Safe Speed Forums

A UK-wide project to create new cycling and walking routes has been named winner of The People's £50 Million Lottery contest.

It scooped 42% of the 286,285 votes entered by members of the public for the competition.

The Sustrans: Connect2 scheme beat three other shortlisted entries to win the £50 million prize - the biggest-ever UK Lottery grant awarded by public vote.

As part of the winning scheme, 79 communities will benefit from new walking and cycling routes which aim to improve local travel. The project involves building bridges, tunnels, crossings and networks of paths.

I hate to sound scepticle (and hate to not know how to spell that word) - but judging by the way money is spunked away so casually, I can see £50m amounting to a very very small amount of additional cycle/walking paths/routes. I remeber in the 90's when a surge of cycle lanes was widely publicised, but it turned out what in fact had happened was we had hundreds of 10 metre long cycle lanes scattered across the country.

Like this one here

That's because these cycle paths were used by local councils to pretend they were doing something "green" by providing cycle paths. But they didn't really.

Of course, had they got Sustrans in they would have been given advice as to how to build proper cycle paths. But as the councils mainly did not give a dam about green or ecological matters, Sustrans would have been the LAST people the council would want to speak to!

_________________
www.thatsnews.org.uk / www.thatsnews.blogspot.com / http://thatsmotoring.blogspot.com/

I thought it was because they have quotas to fulfil...

_________________
Andrew.

Which will all be built after committees plan them, H&S experts advise on lighting etc.

- and then not be used by the public just like all the other cycle lanes.

Do you know how much fully separated cycle lanes cost per mile?

_________________
Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

That's one of the reasons why they pretended to be green. Quotas to fill, votes to earn, you know, the usual stuff...

_________________
www.thatsnews.org.uk / www.thatsnews.blogspot.com / http://thatsmotoring.blogspot.com/

Nice to see we have our priorities right, cycleways are sooooo much more important than the police force.

Our taxes pay for the police... This is a Lottery grant.


I live in Peterborough which has had a Lottery grant for improvements/additions to its cycleway network and its awesome.

_________________
The Box said "Windows XP or better" ... So I installed Ubuntu

Thats about 1 million per authority. Just about enough to pay for the consultancy into where to put the lanes......

(I bet there will be a few companies spring up owned by Councillors relatives ready to pocket the cash)

_________________
Speed camera policy Kills

You're thinking of capita are you ?

Now , am I being cynical or what - Highland Council in August put in a cyclepath between the path to the North face footpath access point (of Ben Nevis ) and halfway to Fort William.Very usefull??? to the residents of the burgh ,or to the tourists ???? Perhaps they had some advance warning - we shall never know. But the cyclepath is there - spanning streams etc to let the tourists get to the North face ( for the blokes from Kinloss , ex mates of SE) , TO RISK THEIR LIVES TO SAVE after they come bouncing down the mountainside .

_________________
lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

AFAIK Sustrans 2 already has the projects fully planned, it was just waiting for the money. I had a brief look at the local ones and many were short routes to link others together, but they were somewhat tricky ones.