Cycle town! Its time to get on our bikes

On Thursday (19th June) the government announced a scheme investing £100m into 12 chosen "Cycling Towns/Cities" to improve cycling infrastructure and facilities in those urban areas. But it appears that the money is going to places that already have good cycling infrastructure (like Cambridge)! Friday's EDP newspaper was very critical of Norfolk County Council for failing to even bid for a share of this funding, despite both Norwich and Yarmouth being qualified and Kings Lynn expressing an intrest, because "funds would have to be taken from other transport budgets to match any funding award made" (quoting EDP article).
Rupert Read (Green Party Transport spokesman) says in the EDP that "its about time we took the initiative on getting the key improvements made to road junctions. The more people we can encourage on to their bikes, the less congested the road network will be - and the more people will be saving money, by travelling in a way that is immune to fuel price increases."

SO WHAT IS Norfolk County Council playing at??? We need serious investment into forms of transport (like cycling) that do not depend on damaging and dwindling fossil fuels like oil. Dereham is wofully lacking in cycling infrastructure like cycle lanes/paths, cyclist priority at junctions, and good sheltered cycle racks around the town.

I regularly cycle to the City College learning Station at Trafalgar Business Park, Rashes Green. But there are no proper bike racks there at all! So I have to lock my bike to some rather exposed railings. Service providers (like the Learning Station), employers, and particularly planners at Breckland must do far more to ensure that the infrastructure is there to facilitate cycling. And if there is money out there that the County Council can go for to help fund this then they really MUST GO FOR IT!

The County Council (and others) must get their act together and start investing into our carbon-free transport future, rather than linguring in our dying, oil-adicted transport past! Lets see safe dedicated cycle routes being developed to link Dereham town centre to all the surounding housing areas and on out to all the surounding villages.


Meanwhile, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been swanning around in Jeddah over the weekend trying to talk Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich countries into giving us back some of the trillions of dollars that we're spending, buying their oil. But Gordon wants them to invest all that money that they're making out of us due to soaring oil prices, back into the UK by financing new nuclear power stations! IDIOT! Nuclear is clearly NOT the solution!

Frankly we would much sooner solve these problems if we were to stop pouring our money away to Saudi's in the first place by not buying their oil! Then we would instead have that money ourselves, to invest into finding zero-carbon solutions, reducing our energy use and rebuilding more resillent and re-localised economies.