Category: Uncategorized

source: http://www.sheffieldcityregion.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/SCR-LTB-26-07-13-Full-Papers.pdf

Today the Sheffield City Region Local Enterprise Partnership has announced their preferred list of major transport schemes.

This has come about because the Sheffield City Region has secured devolved powers to develop and fund major transport schemes in the area from the Department for Transport. We (the Local Transport Body) now gets to choose the major transport schemes in it’s area with far less control from the Department for Transport.

The Local Transport Body (LTB) is the body responsible for making and overseeing key infrastructure investment decisions in the Sheffield City Region.

http://www.sheffieldcityregion.org.uk/projects/ltb/

The Local Transport Body gives a worrying vision for transport by showing an image of an M1 junction at the very top of their webpage. I hope they can see past the big trunk road schemes and put large investment into local and sustainable transport (rather than just focusing on the needs of hauliers, distributors and big business).

The schemes put forward today as priorities are a mixed bag for the people of Sheffield and improving transport.

Of the 19 schemes given priority, 4 are within the Sheffield Local Authority area.

#3, Sheffield City Centre

Infrastructure works to support delivery of New Retail Quarter, Central Business District, Riverside Business District and university development. Investment includes bringing forward a number of key city centre sites, refurbishment, development and consolidation of university campus buildings, train station access improvements, walking and cycling enhancements, public realm, housing, Hillsborough – Penistone Rd key bus route.

If done well, this could be a good scheme. The recent draft Sheffield City Centre Masterplan was lacking on encouraging cycling and instead focused on pedestrianisation of the City Centre (with the exclusion of cyclists), we’ll see how this evolves.

Onto Penistone Road, National Cycle Network Route 627 runs along this road and provides a safe (even if it could do with improving) alternative to the less busy but dangerous (because of tram tracks) Langsett Road.

Sheffield City Council have been awarded £3million from the DfT Pinch Points fund to develop the Penistone Road highway but have so far been uncooperative in releasing information about exactly what this scheme involves. Just like before, we’ll have to wait and see how this pans out.

#9 Upper Don Valley

Infrastructure and facilities to open up for inward investment Claywheels Lane Industrial Estate and Parkwood Springs Business Park. Includes a series of junction improvements and site access roads.

This scheme worries me. Sheffield City Council have already shown that they have no appetite for considering walking and cycling in this area viable by approving schemes like the Clay Wheels Lane widening and junction redevelopment designed and funded by Sainsburys. Clay Wheels Lane is part of the Sheffield National Cycle Network route 627 however there are plans to develop a business/industrial park along this road. The plans for cycling on Clay Wheels Lane so far have been abysmal, I don’t hold out much hope but would be very happy to be proved wrong. This scheme links into #3 above, both Claywheels Lane and Parkwood Springs are off of Penistone Road.

#11 Lower Don Valley (Waverly)

Highway, community and green infrastructures and utility services to accelerate the delivery of a mixed use site. Highway investment includes Waverley Link Road, Widening of the A630 to dual 3-lane between the M1 Junction 33 and the Catcliffe Interchange, Bridge maintenance scheme at critical location on A630 Sheffield Parkway.

 This seems like a typical road congestion alleviation scheme – I know very little about this area of Sheffield.

#15 Lower Don Valley (Sheffield)

Enabling works / infrastructure for two 20Ha sites. Development of over 1000 homes and retail and commercial centre, Bus Rapid Transport South.

This is an interesting sounding scheme that I know very little about. I believe it involves the widening and introduction of a bus lane along The Parkway in Sheffield – a road where cycling and walking is not permitted. More information is here.

In January 2013 Norman Baker launched the Cycle City Ambition Grants, £30 million (later upped to £77 million, later upped by £114 million more) of funding for cities that showed the ambition to “make cycling easier and safer for people throughout England”

Sheffield was the only large city that failed to submit a bid.

What does this mean? Are Sheffield City Council and our Regional Transport ITA just not interested in cycling? Are we not ambitious enough? Do we already have enough money? Or are we just incompetent?

Back in April the Cycling Safety Junction Improvement funds were awarded, Sheffield did not submit a bid for this either – as noted by fellow local blogger Stan Fichele and even with Brookhill Roundabout highlighted by The Times as a dangerous junction for cycling.

Stan notes that Sheffield City Council were intending to submit a bid for the Cycle City Ambition Grant.

However, you may be interested to know that it is our intention to make a bid for the Cycle City Ambitions Grant, the requirements for which are not quite so onerous.  I cannot, of course, guarantee success.

This never happened and I’ve been trying to find out why.

I asked at the Sheffield Cycle Forum. The council seem to put the blame squarely with the South Yorkshire ITA and washed their hands of it. I believe that if Sheffield were truly ambitious they would have submitted a bid independently of the ITA as Newcastle have done. The full statement from the Cycle Forum on 21st May can be found here. Cycle Forum Minutes 21May2013

In summary, the response said

1. The Sheffield City Region have no cycle schemes to bid for
2. We did apply for National Parks Bid money for the same scheme
3. All the cycle schemes have already been funded through LSTF and National Lottery/Sustrans Connect
4. We’ll have some schemes ready for funding applications in TWO YEARS

Sheffield have used up all the cycle schemes as part of LSTF back in 2010 and will have new ones ready in two years. This means that Sheffield will not have planned any significant new cycle schemes for 5 years. This situation is ludicrous! The statement describes these schemes as very recent, but we’re already three years on from the LSTF bids.

Sheffield City Council will have a hard fight on their hands if they think they can get away with failing to bid for funding opportunities for cycling (as with Ambition Grants and Safer Junctions) for the next 2 years. We must not let them be idle.
Sheffield have proven that they can apply for funding when they’re really keen, as is the case with the Pinch Points fund where £3m was awarded in May for a scheme to increase capacity on Penistone Road. A very similar bidding process was used.

The council try to say that all is OK because funding has been sought from the National Parks Bid. This is irrelevant, no application was made for the Cycle City Ambition Grant.

It speaks volumes that the schemes could be so easily transferred to the National Parks bid – a funding source with tourism and recreation at it’s heart instead of door to door transport.

I visited the South Yorkshire ITA to ask a similar question. Nothing about the South Yorkshire ITAs decision not to bid had been discussed in a public meeting, I thought it was important to get it on the agenda – you can watch a recording of this meeting here. It is well worth a watch and there is a very interesting discussion about applying for this sort of funding as viewed by Local Authorities.

Key points from their response

Tom Finnegan-Smith – Local officer

1. It was a difficult to reach a decision to not submit a bid
2. Schemes intended for a bid didn’t meet the criteria from the DfT and no coherent package across the region
3. Cycle in the National Park bid was submitted
4. Submitting a weak bid would harm relationship with DfT
5. Don’t have all the funding to deliver all of the South Yorkshire Cycle Action Plan from 2011
6. There will be a review of coordination between authorities in the City Region

Leigh Bramall

1. Disappointing to not put in a bid
2. You’ve already asked these questions – (I think hinting that I was wasting their time)
3. Local Authorities facing financial cuts and capacity is stretched. Difficult to come up with complex bids in such short timescales
4. Need a higher permanent level of funding
5. No previous short term funding so we’ve not planned to have bids like this ready

Ian Auckland

1. Nothing new about short term funding
2. Issue was about no schemes that fitted the bill ready, not the lack of time preventing a bid

Alan Jones

1. Officers must have had some preemptive warning of this grant (other said that this is how it happened!)

Graham Kyte

1. Doing well in Barnsley – good relationship with cycling organisations
2. Thanks to Matt for coming along and taking advantage of the democratic process! More people should come along( I completely agree! Thanks for having me!)

Ben Still

1. Difficult to preempt the nuances of funding before officially announced
2. Need to look at problem of no bid submitted when looking at next round of budget cuts (perhaps hinting that we need people to develop these schemes)

So, I think I’ve come to the end of this story. I’ll keep monitoring for National Funding on my page here and will do my best to support and urge Sheffield in applying for these opportunities in the future.

I think that some of the responsibility must fall on local people/organisations to come up with good cycling schemes and to push the council to fund and implement them. Local campaigners need to step up to the mark and start being bolder and ask for more.

 

Some notes:

 List of applications:

• Large cities – Wave 1 City Deal Cities
• Birmingham – http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/bcr
• Bristol – http://www.travelwest.info/node/703
• Leeds – http://road.cc/content/news/81876-leeds-and-manchester-each-seeking-%C2%A320m-dfts-%C2%A330m-cycle-city-ambition-fund
• Liverpool – http://liverpool.gov.uk/media/476954/cycle-city-ambition-application-liverpool-approved.pdf
• Manchester – http://cycling.tfgm.com/velocity/
• Newcastle – http://www.newcastle.gov.uk/parking-roads-and-transport/cycling/cycle-city-ambition
• Nottingham – http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/Bid-pound-6m-funding-create-cycling-city/story-18686041-detail/story.html#axzz2ScX5gv1E
• Sheffield – NONE

Statement from Sheffield City Council:

It was explained that the Sheffield City Region (SCR) had not made a bid for any funding as there were no schemes ready that met the necessary bidding criteria for the City Regions.  However, running in parallel with the City Regions grants there were also National Park grants with different criteria.  Exactly the same Sheffield and Barnsley elements (of the not progressed SCR bid) were included in the Peak Park grant submission.  

The press had reported words to the effect that Sheffield had ‘yet again failed to bid for funding’.  Clearly, the local press had got the situation wrong or were being economical with the truth.  All the Council had done was to ‘change horse’ when it became clear that the SCR would not bid.  A situation which the various authorities involved in the Peak Park bid had prepared for.

Further, many Sheffield Council cycle schemes, that had been ‘ready to go’ and would have met the necessary bidding criteria for the City Region grants, had already been funded through the successful Local Sustainable Transport bids (e.g. Beeley Woods, Hanover Way, Five Weirs Walk between Sheffield and Rotherham, FWW link to Exchange Place, etc) and the successful Halfway to Killamarsh Connect 2 bid and scheme.  These very recent schemes add up to many millions of pounds of successful bids, matched by LTP funding.   

For the future, Sheffield is in the process of preparing further cycle infrastructure schemes.  These should be far enough advanced in another two years to be able to bid for similar City Region grant funding and will amount to around £10 – 20m worth of cycling infrastructure.  Currently the council would be expected to find around 30 – 50% of this sum in match funding – not easy given the considerable recent cut-backs suffered by most councils (with more to come).

Just a quick post, Rotherham Council has just been awarded £3.4million from the Pinch Points Fund to convert Pool Green Roundabout into a signalised crossing.

The road is a standard crossroads, it has 6 lanes in the north south direction and 3 lanes in the east west direction. Cycle facilities consist of in carriageway lanes and advance stop lines.

Is this really the best we can do for cycling?

(I’ve highlighted the on carriageway lanes in red below, the original is here)

The cycle lane design reminds me of another road in Sheffield, the new Inner Ring Road which seems to encourage drivers to cut up people in the cycle path to access the slip road.

Surely within carriageway cycle lanes like these can’t be recommended in high traffic urban dual carriageways? Can they?

I much prefer this design from The Netherlands (borrowed from A View From The Cycle Path) which provides separation (I have flipped the photograph).

An open letter from my girlfriend.

To the two fully grown men who thought it was OK to shout abuse at a young woman….

I am so sorry to have delayed your obviously urgent journey by 30 precious seconds by choosing to ride into town on my bike on a brilliantly sunny bank holiday. You don’t want me to be on the road? That’s fine, well neither do I. The reason I was waiting at the lights with you is that is the only way to get onto the cycle path, where I would much rather be! There is no other place I could have been – what did you expect me to do?!

That aside, I hope you feel proud of yourselves. I’m sure you wouldn’t go up to a young woman in a bar, or in a shop, or even in the street and start shouting at her. But for some reason, safe behind the wheel of your car speeding past, you suddenly feel it’s acceptable to bully someone who has no way of answering back.

Shame on you.

 

Dear Bob Johnson,

I’m writing to you because I’m concerned about the lack of progress I see in encouraging people to use bicycles to travel in Sheffield.

At yesterday’s Council Cycle Forum we heard from Dick Skelton, a highways planning officer, that all the council’s cycling schemes had been used up with the Local Sustainable Transport Bid. It was explained that the council are working on a Green Routes project and that this will provide more schemes to begin work on but these won’t be designed fully until next year (let alone built). The LSTF schemes in progress do not include any projects to improve the roads in Sheffield for cycling, they only include off road paths, river routes and railway line conversions.

I find it staggering that there seems to be this lack of ambition to encourage people to use bicycles. We need our major roads in Sheffield to be made safer and more inviting to those who choose to cycle, and so that others are encouraged to cycle.

My understanding of the Green Routes project is that it aims to open up the city’s green spaces and parks for walking and cycling. I think that this is skirting around the problem, there is no problem cycling in the park, people enjoy it and it feels safe. However to get to the park, or green spaces I need to use roads, the majority of main roads in Sheffield do not have facilities for bicycle traffic. In addition, my workplace isn’t in a park, neither is my local school or the shops I visit, all the amenities of Sheffield are on roads, not in parks or green spaces!

I’m not aware of a single scheme aiming to improve or encourage bicycle travel on the roads in Sheffield.

I’m writing this email to you in the hope that you’ll ask Sheffield Council on my behalf what they are doing to improve conditions on our roads in Sheffield to support and encourage cycling.

Yours sincerely,

Matt Turner

Statistics for cyclists injured by ‘car door incidents’ have just been released for the last few years. I’m fairly sure that this information has been available previously but this is a nice summary in response to a Parliamentary Question.

Between 2009 and 2011 1587 incidents have been recorded resulting in injury, 2 resulted in death.

Mr Sheerman: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what information his Department holds on (a) the number of pedal cyclist casualties attributable to the opening of a vehicle door in (i) 2009, (ii) 2010 and (iii) 2011 and (b) the severity of the injuries received in each case. [145360]

Stephen Hammond: The numbers of pedal cyclists injured, by severity, in reported personal injury road accidents in Great Britain, as a result of hitting an open door of a vehicle, or as a result of a vehicle door being opened or closed negligently (e.g. injured due to evasive action), for the last three years are:
Casualties
Severity    2009    2010    2011
Killed      0      1      1
Serious     55      77     92
Slight      413     449     501

So… don’t ride in the door zone! Heed the advice from Silly Cyclists and watch the video below.