Vélocity 2025 - A cycling plan for 2025 and beyond... Greater Manchester bids for £20 million

Our new network for cycling across Greater
Manchester will connect all 2.7 million
residents with high-quality cycling routes,
segregated wherever possible, that will
connect across the city region in a wellsigned
and easy to use European-style network.

Today (30th April) was the deadline for all the cities bidding for the Cycling City Ambition Grant funding. 

The Velocity 2025 programme outlines the targets - which include:

"The outcome of our Vélocity 2025 programme – our target – is to secure at least a 300% increase in the levels of cycling across Greater Manchester by 2025.

We want to see the proportion of trips by bicycle increase to 10% over the next 12 years, which we believe is achievable alongside additional Government funding. We aim to double, and double again the proportion of trips made by bicycle, whether that’s commuting, utility or recreational cycling, through an unprecedented, long range  programme of investment in cycling infrastructure for the city. 

The vision we set out for Vélocity 2025 supports the targets in the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group ‘Get Britain Cycling’. The CCAG funding, supported by local funding, will help us,
by 2015:

• Deliver 56km of largely segregated cycle route across Greater Manchester 
• Generate 26,800 new cycle trips per day on these routes 
• Improve the health and wellbeing to the value of £7.3m per year
• Provide business financial savings by reducing absenteeism of 1,000 days per year 
• Remove 1.7m traffic kms per year from Greater Manchester’s roads reducing congestion and accidents.

The Velocity  video is available below:



The bid document explains that: "Greater Manchester is bidding for the funding needed to deliver a generational shift in levels of cycling across the city region. The catalyst we seek is £20 million and if we are successful, this grant will unlock up to ten times that amount over the next decade or so as the city region delivers a remarkable strategic programme of change.
 
Central government funding will be matched by £10 million from Greater Manchester partners by 2015.  The Cycle City Ambition Grant (CCAG) will deliver £10 per capita investment per year for two years across the core of the city region (one million residents). 

Greater Manchester will then seek to commit future funding, through public and private sector sources, for a further ten years (giving a consistent twelve year programme) and across the rest of Greater Manchester (a further 1.7 million residents).

In total our Vélocity 2025 programme would see between £150 and £200 million invested on a range of cycling infrastructure, interventions and culture shift of which £20 million will be from the Cycle City Ambition Grant, £20 million from the LSTF and the remainder from a range of local and national, public and private sources through to 2025."

The Greater Manchester bid is supported by Love Your Bike and other Greater Manchester cyclign groups.  You can show your support (assuming you do) on the Love Your Bike petition on Change.org.




 

Tyndall seminar: To EV or not to EV? Choices and trade-offs on the path to a decarbonised transport sector.

Tyndall Manchester would like to invite you to attend the next talk in our seminar series ‘To EV or not to EV? Choices and trade-offs on the path to a decarbonised transport sector’ by Dr. Jillian Anable, Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Transport Research at the University of Aberdeen.

 

Many different carbon plans, climate change reviews, and transport and energy White Papers over the past decade or so have proposed more or less similar packages of policies to ensure the transport sector 'pulls its weight' in climate change policy in the UK. 

These have emphasised developments in vehicle technology and fuels and associated fiscal incentivisation, with relatively little attention given to the management and reduction of travel demand. In recent years, however, the attention given to the 'technical fix' has intensified as most of the policy effort and expectation has been increasingly placed on projections of plug-in electric vehicle uptake.

This talk will suggest that the recent focus on electric vehicle technology could result in more carbon emissions over the long run. It will review current proposals and projections for the uptake of these vehicles in the UK and elsewhere. 

By drawing on recent work for the Energy Technologies Institute and the Committee on Climate Change, including research on the psychology of vehicle choice, it will offer an understanding of the real role that electric vehicles are likely to play in future patterns of mobility and car ownership. By reviewing the recent policy direction and evidence on potential EV uptake, it will pose and attempt to answer the question: have EVs damaged transport and climate change policy?

Open meeting but please RSVP, to Amrita via  tyndall@manchester.ac.uk 

When: 4pm, Wednesday 22nd May
Where: Room C1, George Begg Building, Sackville Street, Manchester, M13 9PL

Car sales down, bike sales up: Two new bikes are sold for every car in Europe

Photo from the Danish Cyclists’ Federation

The latest sales figures from the car and the bicycle worlds have been realeased. Guess what, the bicycle wins ! 

The European Cylists Federation Policy Officer, Fabian Küster highlights the trends in Europe.

Early this week, ACEA, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, presented the latest sales figures, and they were not pretty from the car manufacturers perspective: Over the first quarter of 2013, units were down by 9.8 % compared to the same period in 2012. 

This follows the February figures when ACEA published that Europe’s car sales fell to the slowest February since it started compiling figures in 1990. From 2011 to 2012, sales went down 8.5 %. The 12 million units sold in the EU-27 2012 was the worst sales figure since 1995. Ivan Hodač, head of ACEA, estimates that sales in 2013 will be down another 5%–8%.

In contrast, bike sales increased in the EU-27 from 18.9 million units in 2000 to about 20 million units in 2011. In other words: for every car sold in Europe, almost 2 bicycles currently find a new customer. 

And these bikes are not just for decoration but they are used more and more: Germany saw a 50 % increase in cycling between 2002 and 2011; In the Netherlands, the success of e-bikes (pedelecs) contributed to an increase of 9 % in km cycled in just one year (from 2010 to 2011); Cycling in many capital cities doubled over the past decade, including in London and Dublin. Pedelecs are a main driver in this new mobility behaviour, making also for a convincing business case: in 2011, 716,000 electric bicycles were sold in the EU, compared to only 11,500 e-cars. A stunning ratio of 62 : 1. This is probably one of the reasons why so many car manufacturers have entered the e-bike business.

According to Hodač, it is the financial crisis that is mainly to blame for declining car sales. While this might be true to a certain extent, there are other fundamental reasons behind this development, as Germany’s daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung explains: “In many countries, young people do not aspire car ownership anymore. Smartphones and tablets have partly taken over from the car as the new status symbols.”

It is an idle hope to believe that as soon as Europe’s economy recovers, car sales will go up again to pre-crisis levels. Young people in urban settings fare pretty well in just using a car when occasionally needed. While declining car sales may pose challenges to (some) European car makers, less car use and more cycling has at the same time great (economic) opportunities.