On 2nd February, 20 leaders from MK’s private, public and voluntary sectors met to plan a vision for substantially increased cycling in the city. The meeting, organised by Cycling CitizensMK, was hosted by Trek Bikes in Tilbrook. Organisations represented included MK City Council, MK Community Foundation, MK Christian Foundation/Cycle Saviours, MK Cycle Forum, MK Development Partnership, Network Rail, Next Bike/Santander, PWC, The Open University, Red Bull Racing and Volkswagen Group.
The meeting was opened by Deborah Cooper and Phil Murphy of MK Cycle Forum, who talked about the importance of cycling to personal health and explained the meeting aimed to complement MK City Council’s current efforts to promote cycling.
Cllr Jenny Wilson-Marklew, Cabinet Member for Climate Action and Sustainability, said cycling was one of the Council’s carbon-neutrality priorities, MK’s Redways needed investment and she would share the work of this meeting with her team. Jacqueline Fairclough, Travel Planning Officer for the Council, said her colleagues were focused on improving the Redway infrastructure and delivering Bikeability training, encouraging leisure cycling as a stage in the process towards increased utility cycling trips.
Dr. Jonathan Flower, former MK resident (pictured above with his family of six on a cycle in the late 90s) and now researcher at the Centre for Transport & Society at University of West England, showed examples of best practice from elsewhere in UK – especially Bristol, where cycle usage is high despite the hills – and talked about the obstacles facing cycling planners in MK, where cycle usage is low at 3-4% of modal share (see presentation).
This was followed by a Chris Boardman video about Kesgrave secondary school in Ipswich, where 9 out of 10 students walk or cycle to school.
Then Trek Bikes’ Malcolm Davies presented on how MK can use a rating of cycling infrastructure through People For Bikes as a basis for setting and monitoring cycling improvement targets (see presentation). Can MK get to 10% of cycling modal share by 2030? James Heslop, Head of Strategy at Network Rail, talked about their business drivers for promoting cycling, emphasising the benefits to employees’ health and wellbeing (see presentation), and the importance of good cycle parking.
Tom Bulman of Cycling CitizensMK then shared initial findings from a large-scale MK schools travel survey created by Tim Coffey, Science teacher at Ousedale School, showing that 5,000 MK secondary school students are being driven to school across distances that could be cycled in less than 15 minutes (see presentation).
Small groups discussed and fed back on four questions:
- What should the goals be for active travel in MK, what should success look like?
- What should be the next steps?
- Who else needs to be here?
- Who could fund the development?
Ian Revell, CEO of MK Community Foundation, talked about next steps and the importance of secure funding for a continuation of the Cycling Citizens MK project. Tom Bulman recommended a bold vision of MK becoming the UK’s lead cycle city by 2050 in step with the Council’s existing carbon-negative target, a disciplined analysis of each Council Cabinet member’s interests, and a process of Community Organising to build relational power through an alliance of diverse, dues-paying institutions. Ian suggested creating an endowment fund to enable this approach long term.
It was agreed to set up a follow-on meeting in March/April to consider firm plans for such an alliance, with the aim of launching it in June/July. It was also agreed that developing relationships with officers at the Department of Transport and Active Travel England, and developing with them a data-driven approach in the context of their own goals, was vital. The main goal of this group, suggested Michael Pattinson of PWC, should be to make it easier for MK City Council to make good decisions about cycling.
And Malcolm later sent this thread of inspiration from Waltham Forest.