be something substantial..
I just don't understand how Andrew Gilligan goes from this: https://andrewgilliganblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/reinventing-the-wheel-without-the-wheel/
to this?
From link -
“
We instead tried to balance the interests of pedestrians and cyclists – and succeeded more often than not. Nearly all our schemes were strongly supported by pedestrian groups (some of the others making pedestrian-based objections turned out to be the motor lobby in disguise.)
And if we did focus on cycling more than in the past, it was for two reasons. First, because (unlike pedestrian infrastructure) cycling infrastructure barely existed. For most of the last forty years, it is of course cycling which has been neglected and ignored. A few years of relative focus and attention under the last mayor can’t make up for decades of near-total neglect. Norman’s implication that it can, that cyclists have had their quota of policymakers’ interest, and the light must now shine elsewhere, is worrying.
“
So not really 250 miles of segregated cycleway then, depending on how it's done of course.
Somewhere between 35 and 140 miles of segregated cycleway, most probably.
update: https://twitter.com/peterwalker99/status/1227276467911843847
It seems Johnson got it wrong here - apparently the total spend on cycling will be around £1bn or more of the £5bn.
He said at a Westminster there would be “Barnett Consequentials”.
We’ll see...
8% of how much? Allegedly most of the bus/cycle spend is not new money but re-announcement of already allocated budgets. Perhaps a few million will trickle down to North Brexitania. Which the SNP government will spend on dualling the A9/A96?
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