New cycle hangars will be installed outside council tower blocks in Bristol next year to give cyclists somewhere safe to store their bicycles. Bristol mayor Marvin Rees said a new plan will look at installing cycle hangars at 16 sites across the city, with spaces for 168 bikes.
Bristol already has a few secure cycle hangars, which allow people with little storage space at home to safely lock up their bikes. The hangars look like large bread bins, take up the space of about one car, and usually have enough room to store several bicycles.
Responding to calls for safer cycling infrastructure in the city, the mayor said the “single biggest flaw” in transport planning is to have a “single focus”. In a recent blog post on his website, he said an underground railway network would allow for more segregated cycle lanes to be built. Campaigners said many cyclists would likely “not be satisfied” with the mayor’s response.
Read more: Clean Air Zone and underground will make cycling safer claim council chiefs
Mr Rees said in the blog post: “As part of our work with the West of England combined authority, we’ve been able to begin the project for a programme of cycle hangars in the city. We will use the funding which will be made available at the January committee to prioritise cycle hangars for council blocks.
“The project scored blocks against strategic criteria such as their links to the strategic cycling network, levels of deprivation and car ownership. This identified 168 cycle hangar spaces for 16 sites, and we’ll begin installation next year.”
Calls are growing on Bristol City Council to make the city safer for cyclists. Earlier this month thousands petitioned council chiefs to come up with a plan for a comprehensive network of safe bike lanes, a proper bike share scheme, and cycle hangars to clamp down on rampant bike theft. The mayor’s blog post is his formal response to the petition for safer cycling.
Mr Rees added: “When dealing with transport planning, the single biggest flaw is to approach the challenge through a single focus. Our challenge is to enable people’s movement while bringing people with us on a journey to sustainable, efficient, low carbon travel. Many campaigns struggle: alienating and isolating people, building barriers to growing support for change.
“Active Travel England has set out standards that we aspire to where they are deliverable. We want to deliver infrastructure which enables growth of cycling among more disadvantaged communities. Bristol has a clear transport hierarchy, which prioritises pedestrians and then cyclists.
“Our mass transit plans have progressed and are ready to be completed by the next administration and the combined authority. This is the single most transformation [sic] approach to transport in our city for a century and will remove more car journeys than any other initiative, paving the way for far greater implementation of segregated cycling and active travel like other modern cities.”
Current plans to build new cycle lanes in Bristol are detailed in a document called the Local Cycling Walking Infrastructure Plan, which covers the whole of the West of England region. Mr Rees said new routes in this document would increase cycling in disadvantaged areas, but critics say many of these plans are sub-standard and focus only on major commuter routes. There are also no dates for when the works will be done, only before the year 2036.
Elsewhere, the council is applying for £14 million from the government’s Levelling Up fund to build a new Family Cycling Centre in Lawrence Weston. This would help people learn to ride a bike in a safe environment, but would also mean the closure of the Bristol Family Cycling Centre in Hengrove Park.
Mr Rees added that the council is taking a “holistic approach” to improving the city’s transport network. This includes the hugely popular Voi e-scooter trial, which he claimed has taken three million car journeys off the roads and saved “hundreds of thousands of kilos of carbon dioxide emissions”; as well as the new Clean Air Zone, and plans for fining drivers for moving traffic offences.
Ian Pond, who organised the cycling petition and chairs the Bristol Cycling Campaign, said the mayor’s blog post did not address the issues which his petition called for earlier this month.
He said: “The petition asked Bristol City Council to complete and publish an updated cycling delivery plan, as was committed to in the 2019 Bristol Transport Strategy. The mayor’s article is not a cycling delivery plan; it is a description of some individual initiatives, some concerned with cycling, but others not.
“Petition signatories are expecting a comprehensive strategy and plan for cycling, just as motor vehicles and public transport are given in the Bristol Transport Strategy. I don’t think that the almost 4,000 Bristol residents who signed the petition will be satisfied with this response."
