First a history lesson
Although I have lived on South Tyneside for approx 10 years, I hail from Darlington, and did most of my cycling there, and have worked for the local hospital trust since '91 and until 2010 worked in Darlington daily.
Although it was the freedom, speed, and cheapness which got me interesting in cycling as a student, it was the Darlington cycling festival which first got me into cycling as a recreational activity. Always one to pay back a favour, I was always a willing volunteer at festival events, and have participated in on form or another until approx 2001 when I moved to Tyneside. I have led and organised rides, helped with community bicycle maintenance classes & used to sit on the Council's cycling forum back in the late 80's & 90's.
I was also a organiser for several years, of the best cycling related thing Darlington had - Darlington Freewheelers.
I was very interested as a bystander when I found out that Darlington had been awarded a project as a demonstration cycling town, and was very interested when the final reports have been published, and linked to by Kranksbikes on Twitter, and extremely saddened by the missed opportunities and failures of the project.
The reports can be downloaded from here
Cycle Route infrastructure
Looking at the maps of cycling route infrastructure, there does not seem to be a lot of change from 20 years ago, other than improved crossings and new links where new developments have been created.
Darlington is a compact town with most of the main routes being radial.
Most of the cycling routes follow the same pattern, but avoid the main roads like the plague, preferring instead to stick to side streets and links though parks etc. Other than crossings, then main roads have been almost completely ignored by the project - Why?
1. Because the main roads in darlington are the obvious radial routes, the cycle paths are more torturous as a result, and therefore slower. Humans by nature tend to go the shortest route - the main roads should be more cycle friendly.
2. Moving the cyclists off onto the back streets hides them from the general public, and creates a perception that people are not cycling - cycling needs to be visible for the public to think that it is Ok to cycle. In my current regular commute I see loads of cyclists on the path alongside the A167 between Durham and Chester le Street, and this always makes me want to join in. If you get masses cycling along Yarm road or North road everyday it will encourage others like a snowball effect.
3. The routes go down some pretty quiet and often deserted roads/lanes/alleys etc. In these paranoid times, that is hardly likely to make them attractive to women and kids etc, especially at night, and early mornings. I'd hardly want to cycle around some of these routes alone in the dark, so it hardly encourages people to start, who already ride around in tin boxes for safety. Keep the routes yeh, but do not have them as the only solution.
4. Advanced stop lines should have been put in place at all traffic lit junctions on all the major routes.A simple and relatively inexpensive task, and I cannot think of a single argument why it wasn't done.
5. There is still no signed route from the north (Harrowgate hill) and the north east (Haughton, Barmpton) of the town into the town centre. Although the report says it isn progress. It has been for 25 yrs+. Why was it not completed during the project? Lots of people live, work and shop along those corridors. There is patchy support along haughton road, but again it peters out.
6. All the routes, except for the circular leisure route, focus on the town centre. Is that the only place people in Darlington go? What about safe signed routes to Morrisons, Sainsburys, football stadium, Hospital? If you want to encourage people to start cycling, you need to routes to where they want to go, not some planners utopia.
7. As well as an outside circular route, I think that there should have been a inner circular, or at least some cross links - Hundens Lane, Cleveland street, Surtees Street, Pierremont road/Crescent.
Participation
It is all very well creating and signing loads of routes, but you still need to persuade people to cycle. Takeup of some of the ideas such as the bike loan, and the cycle training seem to have fallen a long long way short of expectations. An example is:
As part of our engagement with new and returning cyclists we also offered cycle training to adults. Between July 2008 and March 2011 38 adults across Darlington took part in some form of cycle training.
38 people in 32 months!! Surely in a town of 100,000 people there must be a larger demand than that.
What went wrong? It seems obvious that either the scheme wasn't well published, or completely missed the target audience. Where are the lessons learnt from that. Was the targetting or the advertising changed during the scheme to try to increase takeup?
The workplace engagement programmes were another disaster area:
During the course of the Cycling Town programme job roles and responsibilities were altered and there was no longer an officer responsible for workplace engagement. Contact with workplaces was limited to those workplaces that were already engaged or those that proactively contacted the Transport Policy team.
I find this incredible - no wonder it failed, if they relied on people asking for them. Surely the concept of the whole scheme was to reach out to people and organisations - what happened to the officer roles? Presumably money was allocated to fund this role at the outset, again what happened?
The cycling festival, and tourist trials have been yearly fixtures in Darlington for at least 25 years. and have always featured community bike maintenance sessions, tours of the cycle routes, and off road ride etc. Darlington Freewheelers always got a major boost during and after the festival and occasionally saw nightly numbers of 60-70, so that's not a success that the scheme can claim, although it seems from the report that the momentum was not built upon.
To be fair though, from the report data, the effort to get schools cycling has been successful.
Women were a different story, mainly as although efforts were made to encourage women to cycle, there has been no results gathered or published. The only figures were from 2004 to 3008, before the scheme was introduced. Nothing about participation or takeup of the events.
My conclusion
It seems to me that the "cycling town" demonstration has been a dismal failure overall.
The scheme should have been about unlocking potential.
Darlington has a lot of potential as a flat compact town with good radial roads.
Darlington had a small cycling festival for years along with regular events for experienced and keen cyclists. The scheme has completely failed to build on most of that potential.
The complete lack of improvement in general conditions for cycling on the normal roads is a large failure - people don't always want or need to go where the signed routes take them, and it's no good putting up signs in back streets, when the potential cyclists driving into work everyday don't see any change on the roads.
If you put advanced stop lines in, big painted cycle lanes on the main roads. Most rush hours Darlington traffic is very slow. If drivers in cars see cyclists whizzing by, then it may encourage them more.
Sustainable routes to schools is a great idea, and should have been expanded to supermarkets, shopping areas, major workplaces etc., to show the easy local access.
The cycle training and loan schemes were other failures - we dont know whether they were ill-fitting concepts, or just badly advertised and run. I suspect a combination.
Overall though, the biggest fail has to be with what comes across as a lack of will from the council. The workplace engagement got orphaned. Most of the cycle routes have been in place for years. The obvious gaps have still not been plugged.
The best way to get people riding is to get people riding with support-
Short cycling rides which are held frequently at regular times from a regular start point, so people can join in as they wish, where people know they wont get left behind or made to feel silly. It takes time to build momentum, but it can be done.
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