“If you don’t want cycling on footpaths, support bike lanes and 20mph zones”: Town centre cycling bans and the fight against “cowboy” wardens + the year in cycling reviewed

As 2024 soft pedals its way to the finish line, after being dropped early on in some strong crosswinds, we’ve gone all festive on the road.cc Podcast, as we gathered around the Christmas crackers and opened up the archives to dissect the biggest and barmiest stories from another momentous, and occasionally tumultuous, year in the world of cycling.

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In part one, Ryan, Jack, and Emily, paper party helmets firmly attached, discuss the stories and narratives that jumped out at them during 2024, from the general election and its impact (so far) on cycling in the UK, the ongoing storms battering the bike industry, the latest wave of aero tech (including that aesthetically challenged Giro TT lid), how Shimano dealt with claims its Di2 groupsets could be hacked, Tadej Pogačar’s overwhelming dominance, and one of the greatest days of bike racing ever at the Tour de France Femmes.

In part two, we turn our attentions towards another cycling story that just wouldn’t go away over the last 12 months – town centre cycling bans.

In recent years, Public Space Protection Orders – or PSPOs – have been used by local authorities, with the help of external wardens, to crack down on what councils deem to be anti-social, nuisance behaviour by people on bikes in pedestrianised areas, a method cyclists, however, say simply discourages locals, especially older people, from riding their bikes into town.

This year in Grimsby – the spiritual home of the town centre cycling ban – hundreds have been fined for breaching the local authority’s cycling PSPO, with some penalties even exceeding £1,000 for those who refused to pay right away.

The town’s council even set up a loud speaker on the town’s shopping street during the summer, which played four ‘no cycling’ messages every hour. Luckily, that’s down to two an hour now, after shoppers complained it was “too repetitive”.

Meanwhile, Birmingham City Council has recently proposed a PSPO that would prevent cycling in parts of the city centre, prompting active travel campaigners to brand the plans “clumsy, unworkable, and discriminatory” – although the council has insisted that it is not implementing “a ban on cycling”.

> Active travel campaigners blast “clumsy, unworkable, and discriminatory” plan to ban cycling in Birmingham city centre

And in Colchester, the local council has been engulfed in a PSPO saga for most of the year, after externally contracted, third-party wardens were accused of running amok and unfairly targeting cyclists – mistakenly fining then £100 for riding their bikes in areas where cycling is permitted, threatening them with a £1,000 penalty if they appealed the fine, “lying in wait” for rule-breaking cyclists, and telling one elderly female cyclist that she wasn’t allowed to use a city centre road because she doesn’t pay “road tax”.

Following a public outcry and a campaign by local cycling activists, the council finally agreed to pause the cycling fines and waive any penalties mistakenly handed out by the oblivious wardens, before announcing last month that it would pursue an ‘education first’ policy from now on when it comes to its cycling ban – a model campaigners say should be replicated across the country.

Ryan is joined by one of those activists who successfully stood up to the wardens and caused a rethink in their local council over how they approach so-called ‘anti-social cycling’. 

As well as discussing his group’s campaign against the crude and often incorrect implementation of the city’s cycling ban, Will Bramhill from the Colchester Cycling Campaign told the podcast that cycling PSPOs will always prove controversial until the UK fully addresses its decades-long failure in transport policy, which constantly shunts cyclists away from safe spaces and on to dangerous roads alongside motorists.

“The big problem, of course, is that we’ve had a failure of our transport policy since the 1940s,” Will told the podcast.

“The Dutch have catered for cycling. We haven’t. And cyclists have been pushed off the roads. People still want to cycle because it’s a great way to get about. And if you don’t drive and don’t want to catch the bus, it’s probably your choice of getting about. 

“But we’ve had this failure in transport policy, which has caused the present situation where you’ve got cycling on footways.

“If you’re not a cyclist, if you don’t want cycling on footways, then support 20 miles an hour, support cycling infrastructure, because that’s the way ahead. It has to be.”

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