You may have seen us out locally handing out flyers to cyclists in the morning, to get momentum behind London Cycling Campaign's efforts to put cycling front-and-centre of the local elections. We've been busy lobbying local candidates to get them to pledge to build a safe cycle network in Merton.
We're also working with Merton Active Travel.
You can help by contacting the party leaders - we've made this super-easy - just visit
https://action.lcc.org.uk/streets
With the popularity of electric hire bikes (Lime, Forest), no-one can now deny how much suppressed demand there is for cycling. We saw 200,000 Lime journeys last July alone! People want to cycle,
but are prevented from doing so by a lack of secure storage for cycles,
and primarily by fear of traffic and a lack of safe routes. Enabling
more people to cycle gives people so much more freedom to travel. As cyclists we know that cycling
is very often the quickest (and almost always the cheapest) way to make
short journeys. Plus it enables people to get more exercise as part of
their daily routine, without the expense of gym membership. Merton has
the worst deterioration in bus speeds of any London borough over the
last 10 years (source: London Travelwatch). Getting more people on bikes
instead of using cars for short journeys would reduce congestion,
speeding up buses, commercial vehicles and other motor traffic.
Furthermore,
the funding for a local cycle network comes from Transport for London.
If Merton doesn't get the funding, it will go elsewhere - we've seen
this over recent years where Merton has failed to bid for funds that
could have been used to improve our borough.
Over the last couple of years, we've pushed for a Merton to publish a Cycling Strategy, and put a lot of time and effort providing input for it. The document has now been delivered and approved.
You can read it here (unhelpfully, it's in 2 parts):
The challenge now becomes how to deliver it on the streets!