Contents:
- Cyclists gather 'crumbs from Transport Budget table'
- Massive boost in Auckland off-road bike paths
- Cyclists big winners as Wellington's transport 'wish-list' is decided
- Wellingtonians showing their love for two wheels
- Symposium on the future of cycling
- UK businesses call for government investment in cycling
- Paris plans to become 'world cycling capital'
- Cars cost society six times as much as bicycles, says Danish study
- Cyclists 40 per cent less likely to be stressed following their commute
- How cities are outgrowing the automobile
- Weblinks
Cyclists gather 'crumbs from Transport Budget table'
21 May 2015- Cycling advocates today welcomed the funding set aside for cycling projects, while bemoaning its small proportion relative to overall transport funding.
Land Transport Plan projects, Roads of National Significance and increased rail spending attracted the lion's share of today's Transport appropriations, totalling $6.379 billion, but spending on cycling is growing: the first $45 million of a $100 million total has been set aside for the Government's Urban Cycleway Programme.
The Urban Cycleway Programme is an NZTA-led scheme providing funding and oversight to local roading authorities for cycleway projects.
"Funding for cycling, protected in today's Budget, demonstrates a seismic shift - we've moved from excluding cyclists to welcoming them onto Kiwi roads", said interim spokesperson Will Andrews of Cycling Advocates' Network (CAN). "We've a solid upturn in cycling numbers in New Zealand today, we have the Government providing real funding for the first time for cycling networks, and we have great support for leisure cycling". But Andrews claimed that the $45 million appropriation for the Urban Cycleway Programme fails to adequately provide for both existing and expected new cyclists.
"Over six billion dollars go to National Land Transport Plan, highway and rail projects in the Budget. Beside those figures, the Urban Cycleway Programme fund is minuscule. Cycling as a useful transport mode deserves a lot more than crumbs from the Transport table", Andrews stated, concluding, "Recent research by Christchurch City Council found that investments in cycling facilities provided a benefit-cost ratio of 8 to 1, so cycling deserves a much more realistic slice of the pie".
Massive boost in Auckland off-road bike paths
29 April 2015- Auckland Transport is applying to the Government's urban cycle fund for a massive boost in off-road bike paths.
The council body wants to pour $111 million into new cycleways over the next three years - for which it hopes a local share of $42m from Auckland ratepayers will be outweighed by hefty Government contributions.
That will require $27.5m from the $100m urban fund the Government announced before last year's election, and $42m from the national land transport fund.
The cycle fund is already contributing to an $11m bikeway from Upper Queen St to Victoria St, including a 160-metre prefabricated bridge to be installed above Spaghetti Junction by the end of this year.
A report to Auckland Transport's board yesterday on the aggressive push for new projects to criss-cross the CBD and beyond coincided with an announcement by Transport Minister Simon Bridges that applications were "flooding in" from across the country for $90m remaining in the national fund.
Read more here:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11440245
Cyclists big winners as Wellington's transport 'wish-list' is decided
30 April 2015- Wellington's transport wish-list for the next six years has been decided, and it includes three cycleway projects that have been given priority over major motorways.
The Regional Transport Committee, on which all the region's mayors sit, signed off its list of most significant projects on Wednesday after releasing its draft list in December and considering 570 public submissions.
Those submissions largely called for a greater focus on public transport and cycling over motorway building. As a result, the committee bumped the Ngauranga to Petone Cycleway up from No 10 to No 5 and included Wellington City's Council proposed network of 150 kilometres of cycle lanes on the list at No 9.
Improvements to Wellington's Adelaide Rd, which include safety measures for cyclists, sit at No 10.
Read more here:
Wellingtonians showing their love for two wheels
15 April 2015- More Wellingtonians are getting into the saddle, with recent surveys showing record numbers of people commuting by bike. The Wellington City Council Transport Monitoring Survey 2015 shows that cycling commuter numbers continue to rise - up 21 percent from 2014, and 200 percent over the last 10 years.
Mayor Celia Wade-Brown says the figures are encouraging and justify future investment.
"The Capital's cycling numbers are up and up, unlike some other cities in New Zealand. Wellingtonians have told us they want more opportunities to bike," she says. "The Draft Regional Transport Plan 2015 shows that regional mode share for biking is 2.9 percent, but Wellington City comes in highest at 4.2 percent."
"These figures add weight to our proposal to implement a cycling network across Wellington. The more we encourage people to use active modes such as cycling, the more we can reduce the congestion for other road users, as well as improving our health, reducing emissions and supporting local shops and cafes."
Read more here:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK1504/S00333/wellingtonians-showing-their-love-for-two-wheels.htm
Symposium on the future of cycling
The University of Waikato is running a two-day symposium on "The Future of Cycling: Challenges and Possibilities" over 1-2 October 2015. This will be held at the Avantidrome in Cambridge.
The symposium aims to attract a range of participants, from scholars to policy makers to recreation experts to sporting organisations to local councils, and hopes to consider issues around cycling as a sport, leisure pursuit, transportation and community activity.
To register interest in presenting at the symposium, email Rebecca Olive at rolive@waikato.ac.nz.
For more information or to purchase tickets, go to:
UK businesses call for government investment in cycling
20 March 2015- UK corporate giants (including GSK, National Grid, British Land, Santander, Orange and Allen & Overy) are calling for concerted, consistent investment in cycling, and not because they see it as a partisan issue. For them it's just common sense.
These companies are among those who have clubbed together with British Cycling to make some very explicit demands: that all parties sign up to committing 5% of the total UK transport budget to cycling; and with a view to getting 10% of all trips made by bike by 2025.
Read more here:
Paris plans to become 'world cycling capital'
5 April 2015- Paris is planning to invest €150 million to double the number of cycle paths across the city, a move it hopes will transform it into the "cycling capital of the world" and help solve the French capital's pollution problem.
Unveiling the proposals on Thursday, Paris's City Hall said the investment could see the number of journeys made by bike in the capital triple from five percent of all journeys currently to 15 percent by 2020.
The centrepiece of the scheme is a new cycle "express way": more than 80km of two-way cycle paths following some of Paris's main avenues and spanning the city from north to south and from east to west.
Other cycle paths outside this main "axis" will be added and expanded, doubling the total length of cycle paths over the next five years to 1,400km.
Read more here:
http://www.france24.com/en/20150405-paris-cycling-world-capital-pollution/
Cars cost society six times as much as bicycles, says Danish study
13 May 2015- If you combine the cost to society with the cost to the individual, a car is six times as expensive as a bike. That is the finding of a study carried out by Stefan Gossling from Lund University and Andy S Choi from the University of Queensland who have investigated a cost-benefit analysis used by Copenhagen Municipality to determine whether new cycling infrastructure should be built.
The Lund University study looked at how cars compare to bicycles in terms of air pollution, climate change, travel route, noise, road wear, health and congestion in Copenhagen. The researchers found that if the costs to society and the costs to private individuals are added together, the impact of the car is EUR 0.50 per kilometre, while the impact of the bicycle is EUR 0.08 per kilometre.
Read more here:
Cyclists 40 per cent less likely to be stressed following their commute
13 May 2015- Stanford University's Calming Technology Lab has found that cyclists are 40 per cent less likely to be stressed during and after their commutes compared to those who drove or took public transport, reports BikeBiz. The data comes from assessing the breathing patterns of 1,000 commuters across 20,000 commutes.
The findings echo those of a recently-completed 10-year study carried out by the University of East Anglia's Norwich Medical School and the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York. It found that cycling or walking to work makes people less stressed and more productive.
Read more here:
http://road.cc/content/news/151540-cyclists-40-cent-less-likely-be-stressed-following-their-commute
How cities are outgrowing the automobile
28 April 2015- Gilles Vesco calls it the "new mobility". It's a vision of cities in which residents no longer rely on their cars but on public transport, shared cars and bikes and, above all, on real-time data on their smartphones. He anticipates a revolution which will transform not just transport but the cities themselves. "The goal is to re-balance the public space and create a city for people," he says. "There will be less pollution, less noise, less stress; it will be a more walkable city."
Vesco, the politician responsible for sustainable transport in Lyon, played a leading role in introducing the city's Velo'v bike-sharing scheme a decade ago. It has since been replicated in cities all over the world. Now, though, he is convinced that digital technology has changed the rules of the game, and will make possible the move away from cars that was unimaginable when Velo'v launched in May 2005. "Digital information is the fuel of mobility", he says. "Some transport sociologists say that information about mobility is 50% of mobility. The car will become an accessory to the smartphone."
Read more here:
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/28/end-of-the-car-age-how-cities-outgrew-the-automobile
Weblinks
Which matters more- a bike network's connectivity, or its density?
Have you been "quaxing"... lately?
Trotify: how to make your bike sound like a galloping horse:
http://inhabitat.com/trotify-makes-your-bike-sound-like-a-galloping-horse/
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