Some Thoughts on the Proposals for the North East Active Travel Routes (NEATR)

Wallacewell Rd Spaces for People lanes

By Alasdair Macdonald, GoBike member

I was disappointed by recent unbalanced coverage of Glasgow City Council proposals to develop North East Active Travel Routes (NEATR) in the Springburn area. Glasgow Times reported on a local group, supported by two Labour councillors, which was opposed to the plans. The reporting focused on cycle lanes on Wallacewell Road (ironically, championed by a previous Labour councillor). However, it ignored the wider plans for the area.

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Gearing up in active mobility – attending the Cycling Scotland Conference 2023

This week, I had the opportunity to attend the Cycling Scotland Conference 2023. This years’ theme was “Cycling towards a healthier, fairer, safer and greener Scotland”. At first glance this is a lot of adjectives to cover in one day. However, underlying these words is a focus in active mobility – people. Curious to see where these words may overlap, I’m excited to share with you an overview of the day.  

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GoBike Annual General Meeting – one week to go!

Only one week to go until the GoBike 2022 Annual General Meeting. The AGM is open to all so why not come along and join us!

This years AGM will take place at 10:30am on Saturday 3 June 2023 at the Pearce Institute, 840-860 Govan Road, Glasgow G51 3UU 

We are gathering during Volunteers Week (1 – 7 June) so join us to celebrate all the achievements that GoBike volunteers have made over the past few years!

It is free to attend and it would be great if you could book your place via Eventbrite. And please take a few minutes to have your say on our campaign review too.

If you’d be interested in joining the committee please email convenor (at) gobike.org.

Thank you and we look forward to seeing you at the AGM.

GoBike Committee

GoBike Annual General Meeting and Campaign Day

GoBike bike icon

The GoBike 2022 Annual General Meeting will take place at 

10:30am on Saturday 3 June 2023 

at the Pearce Institute, 840-860 Govan Road, Glasgow G51 3UU 

The AGM which has been slightly delayed since November last year will be a great opportunity for members and others to hear what GoBike has been up to over the past couple of years and importantly have your input into what GoBike should be focusing on over the next few years.

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GoBike members have been heartbroken and dismayed by the recent untimely passing of someone cycling on Glasgow’s roads. We would like to send our condolences and love to the family and friends of Emma Newman. We cannot imagine how deeply her loss will be felt – we know the grief of those who knew her will reverberate with everyone who cycles in our city and would have shared the same streets. It could have been any of us.

In light of this incident, GoBike have sent a communication to the council in a spirit of mutual understanding and in the hope that we can safeguard vision zero as a shared priority in our city, for Emma and for all those like her. We will update you when we receive a response.

Contraflow Conundrums

Are you ever tempted to cycle the wrong way up a one-way street? Do you wonder why it’s allowed on a handful of Glasgow streets but not on others which would offer convenient short-cuts? Committee member Brenda examines the ins and outs of contraflow cycling for GoBike and asks you, our members, to feed in to us on the final questions.

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University of Glasgow Could Fail Own Exams

We are beginning to see with a sinking heart that the University of Glasgow would perhaps not pass their own entrance exams when it comes to vocabulary relating to safer cycling. While they are clearly running a tight press campaign on their plans for University Avenue, and undertaking a great deal of copying and pasting within their communications, they do appear to have a rather poor grasp of the meaning of certain words. That, or perhaps they are being deliberately disingenuously mendacious. So over at GoBike we have brought our dictionaries out and hope to help.

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An update on #GlasgowCycleInfraDay17

Time flies when you’re having fun! It’s been more than a week already since #GlasgowCycleInfraDay17 and after such a phenomenal response it has mostly spent reading and re-reading Tweets, whilst staring at a spreadsheet, trying to figure out how best to put them together in to the story of Glasgow’s cycling infrastructure.

As you might expect, most of the submissions were negative.  If you’re familiar with cycling in Glasgow you can probably imagine them; pictures of potholes and flooding, of cars parked in cycle lanes, of busy roads with no infrastructure and of barriers blocking access.

Examples of bad infrastructure

Perhaps more surprising was that around one in eight of the Tweets were positive.  With so few examples of truly segregated cycling infrastructure in Glasgow, you sought them out and held them up as examples of what you need.

Unfortunately it’s not all good news.  Poor maintenance, flooding, and in some cases bad design decisions all meant that the negative feedback for segregated infrastructure outweighed the positive more than 2-to-1.

Whilst the Council might believe that they are ‘leading the way in the UK regarding implementation of segregated cycle facilities‘ the results of #GlasgowCycleInfraDay17 would suggest there’s a way to go still.

So what’s next?

First up, there will be another blog post here shortly focusing on the details of some of the worst examples from #GlasgowCycleInfraDay17 and how they relate to Glasgow’s Strategic Plan for Cycling 2016-2025.

A similar approach will be taken when communicating this year’s submissions to Glasgow City Council, tying them in to the Strategic Plan for Cycling to help to identify areas which need increased focus.

Finally (for now), where specific safety issues were identified, these will be raised directly, and individually, with the Council to ensure that they are rectified.

Whilst all this is happening, the Tweets for #GlasgowCycleInfraDay17 have (so far as possible) all now been added to the CycleStreets.net.  Have a browse; seeing them mapped across the city really highlights how much work people put in on the day to cover as much of the city as possible.  So thanks again to everybody who took part.

 

 

Today is #GlasgowCycleInfraDay17

#GlasgowCycleInfraDay17
It’s Friday!

It’s September 8th!!

It’s #GlasgowCycleInfraDay17!!!

 

Yes, the day has finally arrived for us to take to the streets of Glasgow and show the world exactly what our cycling infrastructure is like.  Some of it will be good, some of it will be bad, and we need to see it all so we can show it to the Council and help to make ours a true Cycling City.

Keep your camera with you today and when you spot any cycling infrastructure that you want to highlight (good or bad) – or if you spot somewhere that’s crying out for infrastructure it doesn’t have yet – take a picture and Tweet it with the hashtag #GlasgowCycleInfraDay17.  Don’t worry if you don’t have Twitter, you can still take part by emailing your pictures to us at CycleInfraDay@gmail.com.

You’ll be able to watch the gallery build throughout the day by keeping an eye on the hashtag on Twitter (you don’t need an account for this – just click this link), or by following the Twitter account (@CycleInfraDay).

Remember, this is supposed to be an easy way of documenting a day in the life of Glasgow’s cycling infrastructure.  So please be sensible; don’t go dashing across busy roads to get an ‘action shot’, or exploring the collapsed section of the cycle lane along the Clyde to show the damage after the weir jammed last week.

Most importantly… have fun!

#GlasgowCycleInfraDay17 is coming tomorrow!!

Just one more sleep until the return of #GlasgowCycleInfraDay17 to our city!

#GlasgowCycleInfraDay17

With the Scottish Government this week announcing their commitment to double the budget for Active Travel in 2018/19, making sure your voice is heard when that money gets spent has never been more important.  Tomorrow you can shout it out loud.

It’s as easy as snapping a photograph of Glasgow’s cycling infrastructure and posting it on Twitter with the hashtag #GlasgowCycleInfraDay17.

Take pictures of the good stuff, what we want more of, as well as the not so good stuff.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a Twitter account; just email your pictures to us at CycleInfraDay@gmail.com and we’ll upload them for you.

So, get your cameras ready, charge your batteries and load up your memory cards… for tomorrow we shape the future of cycling in Glasgow!