Interview 13 – Promoting Sustainable Transport
Mark Eves – Cycle Stars, Colchester
Martin Fraser – Roadshows, Bristol
Emma Bullard – Love Your Bike, Shrewsbury
the aim of cycle stars is to encourage those people who haven’t cycled before to get on a bike um the objective really behind cycle Stars was to look at um ways of encouraging um families really to get into cycling um that haven’t really been involved for some time now um what we were looking to do was to round rather than actually provide people really who are involved with the the project itself we were looking to engage with members of the community the bike ability that we training that we offered them was level two bike ability um the maintenance was was really targeted and and we tried to provide in a fun way really so that they they had competitions between the families really to who could who could change tires the quickest and the likes um and from the point of view of um of actually getting them engaged with a challenge they could choose their own challenge so for there was one couple who are re tired and what we were looking for them to do was to encour increase the amount of times that they cycle to improve their their activity and their their health and wellbeing um with other groups there was a mother and her teenage son what they were really looking for was the opportunity they’d recently moved to cester so what they were looking for was an opportunity really to to visit the the areas within culture sta um and to spend more time together um so it gave them that opportunity to to be together really um and and by doing that it also helped their confidence and so I’ve had a feedback over the last four months and what we found of the four families that are actually involved that range from um a pair nearing retirement to some very young families we found that one of the the sets of families that the mother of one of those families um has now become a sustr ranger um so she’s actually gone above really what we expected her to do um and one of the other mothers from from from an alternative family um she’s training to be a cyc instructure at the moment so we can see that they’re really engaged with the project itself the the road shows really started up uh following a period where we had cycle advisors slogging it out door Todo um basically trying to encourage people to cycle um during a long cold winter last year um when we came around to looking at the plans for this summer we felt that we weren’t really reaching enough parts of the city and uh there might be better ways of doing it so we put the team together using some of the same people but some new ones as well um essentially so that we could attend um as many Citywide events as uh as possible so things like the harbor festival and Bristol’s biggest bike ride which are very established um very um well attended events but also so that we could put on events of our own um using libraries community centers uh sports centers um and other other public venues um that enabled us to wheel in resources like Dr bike mechanics um cycle trainers and um others who could really help Galvanize the public and and get them interested in cycling um and the the third and probably one of the most important parts of it has been working with businesses where uh we’ve worked at one extreme in very small businesses so um health professionals in a doctor’s surgery for example and at The Other Extreme at the ministry of Defense site which employs 9,000 people and uh where the road show team came in virtually every week throughout the summer and talk to their staff about Roots cycling and just sort of generally them infused we could focus on the things that we’ve always tried to stress which is about being practical and being enjoyable so it was love your bike in the sense of looking after it learning how to maintain it um keeping it secure you know we’re putting more cycle parking in but also love your bike you know have a day out on it cycle to football match come to our Halloween party so it actually worked really well I think think in terms of our program overall I I think that um we really try to be very practical I think often what gets people cycling is just a very sort of can be quite small but piece of advice or piece of help they just aren’t quite sure what they need to do and this is adults as as well as children and you almost need to hold their hands I think to get them started um and I think that approach has has been has been proved to be a good one