Newcastle City Council are consulting on a new Movement Strategy, launched last month. The consultation is open until Friday 29th November. Find a pdf copy of the strategy here.
They want to hear from people who live/work/study or just have fun in Newcastle so everyone has a contribution to make.
If you do one thing for cycling this month, PLEASE RESPOND
We can’t stress this enough. We understand that consultation fatigue is real and saying the same things over and over can feel pointless but it is an essential way to get your voice heard.
In Newcastle we are currently on our fifth Cabinet member for transport and third Council Lead in just over three years. Each one arrives with different priorities, knowledge and experience and making the case for the safe cycling infrastructure you want to see in our city becomes more important than ever.
YOUR VOICE MATTERS
If you have some time and would like to respond in more depth, ourselves and several groups in the city have written detailed responses. Click here to go straight to our response along with all the relevant links and contact details to reply by email.
Only have a few minutes to spare, want to respond and wondering what to say? We can help with that too:
The primary way of responding is via their response form. It’s straightforward and doesn’t take long to complete. Most of it is choosing from a list. The bits where you have a chance to write something may need a little thought so we’ve highlighted those here:
1 Are there any other priorities you think should be included?
The exisiting options are:
- Improving Public Transport
- Improving walking and wheeling opportunities
- Expanding cycling infrastructure (such as cycle lanes, bike storage or cycle crossing facilities)
- Expanding electric vehicle infrastructure (such as installing more public electric charge points)
- Improving air quality
- Improving safety for all road users
- Improving accessibility for disabled people
- Reducing traffic congestion
These priorities aren’t actually discussed in the consultation document. We think they don’t go far enough and aren’t clear enough in what they aim to achieve, particularly when priorities compete.
With all this in mind our suggestions for other priorities to be included are:
- Reducing the need to travel, particularly by less sustainable means.
- Enabling car-free lifestyles.
- The liveability of streets and neighbourhoods.
- The safe and independent movement of children.
- Achieving Net Zero transport emissions.
- Vision Zero strategy and accompanying target of zero deaths and serious injuries on our city’s roads.
2 If you’d like to make additional comments or suggestions about the overall vision of Newcastle’s Movement Strategy, please do so here
The proposed Vision is an inclusive, sustainable, healthy and thriving Newcastle
Not much to argue with there – sounds great.
3 If you have any suggestions for additional principles that should be included in the Movement Strategy, please include them here.
The principles are:
Net Zero Newcastle: focussing on low-emission travel and climate resilience
Sustainable growth: Supporting businesses and providing access to opportunities like jobs and education.
Healthier, active and safe: Promoting health and well-being through safe and active travel.
Inclusive, connected and efficient: Ensuring the transport network benefits all residents and visitors.
We’d also like to see the following:
Child Centred City: ensuring our places and transport network is mapped from the viewpoint of a child, is safe connected, accessible and enable independent movement.
4 If there are any additional actions you think we should take to improve transport in Newcastle please tell us about them here:
There are lots of actions outlined by the council so we’ll focus here on the ones they haven’t mentioned that we think are critical to the success of any transport plan:
- Proactive maintenance of walking, wheeling and cycling infrastructure, particularly in winter.
- Commitment to a coherent and connected cycling network that ensures safe connections between neighbourhoods and schools, colleges and recreation centres as well as public transport interchanges such as Haymarket and Central Station.
- Discouraging the private motor vehicle commute to work by introducing a workplace parking levy.
- Develop a process for residents to apply for: a 20mph limit in their street, apply to reallocate road space for secure cycle storage, planters and public space, play streets and access only restrictions.
- Trial on-street secure cycle parking for residents.
- Develop a process for schools and parents to formally apply for a School Street.
- An ambition for every School to have a School Street and/or reduced speed limits and safe, direct crossings, safe cycling routes to school for as stated earlier, the improvement of the safe, swift flow of pedestrian and cycling traffic from schools.
- From the School Streets evaluation report, existing and future School Street schemes should be enforced with cameras.
If you have any final comments or suggestions about the proposed Movement Strategy, please tell us about them here:
Targets, targets, targets. Many of the actions are open to interpretation and with the priorities that are stated upfront often competing with each other it’s hard to understand how decisions will be made and what objectives the council are hoping to achieve. This needs to be made much more explicit and measureable.
Thank you for supporting safe cycling in Newcastle