Regular readers of this blog know that our campaign group is represented on Stormont's All Party Group (APG) on Cycling. The APG comprises MLAs, representatives of Sustrans, Cycling Ulster and cycling campaigners. Occasionally representatives from the Department for Infrastructure and Translink attend. After the last meeting in June the APG invited DfI to attend the September meeting to update the APG on its cycling-related activities. In response DfI provided the APG with a copy of a "Briefing Letter to the Department for Infrastructure Committee" dated 12 June 2024. As that letter was distributed to APG attendees I assume it is in the public domain and will quote from it but not publish it.
The letter is a good summary of the issues DfI has to address as it rolls out Active Travel across the province. As common with summaries, the letter does not address certain issues close to our heart so we will highlight those in the hope that they either already are included in DfI's Active Travel (AT) strategy and simply were not mentioned or will now become part of it.
In the first paragraph, titled"Background", we are told "Section 22 of The Climate Change Act (Northern Ireland) 2022 states that “the Department for Infrastructure must develop sectoral plans for transport which set a minimum spend on active travel from the overall transport budgets of 10%”. The actual Active Travel percentage DfI achieved was just 1.5% in 2022/23 and 1.3% in 2023/24. I will go into these numbers in more detail later but in the meantime keep in mind that the Department's annual budget currently is just short of £800m: theoretically there are £80m annually that could/should be spent on Active Travel.
In the following section "Ramping-up" DfI lists some of the reasons AT spending has been lower that set out in the Climate Change Act: staff needs to be hired and delivery plans need to be devised. In our experience there has been a distinctive lack of cyclists among DfI staff. While it is encouraging to learn that the AT team will comprise 59 members of staff, it is paramount that its staff includes a significant number of active cyclists or wheelchair users. Otherwise the current car-centric mindset that so far has hindered DfI in fully embracing Active Travel will continue unchecked.
A similar change of mindset also must be embraced by Translink. The company still has no Active Travel team. It should be embarrassed that it took Meg Hoyt of the Belfast Cycle Campaign to point out during a BBC interview after the official opening of the new Translink station that the station at the time of opening had no bike parking facility at all - not a single bike rack! That remarkable oversight has got to be a contender for the 2024 Facepalm Award.
What appears to be missing from DfI's briefing letter is the realisation that any successful AT strategy requires the not only cooperation between DfI's AT Team and Translink's AT Team (once that is set up), but also coordination with the Department of Education (to arrange Cycling Proficiency programs, the setting up of Bike Buses and informing parents about the benefits of letting children cycle to school). DfI needs to engage with the Department of Health to impress on our population that cycling is a healthy activity that improves general fitness, can reduce obesity and contributes to significant reductions in emissions generated by private cars. DfI also needs to engage and coordinate with all the other government departments who have an important role to play to make AT a success.
We urge DfI not to miss (literally) the big picture while working out its strategy: Active Travel can only work if it starts at home. New residential developments need to have short-cuts to existing arterial roads rather than being the current dead-ends out of which AT residents can exit only on roads shared with cars. The DfI needs to change planning regulations accordingly and require developers to install dedicated cycle lanes on roads leading into new developments. They also must provide car-free connector paths leading outside those new developments in a hub-and-spoke pattern.
By definition Active Travel includes walking, cycling and wheeling. Make pavements off-limits to cars and forbid cars from parking on them. When cars park on the road instead of half or fully on pavements the perceived obstruction they cause forces drivers to slow down. That's a positive change as it will make roads safer for cyclists and pedestrians alike. Pavements are for people, not cars, just like cycle lanes (which should not be advisory).
In January 2022 the Hierarchy of Road Users was added to the GB Highway Code. Regular readers of my blog will remember that I called on DfI several times and met with them, requesting Northern Ireland follows suit and implements those changes here forthwith. Cycling UK and Sustrans have been pushing for this too and their pleas were also ignored. The Cycling APG and Cycling UK have raised the issue with the Department Minister who at the last meeting appeared "keen" to explore those changes. I do wonder why it took three years for the various ministers to reach that point yet still nothing has been done.
The main change in the Highway Code is the introduction of the Hierarchy of Road Users which provides more protection to vulnerable road users. This point is absolutely critical to any attempts to ramp up Active Travel here: as long as that hierarchy is not included in the NI Highway Code, AT will fail because vulnerable road users will continue to be too afraid to venture out on our roads on bicycles. Time and again have our campaigners have heard from potential cyclists that the main reason people do not cycle here is that they are scared of being hit by a car. Based on my own experience with close passes (three successful prosecutions in 2024 so far), this cautionary attitude is quite understandable.
Surprisingly, the section Delivery Plans makes no mention of consideration of a province-wide 20mph speed limit in residential areas and in city/town/village centres, something that Cycling UK, Sustrans and ourselves have raised with DfI in various meetings. A reduction would contribute to making residents more confident in engaging in Active Travel. It is disappointing to see it not included in the current delivery plan summary.
DfI goes on to state that its AT Delivery Plan is based on international best practice, admitting this is a step-change in its commitment. Having surveyed the cycling infrastructure around Bangor and elsewhere, we can only agree: most of it is either not fit for purpose (this list is incomplete...) or badly maintained, or both.
At least DfI appears to "get" multi-modal transport: the letter mentions the term "modal shift" despite falling short of referring to multi-modal journeys explicitly. However, Translink's station designers and architects do not appear to have received that memo - which is surprising as DfI owns Translink and receives a sizeable dividend from the operator each year. Do the two institutions not talk about basic travel concepts?
Again, this illustrates why closer cooperation between those two AT teams is necessary. DfI's delivery plan should encourage multi-modal transport where people walk, cycle and use public transport as they see fit. By extension, this would require Translink to change its current policy which forbids the carriage of bicycles before 9:30am. Am I the only one who has noticed that the length of the platforms at the new Belfast Grand Central Station is the same length as the old ones and therefore precludes any future increases in train capacity? It would appear that we in Northern Ireland are stuck with four carriage trains forever. 2024 Facepalm Award...? It is high time DfI and Translink sat around a table and discussed AT.
We are encouraged that the letter mentions that a public consultation on the draft network plans and design guidance is planned for late 2024. We hope that most, not just some of our suggestions here will find their way into the drafts, together with a holistic strategy that engages other government departments and requires them to do whatever is necessary to prevent Northern Ireland's Active Travel Strategy being executed in a silo-centred manner.
DfI then mentions Procurement Changes: its plans apparently include a Consultancy Services Partnership. Many, if not most consultants do not know the areas on which they work particularly well. During their prep work they may walk (perhaps even cycle?) along a street once, at a particular time. We would hope that these consultants would engage with various stakeholder groups, particularly residents, to get a better idea of issues that may crop up only during certain times of the day as they draft new Active Travel infrastructure plans. It is crucial that the consultants collect local cyclists' input before any plan is finalised!
Re procurement: it is imperative that each infrastructure modification and addition is physically surveyed after installation and individually approved. Too often this does not happen with roadworks here: tenders are awarded to the cheapest supplier and the quality of the work often is shockingly poor.
It is encouraging to read in the section on Greenways that DfI will contribute up to half of the capital cost of approved projects, with the rest made up by local councils. This certainly shorten the ramp-up period to achieve spending 10% of its annual budget on Active Travel.
Can we suggest that the first greenway to benefit of this should be the Comber-Newtownards Greenway? It currently is in limbo because someone in DfI decided that allowing that greenway to utilise a short section of the hard shoulder of the A21 dual carriage road was too dangerous because that road has a 70mph limit. Did nobody in the department consider dropping the speed limit there to 50mph? That dual carriage road is being used by farmers travelling in their tractors at 25 or 30mph all the time. That's hardly faster than a cyclist so why is that road suitable for farmers but not cyclists? What's more, cyclists are being passed by cars travelling at 60mph on narrow country lanes all the time so what's the big deal here about installing a short section of greenway along a flat section of wide dual carriageway with excellent sight lines? Did someone mention car-centric attitudes being prevalent in DfI?
Moving along to the Active Travel Deliver Summary section we learn that in 2022/23 DfI spent £12m on AT and that the projection for 2023/24 is a total capital expenditure of around £10m. Let me put those numbers into context: the Climate Change Act 2022 target spend on AT is 10% of its annual budget. The 2022/23 DfI budget was £796m so the department spent just 1.5% of its budget on AT. The 2023/24 budget was £792m and the £10m spent amount to only 1.3%, illustrating that the ramp-up starts from a very low level, especially when we consider that a significant portion (20%) of the already tiny 2023/24 AT allocation was diverted to road resurfacing? This kind of car-centric thinking and creative accounting needs calling out!
The difficult bit as far as DfI is concerned will be figuring out how to correct the massive underspend on AT: its budget is limited and those funds were used to address other pressing infrastructure issues. Let's be realistic: something has to give: either Westminster increases its contribution to Northern Ireland's budget to make up the shortfall to enable DfI to meet its committments to the Climate Change Act, or Active Travel will continue to languish with no funding. Our government needs to explain this to the UK Treasury, urgently.
The final section Active Travel Road Safety and Promotion mentions "the importance of behavioural change programmes to encourage and increase the number of active travel journeys", specifically citing "young people". We hope that the delivery plan will also include an ad campaign to educate learner and experienced drivers about the benefits of Active Travel and about the upcoming changes in the Highway Code.
We commend DfI on supporting the Cycling Proficiency Scheme and Practical Pedestrian Safety Training. However, we do wonder why the £2m spent during the last financial year on potholes repairs were not spent supporting Sustrans who administer the Cycling Proficiency Scheme on behalf of DfI and who had to lay off a number of trainers as a result of DfI funding cut-backs.
The briefing letter refers to the Active School Travel Programme which is a brilliant initiative. Our campaign group has offered to work with a number of Bangor's primary schools on setting up a Bike Bus. Unfortunately take-up has been slow on account of a lack of parents willing to lead rides. The Department could help us and other cycle campaign groups through a publicity campaign highlighting the benefits of a Bike Bus.
We have also outlined how the installation of a dedicated cycle lane along a road corridor housing five schools could greatly reduce congestion in Bangor during the morning and afternoon rush hour while improving public health at the same time. This could serve as a blueprint for local best practice when it comes to integrating Active Travel and the Eastern Transport Plan 2035.
If anyone at DfI, Ards and North Down Borough Council, or local schools is interested in getting involved in any of our initiatives, feel free to contact us here.
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