'Cycle Schemes' failing?

[magnatom]

It would seem that 'Cycle Schemes' have limited impact as suggested by a study in the BMJ. There is a report about it on the BBC web site.

Research published in the British Medical Journal looked at 25 campaigns in seven countries.

Most schemes showed an increase of 3.4% in household trips made by bike.

Are these schemes a waste of money, or is a 3.4% rise in cycling good enough?

 

[John the Monkey]

I would bet that very few address the behaviour of drivers.

Ergo people get one too many close pass/honk/load of abuse out of a passenger window and think "Sod this".

As Hairy Jock said on Twitter, make folk feel safe, and they'll cycle more.

 

[mark barker]

I've not read the reports, but the BBC article is talking about the figures of 7 countries. It'd be interesting to know what the impact of the UK based ones has been...

 

[courtenay]

It would seem that 'Cycle Schemes' have limited impact as suggested by a study in the BMJ. There is a report about it on the BBC web site.



Are these schemes a waste of money, or is a 3.4% rise in cycling good enough?

No 3.4% is'nt good enough, and to some extent these schemes are a waste of money.

There are a number of reason's i believe these schemes are currently not working aswell as they could.

The first being that these schemes as far as targeting the public are badly managed and most people that dont have an initial interess in cycling will not have heard of them. The answer to this is better targeting, how this would be achieved i dont know.

The second is lack of incentive, for your avg family of 2 adults and 2.4 children, buying cheap halfords bikes would cost around £300 - £400 and for most families that puts the purchase into the category of luxury. Imagine if with the purchase of a bike you received a voucher giving you 5% discount on your vehicle tax.

The third being safety, our current cycle route network is poorly maintained and a large part of the time to close to moving traffic, therefore people are intimidated by using it, if however the govt were to properly maintain routes and increase the safety aspect you would likely find an increase in users.

That does'nt mean that these schemes should be stopped, just that more thought should go into there design and application..


Edit : Obviously i am strictly talking about the UK as for the other countries i have no knowledge or experience of them.

 

[summerdays]

I was talking to someone from the Cycling City team recently and asking them whether they had seen any increase - and they said they had, and that was even allowing for the general increase in cycling in other cities/towns over the same time period. Unfortunately I've forgotten what the figure he quoted was but it sounded good (to me - definitely better than 3.4). I gather there will be a report out next year?

 

[Hilldodger]

The schemes need time and they're not being given it. You don't change people's attitudes in 2/3 years.

We have seen a huge increase in the demand for cycle training, refurbished bikes, servicing and repairs and in Leicester the percentage in way higher than 3.4%.

 

[Origamist]

The scheme in London was never going to significantly affect cycling modal share - there's too many people and too few bikes in the scheme's cordon.

Is it a waste of money? On balance, I'd say "no". Here's a few reasons why: it raises the profile of cycling (and hopefully changes attitudes), normalises cycling (everyday clothes etc) makes cycling in London a little easier and more convivial, and finally, if the money wasn't being put into the scheme, it would probably be wasted on the LCN, or worse still, efforts towards: "smoothing traffic flow".

 

[marinyork]

Local Cycling schemes are very hard to measure the effect of. They are probably fairly good in the long term, the problem being the local cycling charities and councils are not very transparent and not impartial about discussing the matter and get extremely angry if you start asking independently minded questions.

 

[As Easy As Riding A Bike]

The paper is here, if anyone wants to read it.

I'm going to have a trawl through it this evening.

 

[HLaB]

I've not looked at the exact figures of that study but I've recently been looking at the cycling towns reports and other work by Cavill et. al. It seems like almost any scheme that promotes cycling has a substantial cost to benefit ratio in terms of what it save the NHS alone. Looking closer at the CDTs it was an increase but on a small base so increases weren't that great and certainly won't meet the targets in the CAPS, 10% of all trips bt 2020 will be by bike; any measures are better than nothing IMO.

I'll have to bookmark that paper :-)

 

[summerdays]

Local Cycling schemes are very hard to measure the effect of. They are probably fairly good in the long term, the problem being the local cycling charities and councils are not very transparent and not impartial about discussing the matter and get extremely angry if you start asking independently minded questions.

What questions would you ask of them?

I know that on most of the main cycle paths there are those induction loops to measure cyclists and that they do those counts at certain locations on a regular basis. We also have an annual survey of what mode of transport we used on that one date. Presumably those sort of figures would be ok to use?

What other ways should they be monitoring it and what sort of questions should we ask /check when they produce the results? I must admit I am hoping for more detail than just x% increase in cycling.

 

[marinyork]

What questions would you ask of them?

I know that on most of the main cycle paths there are those induction loops to measure cyclists and that they do those counts at certain locations on a regular basis. We also have an annual survey of what mode of transport we used on that one date. Presumably those sort of figures would be ok to use?

What other ways should they be monitoring it and what sort of questions should we ask /check when they produce the results? I must admit I am hoping for more detail than just x% increase in cycling.

You seem to have got the wrong end of the stick. I'm not going into that much detail on an open forum but the questions often involve total spend, underlying assumptions, ins and outs and specifics of the scheme and choices. I'm not questioning that cycling is going up in some areas but why it is going up. I've been to presentations on particular schemes and often assumptions are fiddled or very obvious omissions made. I'm perfectly happy for money to go to some of these schemes and that they do good but fed up of the very sloppy scrutiny that goes on - I don't think it's helpful for cycle campaigning at all, if you offer very gushing unfounded praise of a council or a cycling charity they'll walk all over you. I'm very much interested in details than vague grand strategies.

The council and transport executive have a variety of different ways, that said for some of them especially the transport executive I wish they'd do some of them a bit more often. They are reasonable enough but some of them can be self fulfilling loops with respect to themselves at the exclusion of other areas. For example policy could be very much focused on bicycle trips to the city centre, this then gets measured more than other things, it goes up and policy is concentrated on this rather than say bicycle trips to large vibrant local shops or particularly large destinations where we have to take the word of the travel plan coordinator say. One of the things that seems better this time round is the local transport plan is very much more joined up, we'll have to see how that does in the context of very large cuts.

On the recent topic of cycling england and schools what I mean by lack of transparency is that the end results are just presented along the lines of we had such and such a bike day and large number x turned up by being bribed with a free breakfast and bicycle checks. John Smith from charity x/council says oh the kids think it marvellous and are really enthused. When you get into the nuts and bolts of it like why such a small percentage of schools were picked or why they were chosen it all gets a lot more vague. We aren't told of total spend, how many people go to the school, %, levels of cycling outside of these events (although some schools themselves are much more interested in that than the actual charity or council) how much per hour, per child, facilities to support the boom (parking) and so on. How much of a council officer's time is spent on it, how much they earn, why the plans aren't more ambitious, underlying assumptions etc. Some of those questions don't necessarily even have bad answers it's just you have to go fairly long lengths to find out the answers - it's a lack of transparency.

 

[Origamist]

The scheme in London was never going to significantly affect cycling modal share - there's too many people and too few bikes in the scheme's cordon.

Is it a waste of money? On balance, I'd say "no". Here's a few reasons why: it raises the profile of cycling (and hopefully changes attitudes), normalises cycling (everyday clothes etc) makes cycling in London a little easier and more convivial, and finally, if the money wasn't being put into the scheme, it would probably be wasted on the LCN, or worse still, efforts towards: "smoothing traffic flow".

My bad - the OP is not about hire schemes per se! Ignore the above...

 

[magnatom]

My bad - the OP is not about hire schemes per se! Ignore the above...

I was wondering what scheme you were referring to!

 

[StuartG]

I was wondering what scheme you were referring to!

Yes I naturally thought of C2W - which is not 'community'. Twisting the thread to C2W which is clearly the leading incentive to use bikes in the UK - I am strongly in favour of it and saddened by the recent HMRC neutering of the financial benefit. Hopefully yesterday's debacle will not have weakened it further ...

The problem with C2W is that it appears to mainly benefit those already cycling who use it to get a better/second bike that may be primarily used for non-commuting purposes. In other words it is poorly targetted at modal shift reducing congestion. It's huge benefit is putting cycling on the corporate agenda. All major and many minor organisations have been faced with the decision to run/not run the scheme. To 'not run' is probably a harder decision for any company who does not want to look anti-green (and many companies pay good money for greenwash they don't want to see undermined). But once they run a scheme they have to take the consequences. Secure parking, showers, payment for business mileage. Again while success is not guaranteed it does become a very potent item in employee benefit negotiations and
can look a very cheap option to keep employees happy.

Refreshed happy cyclists in the office and easy, safe parking and normalisation of cycling lower the barriers to other employees to join in. Hence further growth in modal shift may be more due to this rather than the direct benefits of the scheme itself. (Indeed if financial benefit was the prime mover - many motorists would have already shifted).