Interview 6 – New Cycling and Walking Routes
Northern Route – Ed Plowden, Cycling City Bristol
Basingstoke Canal – Paul Fishwick, Cycle Woking
Explorer Routes – Gavin Baxter, Cycle Blackpool
the northern route is a really interesting route because it takes it’s actually a two-ended route um we’ve got on the edge of Northern edge of uh Bristol near the M4 we’ve got an awful lot of large employers so people like the ministry of Defense University of the west of England and a number of um things like Rolls-Royce and Aerospace and so the idea of this uh was that it would actually link the city center to that peripheral um uh employment Hub as well as then joining in Parkway station Bristol Parkway station which is again right in the center of all those other sorts of employers we’ve really trying to link um Journey attractors particularly places of work along with um people who are likely to cycle what we’re going to be doing actually in the future uh February and March of this year just uh lining up for the season again is an integrated marketing campaign right along that route so we’ll be using our road show team to go to the places of work but also places of leisure and other Journey attractors sports centers there’s a City farm on the way and so on so we’ll be doing all that um and we’re producing specialized map um thanks to our um researchers in the University of the west of England we’ve got a whole new way a whole new set of Creative Concepts to try and attract people to cycling so really actually it’s the combination of a lot of different pieces of work are coming together for one route the northern route yeah the Basin Stoke Canal is actually a canal tow path route through the district it runs from the western side at perite Bridge through to the way navigation 12.9 km long it’s an off-road route all the way but was very narrow and muddy previously um what we’ve done is upgraded that particular route to a 2. 2 meter wide route um it’s attracted lots of new Walkers and cyclists in 2007 we took some uh Su strands data and using the latest um cycle counter data in four locations the number of cyclists has increased by 75% to 113% at those four locations it’s attracted new people because it’s local Journeys to particular places within the Town Center where most visitors will end up at some point during their stay in Blackpool the idea of the Explorer routs was to actually to run four different routes that actually went at right angles perpendicular to the prominade and took people into the main bit of Blackpool so it took them through the town center it took them through some different areas past the football stadium and through some nice parks and so on and actually took them out to the countryside Beyond Blackpool and showed them hopefully a different side and also hopefully brought people into the other retail areas and showed you know hopefully allowed them to contribute to Black pool’s wider economy and not just a very narrow strip uh along the prominade and the other aspect to is to allow um safe and convenient cycling access for residents to get to and from the Town Center as typically all the the existing routes go north south along the promad so this was to provide a a very different approach which sounds almost so obvious now but to provide something that goes east to west rather than just north south