Cycle City Active City Newcastle – what next for the Active Travel Network?

Peter Mortimer Addresses the Active Travel Network Members

Peter Mortimer Addresses the Active Travel Network Members

Firstly, a big thank-you to all of you who attended the Active Travel Network launch dinner. There are some photos from the event available here.

We hope that you enjoyed the launch event, and many people have been asking what is next, and we are asking you, the members to make suggestions.

The website will be launched this summer and provide a directory of members with individual profile pages for you to edit, this will be a searchable directory of expertise. We plan to include a ‘document directory’ for best practice from GB, Ireland and around the world and of course news and comment.

We are also launching the National Cycle Planning Awards, where members are encouraged to enter their schemes and we hope to be able to provide an online tool to allow comment and to judge, and will be running a series of masterclasses and workshops both physical and as webinars.

 We hope you enjoyed the launch event and will be able to join us for the National Cycle Planning Awards ad London Cycling Show this September 14th and 15th

 Please see below the transcript from Peter Mortimer’s Poem ‘Hail the Bike’ one of our guest speakers at the launch party.

HAIL THE BIKE  

Peter Mortimer

Here is my master plan. Scrap Trident immediately - and with it all that ridiculous posturing about being a world power. Just who are we supposed to use these weapons against anyway- Isis? Take a small percentage of the money saved – estimates as to Trident’s cost vary between twenty billion and one hundred billion depending who you talk to - and subsidise free bikes for as many people as want them.

Let’s say 20 million people, and let’s say at £300 a bike that’s still less than six billion pounds. For the greater encouragement of actually using the bikes, fit special mileometers to them that allow the riders  tax advantages – the more you cycle, the more money you save. Bikes are brilliant. Bikes are the most sane, most therapeutic, most energy giving, most exhilarating item on the planet. Bikes are the perfect combination of human and machine, each dependant on the other. There is no  noise, no pollution, no stress, no snarling traffic jams. 

If all our computer systems failed, if i-phones, tablets, pads and laptops became suddenly dysfunctional, we could still jump on our bikes. Bikes make us better people. Bikes prevent car rage. If – and this happens as little as humanly possible – I drive a car through a congested town, I feel my arteries thickening by the second, my stress levels rising. To ride a bike through such a conurbation brings a remarkable sense of freedom. 

I am not imprisoned in a metal box. I weave in and out of traffic. I dismount and within a few seconds cut out an entire one-way system that will gridlock the motorist for several minutes. Occasionally a shop window or building may catch my eye. I stop, prop up the bike and take my time studying it. In a car, this is impossible. Many people are surprised to even see me behind a car wheel, (a rare sight, I confess).  

They are unaware that one of my first jobs was as a travelling salesman  and that for many years I was a petrol head, given to such petrolhead madness as driving 400 yards to the local shop or furiously trying to squeeze my motor into a small parking space because it was ten yards nearer my destination than a much bigger and easier one. 

I am, I confess a bike convert (though of some 30 years), so much so  that my idea of hell is being on a desert island with only the full box set of Top Gear for company or being forced to attend every Formula One Grand Prix of the season. And I love bike shops. To enter a bike shop brings the same sense of the benign as entering a charity shop. It is the antidote to that feeling of foreboding when entering a large garage workshop to pick up the repaired vehicle, knowing you face a mechanic who will slowly shake his head, suck in his breath and inform you in sonorous tones  that a number of unforeseen faults means the bill is now twice the estimate of £2000.

Often this is accompanied by the statement, (meant to reinforce  justification for what were most likely outrageous charges), “I don’t know how the car kept going  at all.” The biggest bill I have ever paid for repairs in a bike shop is £80. Which would be about my annual maintenance outlay for a cycle. I have a suggestion on how to properly bond with your bike. In a quiet moment, wheel it into the living room and lay down beside it. Study every aspect of it from this new angle; its gear mechanisms, braking system, the beautiful symmetry of its wheel spokes, its system of nuts, the angles of its frame, its taut cables.

Let your eyes roam across its entirety knowing that to come alive, this simultaneously complex yet simple combination of metal, rubber chrome and leather needs you. Not fossil fuels whose extraction plunges the world into eternal conflict, just small amounts of your own human muscle which will miraculously be transformed into an energy far in excess of the input. This astonishing conveyer of human beings will carry you of up to speeds of 20 mile per hour, totally fuelled by yourself, while at the same time improving your health and fitness.

The culture of the bike cannot be considered without the culture of the car. So consider for a moment the following; a football ground which crammed in as many people as possible without any top limit. Or a night club that did the same. Or a concert hall. Quite reasonably we demand such institutions impose limits on numbers.

Yet as our roads town and cities become ever choked with traffic, as every suburban street is lined every inch with parked cars, and the authorities fight an increasingly losing battle to maintain roads motorways, pollution levels soar, we churn out more and more cars without limit. High production levels by Nissan and the like are heralded on the national headlines as ‘good news’.

A Nissan chief executive was even knighted not long back. And no-one, no one thinks that flooding our roads with an ever growing  tsunami  of new cars could possibly be anything but good news. Where are the headlines for bike production? Why is there no similar monthly announcement of bike numbers  rolling off the production lines? Why does it need the success of a sporting celebrity like Bradley Wiggins before the UK awakes briefly to the huge benefits of bike riding? Why are there 100 bikes  in most European cities to every one in the UK?  

To see several hundred bikes parked together in a European city centre is a common sight. In Newcastle, to see more than six gathered in one place causes people to point in curiosity. Some people are put off by cyclists, especially cyclists clad in tight bright lyrca, sporting garish tortoiseshell helmets, heads down as they power themselves through their own fantasy Tour de France with not a flicker of enjoyment on their faces. These are the fundamentalists and in the minority. Take a look at Amsterdam or other cities and note how most cyclists are on sit-up and-beg machines, wearing normal clothes and observing their surroundings as they pass.

They are not demi-gods, they are not superfit and they are powered more by a sense of leisure and pleasure than a messianic zeal to complete 100 miles in four hours. At our recent literary festival in Cullercoats, one popular event was Baiku, a 20 mile circular bike ride along the coastline and through the country lanes  of North Tyneside followed by a poetry workshop to see what small poetic gems (haiku) could be extracted from the journey.. As the programme notes said, the event combined two of the best things going; riding a bike and writing poetry. My own rough rule-of-thumb is that any journey within a few miles, I do by bike, weather permitting.

If not possible, I use public transport. Only as a very last resort would I turn to a motor car (borrowing my partner’s – I have not owned one for those same 30 years). This is the exact opposite of many people’s preferences; such people  would slaughter their great aunt rather than forsake the car. Yet a car dangerously insulates us against the world, it seals us in. It attempts to render the outside irrelevant . We close that car door, switch  on the radio or CD, engage gear and believe ourselves somehow  immune.  

To ride a bike is to open ourselves to every smell, sound, sight and sensation..We are a part of the world as against hermetically locked  out of it. And because of this we are more tolerant, more alive. I often ride the five miles from Cullercoats to Silverlink for meetings with council officials. Odd times severe weather forces me into a car. On these latter occasions, I arrive more jaded, less vibrant, my appetite for the world and everything in it reduced. Today, with a population increasingly sedentary in front of flickering computer screens, with waist lines ever expanding and fat becoming the norm, with the prescription of anti-depressant pills at an all-time high, we need the bike more than we ever did. It can be our saviour, if only we let it. It makes no demands on us, except that  we get on and pedal. For that, it will always reward us.