Author: gavnhev

And the winners are …

by gavnhev, posted in event

On Tuesday our 2024 Best in Cycling Awards came to a conclusion with winners announced and certificates presented.  The winners are:

Best Employer – NHS Grampian

NHS Grampian have made strides in recent years in improving facilities for active travel and encouraging active travel within the organisation.  Judges were impressed by the range of activities including a pool of e-bikes for use by staff for work-related travel. High-quality cycle parking is provided across several sites.  There have also been cycling lessons for inexperienced riders and Dr Bike maintenance sessions. A worthy winner!

NHS Grampian receiving their award

Best new Cycle infrastructure –  Ellon Wheel Park

This Award goes to Ellon Wheel Park – a great new facility delivered by a group of dedicated volunteers who managed to get through all the planning and funding obstacles that are part of delivering a significant project like this. There is a pump track, alongside a closed loop level track which can be used for training and a full range of activities. The next stage of the project will also add a dedicated skate park. Check it out next time you are in Ellon!  Ellon Wheel Park | Sports | Gordon Park, Ellon, UK

A photo of Ellon Wheel Park showing the curvy undulating bike path.

Best public cycle parking – Balgownie, Lord Hay’s and St Ninians Court 

Having somewhere safe and secure to park your bike can be a real problem for those who live in flats when hoiking a bike up the stairs everyday isn’t an option.  We’re delighted that Aberdeen City Council have gone ahead and installed secure bike shelters at Balgownie, Lord Hay’s and St Ninians Court.  We understand more are in the pipeline for other ACC locations.

Best School – Harlaw Academy

With initial support from Sustrans I-bike project, some dedicated staff at Harlaw have continued to deliver and develop cycling in the school, including a girl’s group as part of the #andshecycles campaign.  The have become a Cycle Accredited School and recently secured funding for new cycle parking. Well done Harlaw!

Best Business – Ride the North

Many of you will be familiar with Ride the North and don’t need us to tell you what a great cycle event it has become and an established date in the cyclist’s calendar.  The emphasis is always on fun, the communities, and on top of that, since 2011 it has raised in excess of £2M for a range of charities. We’re already looking forward to RtN 2025!

Ride the North receiving their award for best business.

Cycle Heroes (Best community / volunteer project) – Cycling Without Age (Scotland) Aberdeen City

Before we say a bit about the winner, we were also impressed by the other worthy nominations so congratulations also to runners-up: Martin Sharman (CM Aberdeen), Clare Tayler (Harlaw Academy) and Middlefield Community Project Bike Hub.  There are so many positive things happening in the world of cycling!

Cycling without Age (Scotland) has only been operating in Aberdeen for two years but they are making a huge impact and have recently been able to expand their fleet of ‘Trishaws’ such that they are now able to work with several care homes across the city.  They are always on the look-out for new volunteer pilots, so get in touch if you can spare some time.    Welcome to Cycling Without Age Scotland

Cycling without Age

The Cycle Raspberry –  SUVs

Nominations for the Raspberry included some of our poor quality – or just missing – infrastructure, some bad examples of cycle parking provision, old and new, and one very dangerous roundabout.  But the winner (voted for by the public) is SUVs.   No one can have failed to notice that cars are getting bigger and the proportion of SUVs in the city seems to be increasing exponentially.  Cars get bigger and bigger but our streets don’t, so the logical result is that there is less room for everyone else, including cyclists. 

Celebrating 20 years of Aberdeen Cycle Forum

by gavnhev, posted in event

On 3rd October we met to celebrate 20 years of Aberdeen Cycle Forum (ACF).  Without being too pernickety about the exact date, ACF was formed around this time of year in 2003.  

The meeting was introduced by current Chair, Gavin Clark, who gave a resume of some of the activities ACF has been involved in.  Gavin also read a few paragraphs from Derek Williamson who was one of the founders and a long-standing former Chairperson.  Derek and others recapped that ACF arose partly as a result of a spate of cycle fatalities around Aberdeen and the sense that “something need to be done” to improve matters.  Of course we recognised too that although there has been some progress, there is much much more to be done and in some ways Aberdeen has fallen behind by not sufficiently recognising the benefits from cycling and providing the infrastructure to facilitate it.  Despite our lack of high quality infrastructure, we also noted that cycling is in a good place with high levels of uptake of recreational cycling, and some “game-changers” like e-bikes on the cusp of bringing real transformation.

We had two guest speakers, firstly Emma Roberts of Aberdeenshire Bike Bothy, who told us a bit about the outreach and development work they do.  It is mainly based around selected ‘travel towns’ in Aberdeenshire and doesn’t operate in the city, which is purely down to funding availability.  We hope that might change.

Our second speaker was Alistair Gilmore who is Administrator and a volunteer ‘pilot’ with Cycling Without Age (Scotland).  It was uplifting to hear about this project and something we look forward to seeing more of in the future.

Welcome to Cycling Without Age Scotland

The second half of our meeting was a Question & Answer with Councillors Ian Yuill and Miranda Radley of Aberdeen City Council.  We had a good discussion and lots of interesting questions.  Both Councillors were fairly candid in recognising that we aren’t starting from the best place in terms of delivery of cycle infrastructure.  Both also seemed genuinely committed to get the current Administration working to change things, whilst also recognising that it won’t necessarily happen overnight.  The recent decision to install a segregated cycle lane on central Union St (and hopefully the rest of Union St in due course) was acknowledged as a good ‘win’ and a signal of their intent.

Of course we couldn’t have a 20th Anniversary meeting without a birthday cake and ACF Secretary Fiona McDonald excelled with a tasty and appropriately decorated cake which was enjoyed by all.  Cutting the cake we had Louise Napier of Aberdeen City Council and Sheila Rusbridge of CTC Grampian, who were the two individuals present who had been involved in the set-up and early meetings of ACF 20 years ago.

Cutting the cake!
Gavin speaking to the crowd

Hasta la Vista, Union St

by gavnhev, posted in campaign

The debate over whether Union St should be pedestrianised or not has rumbled on for decades so it’s not surprising that it continues to be a bone of contention.  The Covid-related ‘Spaces for People’ measures saw the central section, from Bridge St to Market St, closed to traffic and the Council seemed keen to keep that in place.  We’d taken part in various discussions with designers working on behalf of the Council who were coming up with ‘streetscape’ designs for how it could look. We’d even got as far as discussing some of the finer details as to how, for example, cycle lanes could be routed around bus stops.

But then back in May we had a local government election resulting in a new Administration: out went the old Lab-Con alliance and in came a new SNP-LibDem one instead.  Soon followed a decision to re-admit buses to the closed central section of Union St, and suddenly all the streetscape designs were back to square one, and astonishingly the new designs had no cycle lane infrastructure at all.

The Council ran a short consultation in October seeking public views on the new designs, and by far the greatest number of comments fed back were in relation to the lack of active travel provision.  There were two worrying trends:  firstly, a false narrative that because buses were back on Union St, there wasn’t room for a proper segregated cycle lane.  Secondly, because they were designing-out a cycle lane for the central section, it seemed to follow that they thought they didn’t need one on the east and west sections of Union St either.  Despite the consultation responses, the recommendations put before Councillors for a decision on 14 December were to approve these new designs which would effectively leave cyclists mixing with buses on the central section, and mixing with all traffic on the remainder.

Whatever had happened to the City Centre Masterplan, passed unanimously by Council in 2015, and which promised to deliver “a cycling city”.  What about the Sustainable Travel Hierarchy, enshrined in national and local transport policy, which is very clear that designs should cater for pedestrians first, and then cyclists, before considering public transport and other vehicles?

In the run up to the Council meeting we’d run a campaign to bombard co-leader of the Council Ian Yuill with postcards highlighting the need for proper segregated cycle lanes on Union St.  We’d also managed to meet with Cllrs Yuill and Miranda Radley, from the respective parties forming the administration, and also Cllr Kate Blake to make our point. 

At the Council meeting itself, both Rachel Martin on behalf of ACF, and Jon Barron on behalf of Grampian Cycle Partnership had requested a ‘deputation’ in other words the opportunity to speak to the meeting.  Both did an excellent job of putting the case for segregated cycle lanes and highlighting just how much at odds the recommendations before Councillors were with current policies and the desire to create an active travel network in the city.

In her presentation, Rachel described cycling amongst buses on Union St currently as being reminiscent of a scene from The Terminator.   The press picked up on that and had great fun with the analogy in items which appeared in the P&J and Evening Express in the following days.

Segregated cycle lanes for Union Street to be considered (pressandjournal.co.uk)

Truck-chase scene from Terminator 2

The decisions taken at the meeting now mean that central Union St will remain much as it is at the moment in terms of traffic access and so bikes will still have to mix with buses and service vehicles.  However speed limits for buses (similar to Broad St) will be looked at again.  And in a critical change from what had been recommended, officers have now been instructed that designs being developed for east and west Union St, and some other city centre streets being redeveloped, should include options for segregated cycle lane infrastructure.  It will be several months before we see those designs, so this isn’t the end of the discussion and no doubt there will be more battles along the way to ensure that cycling is properly provided for.  We’ve also taken the novel step of submitting a formal “participation request” under the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act, to try and improve the process and ensure that cyclists’ voices are listened to.

Our thanks to Rachel and Jon who put their arguments so eloquently, and to those Councillors who listened and voted to amend the plans.

Duthie Park – A cycle audit

by gavnhev, posted in campaign

Last year when we started up our programme of lessons for beginners, Duthie Park was the obvious place to go because there is lots of space and plenty of wide, well-surfaced and mostly flat paths.  The park is generally a great place to cycle, especially for kids, learners or just less confident cyclists who want to stay away from traffic. But could it be better?  There is hardly any cycle parking, and the layout of the access points is far from ideal.

We’ve produced a cycle audit which hopefully captures what is good but also what could be improved.  This is our second attempt at an ‘audit’ of this sort.  The first one looked at the new cycle path on Tillydrone Avenue and the Diamond bridge and you can read it – Third Don Crossing – Cyclists’ perspective.  We don’t claim to be engineers or design professionals – we’re just pointing out things that are obvious to a cyclist but maybe not to everyone else.

Maybe you know somewhere that would benefit from a cycle audit?  Send us your ideas, or even better, do your own one!