Bristol cyclists are being urged to attend a public meeting on Wednesday (8 October) to influence the spending of funds intended to develop cycling in the city before the end of 2010. Back in June, Bristol was named as Britain’s first ‘cycling city’ and was awarded £11.4m in the government’s programme to encourage cycling. With Bristol City Council and South Gloucestershire Council matching that figure, the total amount in the kitty for the Cycling City Plan is £22.8m. But Josh Hart of On the Level: Car Free Blog claims there has been inadequate consultation with the public on how the money will be spent and believes there are major flaws in the existing plans. These include the omission of a bicycle expressway across the M32 motorway, 20mph speed limits, and adequate on-road cycle lanes. “This is an incredible opportunity to develop a high quality cycle expressway network in Bristol,” says Josh. “Yet we could end up seeing the money spent on more of the same: inadequate cycle lanes – often in the dangerous ‘door zone’ – that end just when you need them the most, ill-thought-out facilities that don’t join up and abandon cyclists at junctions, and underwriting the payrolls of existing city council staff and large charities.” He is urging cyclists to attend a meeting to be held on Wednesday by the Cycling City stakeholder group – which includes representatives from Rolls Royce, University of West of England, Bristol Cycling Campaign and Cyclists’ Touring Club (CTC) – although the councils are keen to get more non-cyclists involved. The meeting takes place from 6:30-8pm on Wednesday at Fairfield High School in Horfield.
Cycling City riders urged to speak up
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So they want to pay people a pittance "for the experience", not record their leave accrued, have them ineligible for sickness pay, then complain about them not being experts on e-bikes, bikefitting and more?
No right-wing media frothing about this?
Made worse by the fact the road has recently been closed for services works for a few weeks, and that was brilliant while it lasted.
Whilst all the changes made are broadly good, there are a host of businesses that can and will suffer for them if they are unlucky enough to hire bad people or simply have bad luck. Small businesses are already really hard pushed to turn a profit with all the pressures of NI, wages, rent, energy costs etc so at some point we do need to find a way to support small businesses and encourage their growth rather than encouraging their demise at every opportunity by treating them in exactly the same way as big, wealthy businesses. A country is built on the businesses people start. When all people see is risk with little chance of reward, why would they even try. Its already an issue for plenty of people who start up a one man band and grow to the size where they could and should start thinking of turning things into a proper company with employees. Do you take this risk or do you just in a comfortable place and take more holiday to avoid the pitfalls of VAT and all the issues with hiring people etc?
First casualty already: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd95ezw4003o [Particularly bitter about this one as it's a regular running route for me.]
Difficult to know as (a) most teams don't publish accounts, (b) even if they did, riders may be treated as contractors and buried in with other things, and (c) what gets counted is complicated (there are sponsors paying riders directly, sponsorship in kind, release payments to other teams, etc. etc.). Seems to be about 70-80% (and growing) of costs related to paying riders in some way, though. Don't know what the picture looks like in those other sports for comparison, though. Most of them do tend to have stadium costs to factor in, which may be not inconsiderable (though also a source of income, especially if they own them and can host other events there).
@mdavidford Curious if the distinction between a budget cap and a salary cap is more important for cycling than other sports. Maybe I don't follow other sports closely enough to know what's going on behind the scenes, but it feels like for the sports with a salary cap (NBA, NFL, NHL etc.) it's all about the players, whilst for cycling the rider is of course very important, but a lot of money goes on other things - most obviously the equipment, but also things like support staff (chefs/mechanics etc.), training camps, wind tunnel testing etc. I note F1 has done the opposite and has a cost cap that specifically excludes driver's salaries (i.e. aiming to level the playing field mechanically speaking, but teams can still chuck money at getting the best drivers).
@mdavidford Pffft? Is that the noise you make when expelling hot air?
@mdavidford I can see how it confused you when I pointed to the reviewer at the bottom. but hey if you cant read an entire comment before getting all keyboard warrior blah, kind of like you usually do that not my fault. I should have guessed the first person to reply to a comment would be you, you cant help yourself.