Choose Cycling in 2008
The year of 2008 was a really hectic year for the Choose Cycling Team. There was very little time to park our bikes by the side of the road and look at the view. Here are some of the highlights...
March 2008 - Choose Cycling the Cycling and Green Travel social enterprise for Derbyshire was launched with this website. Our favourite comment was "you could do with a picture of a car"(!)
April 2008 - National Cycle training was offered to adults in Derby and Derbyshire. We particularly enjoyed training the new volunteer St John's Ambulance Cycle Responders for Derbyshire. This is a really useful service as often cycling is the quickest way of getting to an accident in congested roads/ narrow streets.
May 2008- Travel Plan work with a large Derby organisation. We helped produce a marketing brand and poster campaign for the launch of their Travel Plan. Did you know that 20% of traffic on our roads is caused by journeys to and from work?
June 2008 - Bike Week! We were kept very busy with information stalls, cycling tryouts, guided bike rides and Cycling Safety Forums. We took the opportunity to showcase our new fleet of bikes which includes a folding lightweight Brompton and Dahon Ciao. The hit of the week was definitely the electric bike. We are intending to buy more of these for our tryouts next year as we feel it is an excellent, cost-effective way of replacing medium-length car journeys. And lots of fun.
July 2008 - Start of our Community Cycling for Health Project in partnership with the Appletree Surgery in Duffield. We held information stalls outside the surgery every Monday, offered free cycle tuition and guided bike rides in the local area. Our innovative Borrow-a-Bike scheme, where patients could borrow a bike and equipment for a week for free, was a real hit. Highlights of the project were when Sally, the community nurse, borrowed a bike to do her rounds, when L (70) came back with the Dahon after a week on the Derbyshire trails looking fantastic and G (85) started cycling again after 50 years.
August 2008 - Cycling Site Audit for a well-known national organisation. To really encourage cycling to work it is important that cyclists are provided with good facilities so that they can shower, change, and dry and store their clothes, ideally in the same area. And, of course, provided with covered and secure cycle parking close to their place of work.
September 2008 - In Town, Without, My Car! Day Bike Ride. We had a great ride from Duffield into Derby on a brilliant mix of bikes including a tandem and a trike.
October 2008- - Travel Plan work on a large organisation's Intranet site providing advice and information to assist employees to get to their place of work without using the car. Some environmental facts about car use... 1)You are exposed to three times more pollution inside a car than on a bike. 2)Road Transport now accounts for 26% of climate-changing emissions 3)Flooding due to changing climate patterns is a looming threat over much of the UK. A good website is www.direct.gov.uk/actonCO2.
November 2008 - Maintenance workshop for the Choose Cycling Team. We now know everything you never wanted to know about cantilever brakes ;)and intend to offer "Maintenance is easy" workshops as part of our work next year.
December 2008 - New Green Travel Maps produced for a local organisation. Instead of roads, these maps prioritise the main green travel routes - footpaths, cycling paths and public transport routes. Some great websites discovered are www.walkingworks.org.uk and www.fillthathole.org.uk.
So, what's next for us??
Our big news is that the evaluation of the Cycling for Health Project showed that cycling really does improve levels of well-being and activity and that this particular format is a really good way of engaging the community in cycling. We are now a formally-constituted community group and intend to continue the Cycling for Health project in Duffield this year and expand the project to further areas in Derbyshire over the next few years.
We continue to offer adult cycle training in Derbyshire. We will also continue our work with organisations and their travel plans and look at more innovative ways to encourage a reduction in car use.
And we'd like more interaction with you - over 2,000 people looked at the website last year. Please do get in touch with us. We'd love to hear from you.
And, finally, we will be setting up campaigning pages on the website and getting more involved in local and national campaigns. We'd like to do more to help to improve the walking and cycling infrastructure, to lobby to slow traffic speeds and to make public transport more affordable and convenient.
We look forward to connecting with you all in 2009!
The Choose Cycling Team.