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Big Ben © Simon MacMichaelCycling loses £23m of money pledged to improve infrastructure in latest round of government cuts
A £23m ‘underspend’ on Cycle City Ambition grants can be expected as the Department for Transport looks to cut its budget by £545m, reports The Guardian.
In March we reported how Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester would each receive £22 million as part of a second wave of Cycle City Ambition funding worth £114m in total. However, not all of the money pledged will actually be spent after George Osborne announced cost-cutting measures with a view to meeting new departmental budget targets.
The Department for Transport is being asked to reduce its budget by £545m and while around £345 of this is likely to be raised by selling off land around King’s Cross, cycling has been earmarked for a significant ‘underspend’.
Further savings will be made by cutting £124m from contingency money (the financial buffer for overspend or for when things going wrong); a £31m reduction in Transport for London funding; a £16m underspend on the Regional Air Connectivity fund; a £5m underspend on the Stations Commercial Projects Facility; and a £1m underspend on the Sheffield Tram Train Project.
In August 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron announced £77 million of Cycle City Ambition funding, a large proportion of which went to Greater Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham. A further £17 million was also made available to boost cycling in National Parks.
The second wave of funding saw the same three places set to gain an additional £22m along with Bristol (£19 million), Newcastle (£10.6 million), Norwich (£8.4 million), Cambridge (£6 million) and Oxford (£3.3 million). The funding was announced by then Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, who said: “We are in the midst of a cycling revolution in the UK but we need to make sure we’re in the right gear to see it through.”
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
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25 comments
All great comments, but may I suggest that everyone who has taken the time to write here, also write to their MP, protesting at the cut in funding for cycling?
And everyone else, obviously.
You only get the government that you vote for ! ! !
Please Nicola Sturgeon can you annex Northern England ?
Corrected that for you...
No, all of it! Or invite the Dutch. We have a history of being peacefully invaded by the Dutch so there is a sound precedence. (1688 - so popular it was called the Glorious Revolution.)
What, you want to be ruled by a different bunch of motorist obsessed careerists? Why?
Yes please
But on the bright side, if there is no (badly designed, obscenely expensive) cycle path then you cannot get into an argument with a driver who is outraged that you have sensibly decided not to use it.
So who voted them back in....you reap what you sow
Old people, if the figures were accurate.
look at the numbers, the vast majority of people voted against the current government....
"SuperG wrote
look at the numbers, the vast majority of people voted against the current government...."
37% of the votes but 100% of the power, this is disporportional representation.
When is the next march against Austerity again?
Whilst it is not good that cycling funding is being cut, the cycle city ambition scheme in Leeds/Bradford is a shambles. For 23 million, we are getting a 13 mile (largely) segregated cycle path between Leeds and Bradford (which gives way to minor side roads in a frankly dangerous manner) and 8 miles of semi-upgraded towpath (complete with speedbumps, gravel, and only some sections with tarmac). But we are getting lots of twitter feeds and advertising telling people to get on their bikes. How that adds up to 23 million, I do not know.
The problem with the cycle city funding is that it comes without any kind of design standards, and it leaves planning in the hands of car-loving councils who refuse to make any concessions to the flow of motor traffic, no matter what this might mean for the goal of creating safe and convenient cycling infrastructure.
So there's a 15 BILLION POUND budget for new roads, but they're still going to take cycling money anyway. Even after several recent studies that show spending on cycling saves money in the long run.
Morons.
Erm not quite, the road investment strategy budget is £11Bn which is limited to the motorways and trunk roads in England. The majority of this would presumably be spent upgrading existing roads/infrastructure rather than building new ones.
But I am sure that local councils, Scotland and Wales will be spending money on their road networks also, which carry much more cyclist than the motorways...
From the looks of it that same tranche of money will have it's cycle fund protected.
However, getting to the point, why is the Cycle City Ambition grants not actually being used. This is a big problem. The cities got the money but for some reason just not spending it. Which the obvious question is why?
One possible reason is that while maintaining and building new roads is a fairly well known process and so can be converted from capital to infrastructure quite readily, our roads contractors (who actually do all the building and maintaining) do not really understand cycling provision and so they are much slower at designing and developing infrastructure (and that is before people who you know actually ride use it and determine how good or not the provision is).
Another possible reason is that while councils may have lofty cycle ambitions when push comes to shove they are very reluctant to put any pain on the motorist and the disruption that is needed to put in proper cycle provision.
The Leeds scheme was supposed to be finished in time for the Grand Depart. Construction started in November 2014.
One of the biggest reasons that cycle funding is underspent and what is spent is largely symbolic, is that local authority officers have no expertise or experience in planning for cyclists. My local "officer with responsibility for cycling" has just been sent on a training course for planning for cycling, a mere ten years after his appointment.
But the biggest problem is the lack of political will as all the politicians drive cars, and our local "cycling champion" doesn't ride a bike and drives a 4x4.
Or 1 billion on Trident. How about a war on waste starting with that?
All that bollocks and promises and such before the election, I knew they were talking out of their arses!
Hugely disappointing
Looks like we're just going to have to take our chances as usual.
It seems at least one aspect of cycling policy in London has now gone national. Not spending the money allocated.
Even better don't build the vanity project that is HS2/3, who needs to get to London from Birmingham 15 minutes quicker
This will get freight off the roads, so making them safer for cyclists because there’ll be fewer HGVs.
Additional speed is a nice consequence of the additional capacity and new trains, but the real motivation for building this railway is to move more people (and their bikes hopefully).
HS2 is needed because the West Coast Mainline has been upgraded to the max already. Doing it again would involve rebuilding hundreds of bridges, so the line would have to be shut for years, putting even more traffic on the roads, which would impact cyclists.
How about don't build this £175m silly little Garden Bridge - that'll be a good place to start cuts
About the Garden Bridge - think it's supposed to take cyclists (once built, of course) - also not supposed to be built using public money.
Unless Lumley has altered her view, it will only allow cyclists if they wheel their bikes like nice peasants, and can be closed whenever she feels like it.
As for 'not with public money' -ha bloody ha. If it all goes to predicted bidget (ha bloody ha) and they get all the estimated sponsorship (as before), then it won't need public money. But we are guaranteeing build and maintenance costs, so with probability close to 1 it will indeed use public money.