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Cycle network signs (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Gregory Williams:Flickr)Sustrans invites riders to sponsor a mile of the National Cycle Network
Transport charity Sustrans, which curates the National Cycle Network, is inviting donors to support the network by sponsoring a mile of its routes, or to 'buy' a mile of the route as a Christmas present for a friend or loved one.
You can choose from any of the 14,000 miles of the network; 1,169 have already been sponsored, but the support is non-exclusive.
A mile of NCN will cost you £30, which goes toward supporting the whole network. You get a sponsor's certificate, an 'I love the NCN' fridge magnet, and email updates about what's new on the network.
Supporters can also post a message to Sustrans' sponsors' page saying why they are sponsoring a particular mile.
We like Chris Saunders's reason for sponsoring 1 mile of Route 3: "Just when you thought you were alone, suddenly the Maunsel Tea Shop appears. I'm sponsoring this section so I can continue exercising and consuming tea and cake in relative peace, quiet and safety!"
Other sponsors have supported a section because it's where they fell in love with cycling, it has great views or because it's their regular commute.
Julian Hall, Director of Fundraising at Sustrans, said: "The National Cycle Network is enjoyed by millions each year and many people have a favourite mile - whether it's somewhere they have enjoyed walking or cycling with loved ones or somewhere that is particularly scenic.
"Sponsor a Mile allows people to buy a unique gift for someone which in turn will help the charity maintain routes for years to come."
All sponsor money goes to maintaining the network, Sustrans says.
The organisation doesn't have to pay to maintain the whole network, but it does spend over £1m every year and donations go towards these costs.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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34 comments
Is there a mile of route which isn't open to cars, has good surface and is unobstructed? I can't think of one near me. Some bits of Bristol and Bath Railway Path might have been, except for all the bike- bashing done by local police and Sustrans because it gets busy.
I think there's a reason they persist in calling the non- road bits "traffic free": they don't want hardly anyone on them.
Sustrans are, for better or worse, the official custodians of our main cycle routes. After all their National Cycle Network appears on the OS maps.
In order to achieve anything at all in conditions hostile to cycling they have accepted compromise after compromise such that the end result is a travesty of a cycle network. With one or two notable exceptions (Bristol-Bath, NCN2 between Brighton and Hove) most of this network is barely used.
There is a huge latent demand in this country for people who want to use their bikes as transport. There are probably more bikes tucked away in garages and sheds than at any time in our history. People know about the benefits of cycling. They just need somewhere to cycle.
And thanks to the internet we now know exactly what is needed to get ordinary people cycling. Is there anybody involved in cycle campaigning who hasn’t read David Hembrow’s blog or watched Mark Wagenbuur’s excellent videos?
For anyone who hasn’t had that pleasure, see http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/ and https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/ respectively.
I do not mean to lay into Sustrans too harshly. The very idea of a charity being responsible for building and maintaining a transport network is ridiculous. They have done the best they could with what resources and influence they had at the time, but in 2014 to continue to build and promote poor quality infrastructure as if it were the best we can achieve smacks of wilful ignorance.
Wow, a whole stack of Sustrans 'bashing'! I'm pretty familiar with my local routes; they even opened 2 monster tunnels south of Bath - many thanks Sustrans.
I recently did the Hadrian's CTC Cycleway and the signage was excellent with useful bits of cyclepath to keep you away from busy sections of roads. I had a map and the route loaded into Viewranger and I hardly had to use them.
And were you trying to get to work?
That is my point, leisure routes are all well and good, but muddy bridleways don't make good commuter routes.
I half-agree with you.
The two tunnels are great, as it the Bristol-Bath Railway path. I've cruised these routes and enjoyed them greatly.
The reason that Sunstrans get such a bashing is that, great as they these routes are, they don't deliver against the organisation's stated aims. In these examples they have created a brilliant leisure facility that doesn't function so well as a piece of transport infrastucture. Remember that article about riders being stopped by the police for exceeding a moderate 20mph on the Railway Path?
they like many organizations make claims that are frankly if not true are just organizational aspirations, rather than realistic predictions.
When they where planning to create the cyclepath near my folks, heard a lot about kids cycling to school, or commuting.
I see lots and lots of dogwalkers the very occational MTBers/families on the weekend.
what you don't see are commuters or kids going to school, the roads leading off are steep, steep enough that one got into 100 Greatest Cycling Climbs, and frankly it doesn't really connect areas that people would cycle to/from.
But the dog walkers love it!
Agreed, and the result of consistently stating one set of aspirations and delivering something quite different leads a lot of folks to feel that Sustrans are being somehow dishonest.
Charities can do a lot of good for cycling as a whole. For instance they might provide bikes to disadvantaged kids or build/improve sporting facilities (BMX tracks, velodromes etc.) but I'm begining to feel more and more that getting involved in physical transport infrastructure might be counter-productive in the long-term as it shifts the onus from goverment and local authorities.
I think part of the problem for Sustrans is the different classes of cyclists.
A lot of us here want safe passage for longer distances. Have you seen the Sustrans route beside the A9 through the Drumochter pass for example. Not entirely suitable for road bikes (although I have mates who have done it).
And then there in-town commuter types who want alternative safer routes in cities. Edinburgh's cycle path network springs to mind. The problem there is that it is shared use and then you get the attendant problems with that. You certainly can't guarantee the speeds you can on the road on a cycle lane.
So, until a part of our tax money is spent providing (building and maintaining) roads for human powered vehicles only (allowing for velomobiles and the like) we are going to be stuck with a piecemeal solution. A part of which might be Sustrans.
Not sure I'll be sponsoring anything though.
True,
but what does sus(tailable)trans(port) mean? does it suggest leisure routes or does it suggest routes that get you quickly and efficiently from point a to point b?
I have no issue if the point is the former, there is a demand for leisure facilities. If the point is the former, which the name suggests it is, then Sustrans are a waste of time and money.
Finally, shouldn't infrastructure planning and delivery be the role of government and not a charity?
Certainly it should. But then we'd probably need some joined up thinking on the entire transport requirements. Good luck with the one.
Maybe the reason they dont produce great quality bike routes is that their role in life is this (From their website) :
Our vision is a world in which people choose to travel in ways that benefit their health and the environment.
To achieve this we influence and shape policy and practice so everyone can travel by foot, bike or public transport for more of the journeys we make everyday.
We call for UK governments to invest in doubling the number of journeys, under five miles made by foot, bike and public transport to 4 out of 5 by 2020.
That sounds like a campaigning organisation, not a construction charity.
I think this is a big part of why Sustrans are not taken seriously by a lot of cyclists: they don't really seem to know what they are. If their main activity is campaigning I'm afraid to say that they undermine their own efforts completely by associating themselves with sub-standard infrastructure.
Perhaps this focus on journeys under 5 miles has something to do with it. For journeys of this distance the bicycle represents and alternative to walking, not an alternative to the car. As such, infrastructure that dictates that cyclists behave as glorified pedestrians does make some sense in this context. Bump the distance up to 10 or 15 miles and it stops making sense but perhaps Sustrans simply aren't interested in journeys of this sort of distance.
Roughly two-thirds of the 14,000-mile NCN is existing minor roads, one-third is traffic-free path. A bit more than "occasional". You're not seriously telling me you haven't heard of the Bristol-Bath Railway Path, or the Two Tunnels, or the railway paths that make up much of the C2C, or...?
But yes, if vehicular cycling is your thing, you should probably stick to the vehicle roads. Leave the paths for those of us who don't really enjoy pretending to be cars.
We're meant to be talking SUStainable TRANSport here, their raison d'être is trying to shift people's everyday transport away from cars, not providing lovely family Sunday cycling. We have an NCN route into town here that for a lot of the year would be knobbly tyred MTB only, leaving people to do the rest of their ride on the least suitable bike for town riding. So I can take road bike and struggle on the unmade part or take an MTB and struggle on the road bit. However we have a cycle track so the box is ticked, even if it does pass through a restaurant at one point.
Apart from the occasional bridge or path (where, of course, peddos have right of way over cyclists so they're borderline unsuitable for vehicular cycling), most of their so called 'network' seems to be signposts on existing roads. So what exactly would one be sponsoring?
What about a souvenir sample of dog mess?
Or what about asking dog walkers to sponsor their dogs favorite toilet area? They could get a certificate and a fridge magnet in the shape of a toilet seat?
Maybe it could have a button that when you press it says, "Sorry he doesn't normally do that"
How do I put this? Go f**k yourself Sustran. A total waste of space (the organisation, not the people) as far as getting people to use bikes for transport. They have hardly built a thing, just kept signwriters in business.
Stop saying you have built a huge network, most of which is never or rarely used, and get the government to invest in proper infrastructure that people will use every day.
While I'm at it, bike training while helpful for those that want to cycle will never result in mass cycling and never has.
The problem that I have with Sustrans is not with what they do or how they are organised/funded but that there seems to be a disconnect between their stated aims and what they actually acheive.
A lot of the NCN is great. Its great for family cycling and occasional leisure rides. It's great for a lot of disabled cyclists too. It could even enable you to go mini-touring with young kids on their own bikes.
What it is not great at is providing meaningful transport infrastructure for cyclists and, to be fair to Sustrans, I don't see this as a function of the charity sector anyway.
If Sustrans really have the aim of providing real transport solutions it's clear to see that they are failing. If their aim is to provide facilities for leisure cycling and walking and to promote these activities (a very worthy aim BTW) then lets just be honest about it.
Their routes are rubbish and poorly maintained. So they want to levy a voluntary tax? I wouldn't even give them the time of day. Can you imagine the uproar if Dave asked drivers for a few more quid in addition to car tax and fuel duty to maintain the roads ………….
Interesting. The welsh bits might not need sponsoring if the legislation going through the welsh government requiring councils to maintain the routes is passed. Just need that in rest of uk.
Sustrans do maintenance! I reported a trench across part of NCN 7 in January and it's still there (and it's on part of teh route owned or possibly leased by Sustrans, nothing to do with the local council, I've asked)
I'd happily sponsor a Sustrans engineer to go on a study tour of the Netherlands.
They've been! Well our local lot have and took a bunch of officers and councillors from Tyneside with them
http://www.sustrans.org.uk/blog/north-east-councillors-visit-one-best-cy...
They are a great bunch up here who have managed to get some great stuff put in. It is often an uphill struggle against LAs with little ambition or clue, and even less money. Mid you even the LA with sacks of cash is dragging their heels currently
gazza_d wrote:
That’s good to hear. Sustrans nationally is way behind the curve when it comes to high quality cycling infrastructure.
The sort of narrow, disconnected, meandering and often muddy “shared-use” path that Sustrans still promotes may have been acceptable 30 years ago when we didn’t know any better, but in 2014 there really is no excuse for tolerating such substandard infrastructure.
I know many Sustrans officers and volunteers personally and they are lovely, well-meaning people but I’d go so far as to say that until Sustrans as an organisation states load and clear that nothing less than high quality Dutch-style infrastructure is good enough then it will remain part of the problem.
I'd cheerfully pay for a bit of the network if it would ensure it was built and maintained to a high standard.
Sadly you can be confident that the local council would spray it with loose grit and allow cars to park across it, rendering it all but useless, much as it is now.
A superb idea and a bit of fun too. We can't think of a better way to support cycling and fund growth. Great job Sustrans !
http://www.tinpony.co.uk/shop/copy-of-tin-pony-classic-t-shirt
How about committing substantial, sustained, government-level funding for functional, well-designed cycle-infrastructure, rather than relying on piecemeal donations from a charity?
Or could you just not think of a better way to throw in a bit of cheap advertising?
Sorry to be so shirty, but the comment seems oddly like a tasteless plug for a clothes company.
This is poop. When I needed some back up against Windsor Great Park closing access to part of Sustran route 4 at night they failed (very quickly). Why should they get more money for a shoddy service?
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