I read that article.
My sympathy for the people in the developments dropped when I read statements along the lines of "It is a mile to the nearest shop so I have no option but to drive everywhere."
Um, a mile. A whole mile. Wow. It would be great if there was an alternative to a car that was easy for a young person to use to travel a mile when they needed to pick up a pint of milk.
Right. Let's play this one out.
If you have a car, but no bike, a mile to the shops to pick up milk == 2mile round trip. Average human walks at 3mph. So that makes it a 40min round trip, maybe 5 mins in the shop, that's 45 mins to get a bottle of milk. Or about 10 mins by car, assuming good parking. That's an easy one to pick.
Now if the person in question had a bike, then it's about 10-15 mins. *BUT* that is predicated on:
- Having a bike in the first place,
- Having somewhere safe to lock up the bike that is quick and easy to get the bike in and out of.
- Having a safe place to cycle it. For many muggle cyclists, riding down the edge of a busy road to get milk is way too scary.
- There being somewhere convenient to lock the bike up at the shop
In an ideal world, everyone on these housing developments would have a nice cargo bike with a box on the front, locked up securely in an easy to get to bike shed. They could then ride to the shops, along a segregated bike lane, lock it up in front of the shop at the Sheffield stand, then after buying milk, they can ride back along the same segregated bike lane, put the bike back in the shed, and resume making the custard for the pie that they needed the milk for.
*BUT* if you miss out any one item in my list of 4 above, you're not going to ride, even if you did have a bike. We need to change the way we build our towns and cities. Developments like this where active travel isn't at the forefront of the design is always going to encourage car ownership.
Even in one of the most cycle centric cities in the world, even tho it's under 2km to the nearest supermarkets, I still often take the metro or tram, rather than cycle, because it's either a faff to get the bike out, or a pain to lock it up. Tho fortunately it would be impossible to drive to said supermarket. There's nowhere to park... and the 5 year wait for a parking permit at home means I don't actually own a car. When I need to drive to Ikea, I just hire a greenwheels for a couple of hours.
J