Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Active Northumberland: Caring about Carbon

Cycling Provision at Willowburn


this is a polite complaint and a suggestion.

Bikes are by definition highly mobile; valuable enough to be attractive to thieves but not valuable enough to be worth equipping with integral anti-theft systems. So good quality, secure cycle parking at destinations is needed to make the bike a viable means of personal transport to those destinations.

The bike on which I've been riding over to the Willowburn Centre in Alnwick from my home in U_____, though nothing special, would cost circa £1K to replace new. The components (pedals, saddle) and necessary accessories (lights, luggage rack, tool kit, pump, seat pack, panniers) that might readily be stripped from it by anyone with opposing thumbs and hex keys add another £250 - £300 to its value.

There's a science and evidence base around what constitutes good cycle parking. Measured against this your bike racks are, I'm sorry, pitiful. Plainly a begrudging box-ticking afterthought proposed and approved by people who will never themselves need to use them, they fail against minimum standards and guidelines by dint of their design and situation. Butterfly racks, supporting/securing the bike by one wheel (most bike wheels are quick release these days) and known un-affectionately as wheelbenders/ wheelbreakers for reasons that should be self-explanatory, sited away from the entrance where they might enjoy the security advantage of being overlooked by people entering and leaving the building, out of range of your CCTV cameras, attached to the wall by bolts that look like they might simply be spannered out, open to the elements, unlit, are not fit for purpose. Anybody losing a bike to thieves from your racks would have a tough time persuading his/her insurers that he/she took adequate measures to protect against theft. Offering this as cycling provision is akin to making it a requirement of car-users parking up outside that they leave their car doors open wide and their keys in the ignition.



Permission from manager Peter Halliwell to bring my bike in the building has proved unworkable in the long term and has been revoked, on the usual grounds that it is an obstruction and a hazard, and contrary to North Country Leisure policy. North Country Leisure believe their bike parking provision at Willowburn to be adequate and suitable. Will you confirm this?

Hazard though? While rates of death and injury from bikes being brought into spacious buildings currently run at zero per year, cars kill - outright in RTAs - circa 3,000 people annually. They inflict serious, life changing injury on circa 20,000 people a year. A further 200,000 people suffer minor injuries on the roads a year. Some 40,000 people a year have their deaths from respiratory disease caused or accelerated by exposure to traffic exhaust fumes. Of the, if I recall correctly, 110,000 people who die prematurely from heart disease, physical inactivity is a cause in circa 45,000 cases. This and other diseases of sedentariness (like Type 2 diabetes), to which the obesogenic car as default means of personal transport is a major contributor, threaten to swamp our health service. Yet you seem very friendly to the car.

The surface area of the plot on which Willowburn stands is some four times larger than the footprint of the building. There'll have been great expense in acquiring this extra acreage; not for all-weather hockey pitches and tennis courts sadly, but for storing visitors' heavy machinery. This land needed engineering; levelling, landscaping, hardcore trucking in and compacting, asphalt, paving, drainage, lighting, planting. It's a beautiful, top quality, well designed car park: there'll have been significant expense involved in creating it.

  

This generous car parking provision will incur maintenance costs. Research by the Department for Transport, quoted in their Workplace Travel Planning Guidance, showed the national average annual cost to the provider of a single car parking space, excluding opportunity cost and the cost of the original land purchase and build spread over the lifetime of the facility, to be circa £400. Regional variations mean your maintenance costs may be less than this (or they may be higher), but steering by this figure for want of one specific to your Willowburn centre gives an annual cost for the 140+ parking spaces you gift to car users of more than £56,000.

If your status as "A new joint charity.. set up.. to manage and develop leisure services in North, West and South East Northumberland on behalf of Northumberland County Council" means you are transparent to Freedom of Information requests I'd like those figures: the cost of the original land purchase, the cost of building your car park, the annual cost of maintaining your car park. May I also know your annual customer/visitor numbers?

That you make this generous provision free to the car user doesn't mean it costs nothing. People walking, cycling or taking public transport to bring you their custom pay more for your services than they otherwise would, are in effect taxed, to grease car use, while people wanting to cycle may not, for love nor money, access cycle provision that meets standards and inspires confidence.

These are disappointing priorities for an organisation ostensibly committed to promoting physical activity and thereby public health. Doubly disappointing when reading about your policy commitment to carbon reduction - the transport sector accounts for 27% of our carbon emissions - that you should strain at the cycling gnat while swallowing the motorised camel.

Solutions? The space required for one single car parking space can accommodate 8-10 bikes in covered lockable bike lockers like these http://cyclesafe.com/bike-lockers/ecopark/ . Many alternative designs along these lines are available. I'd gladly pay something proportionate to rent one of these for a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon. This would also make you a cycling friendly employer, if that's an aspiration for you.

Please advise when you intend to remedy the sequence of oversights that led to the inadequacy of your current cycling provision at the Willowburn centre, with some provision as inviting to cyclists as the asphalt prairie of your 'free' car park is inviting to car users?

Sincerely

NTMH

I'll be sharing their reply, if and when it comes.
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