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Council set to scrap £100k leisure cycling route – after bike riders branded it a “waste of money”

Campaigners said plan for route in west Harrogate was “not sensible because it would not make a meaningful difference to the cycle network”

North Yorkshire Council is set to scrap a planned £100,000 leisure cycling route that had been branded a “waste of money” by local bike riders – with a report saying that the cash would be better spent on other active travel projects.

In September, outlining a range of proposed measures for the area West of Harrogate, mainly aimed at reducing motor traffic congestion and encouraging active travel in the Otley Road corridor, the local authority revealed plans to turn Nursery Lane, an existing public right of way, into an off-road leisure route, with an upgraded and improved surface.

But a report entitled Otley Road Sustainable Transport Measures West of Harrogate compiled by the Conservative-run council’s Assistant Director Highways and Transportation, Parking Services, Street Scene, Parks and Grounds ahead of a meeting, next Monday, of the council’s Environmental Executive, says that the scheme “was not supported in the feedback from both local members and the wider community and so has been removed from the proposed package.”

As local news website The Stray Ferret points out, in September when the proposal was outlined to a meeting of the Harrogate & Knaresborough Area Constituency Committee, David Mitchell, from Harrogate District Cycle Action (HCDA) said that spending that sum on Nursery Lane was “not sensible because it would not make a meaningful difference to the cycle network.”

Conservative Councillor Paul Haslam, meanwhile, said that he had been told by cyclists that the plans were “a complete waste of money because that lane is already safe.”

The report to be laid before the committee next week instead recommends that £60,000 be spent on “patching and resurfacing” a shared footpath and cycleway between Green Lane and Blenheim Way, which is known locally as the Rosset Cycle Path.

According to the report, the proposed works will “improve the surface to remove potential tripping hazards for pedestrians and cyclists … to enhance the off-road route and to encourage its use as an alternative route to the Otley Road Corridor for walkers and cyclists.”

In all, the council has set aside a budget of £845,000 for works on the Otley Road Corridor, as detailed in the report, with the improvements estimated to cost £715,000 and the balance being  retained as a contingency against fees for design work that is due to begin in the New Year.

Local cyclists could be forgiven for wondering whether they will ever see the plans come to fruition, however – proposals for improving active travel provision on the Otley Road Corridor have been under discussion since 2018, the year before Harrogate hosted the UCI Road Cycling World Championships.

The original plans were ditched in February this year, however, with the council attracting criticism from local cycling campaigners after it grouped ‘no preference’ responses to a consultation with those opposed to the measures and suggested they lacked sufficient support.

> Council scraps £500,000 Harrogate cycle lane expansions… even though majority support plans

However, among people who did express an opinion, 52 per cent were in favour of some sort of active travel scheme in the corridor, and HCDA said that the council’s decision reflected a “complete abandoning of plans to promote active travel.”

Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.

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16 comments

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Rendel Harris | 12 months ago
3 likes

Well done that council. Hopefully it might begin a step change from council consultations/planning being "Do we want cycling infra or not?" to "We want cycling infra, let's ask cyclists what they think would be best."

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HarrogateSpa replied to Rendel Harris | 12 months ago
11 likes

North Yorkshire Council must be one of the worst in the country, if not the absolute worst. It is not 'well done' in any sense/

They won funding in 2017 for a cycleway on the very busy Otley Road. They have failed to build it, other than an isolated 300m section in 2021.

The plan to divert £100K to Nursery Lane was preposterous. It has next-to-no traffic, and already has modal filters. It's not a particularly useful route, but if you want to use it, it is safe as houses.

The upshot is the council has abandoned its idiotic Nursery Lane plan, but we're still not getting a cycleway on Otley Road where it is needed. Instead that part of the cash is going to routine maintenance of an existing route.

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Rendel Harris replied to HarrogateSpa | 12 months ago
4 likes

Clearly you'll know far more about it than I but at least a partial well done for not spending the money on a useless route and maintaining an existing (presumably useful?) route instead? But not spending the money on the route for which it was allocated does sound shite.

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HarrogateSpa replied to Rendel Harris | 12 months ago
8 likes

They abandoned the original plan to create a route where it was needed.

The part-replacement £100K for Nursery Lane idea was something no one had ever asked for, and was ludicrous.

Now they have cancelled it. They can cancel things, but what they are unable or unwilling to do is anything positive and ambitious for cycling.

Maintenance of existing routes should come out of general council transport budget, not from a 2017 funding bid that was supposed to expand the cycle network.

Dealing with North Yorkshire Council would challenge anyone's sanity.

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Fursty Ferret replied to Rendel Harris | 12 months ago
8 likes

There's nothing "well done" about what NYCC has achieved or indeed not achieved in Harrogate. The Otley Rd bike lane is a tribute to terrible design, designed purely to give motorists an excuse to be angry at riders choosing not to use it.

It's bloody awful going up, as you need to give way at EVERY SINGLE side road. None of the beg buttons on the crossings have authority to interrupt the normal light cycle, so you have to wait several minutes at each one. Then the actual bike lane has multiple 90 degree turns and drops off and clambers onto the pavement via steep ramps and slippery edges. You can do 15mph up the road, or average 5mph on the bike lane.

Coming down it's just pointless, because you can just freewheel at 20-30mph. Try doing that on the bike path. There are also multiple steep little ramps that get covered in black ice in the winter and which catapult you into traffic. Then the pavement section is deliberately blocked by a cafe owner dumping his van and tables across it.

I'd be willing to put decent money on a council employee having a family member in the design business because there's no way that this abomination should have made it past the design stage, especially when multiple groups were outspoken in how terrible it was.

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HarrogateSpa replied to Fursty Ferret | 12 months ago
1 like

It is a poor design, and the arrangements at the traffic-light controlled junctions are terrible.

It's not true to say you give way at every single side road - they have put cycle priority across minor side roads, which is the one good thing about the design.

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Gloucester_Dave | 12 months ago
2 likes

Nice to see this happen. In Gloucestershire our highways persist with bad ideas poorly built and expect us to be grateful even when many cyclists has tried to ask them to change plans or do something different. 

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HarrogateSpa replied to Gloucester_Dave | 12 months ago
9 likes

I can't agree.

Having campaigned for a cycle network in Harrogate & Knaresborough for a decade, we are getting absolutely nowhere with a council that is unmotivated and incompetent.

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Fursty Ferret replied to HarrogateSpa | 12 months ago
2 likes

Yep. There's loads of potential even to improve the Beryl Burton cycleway for winter use. At the moment the section past the horses is unusable for commuting because the slurry from the field drains down it. The owner of the big house half way down also has an anger management problem and has a tendency to drive straight at oncoming walkers / riders while on his phone.

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bigwheeler88 | 12 months ago
2 likes

No cycling infrastructure is a waste of money. It is simply not possible. Every penny spent on new roads, on the other hand...

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chrisonabike replied to bigwheeler88 | 12 months ago
10 likes

Well, bizzarolledner, money spend on proper quality cycle infra (which actually connects destinations / is part of a network) is never a waste of money.  Much UK cycle infra has been a waste of money - generally by being inadequate in several ways but also because for every penny spent on it tens of pounds have been spend on making it easier to drive.

Going forward could there be a middle way (also here)?  Moving closer to your side of the mirror than the other perhaps ... but something like:

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wtjs replied to chrisonabike | 12 months ago
4 likes

I can't reply in any other way than 'Hear, Hear'!

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E6toSE3 replied to bigwheeler88 | 12 months ago
3 likes

Disagree totally. Huge amounts of money spent in cycling infrastructure are irrelevant or detrimental to cycling. They are not even sops to cyclists. They are spending target exercises. Government scheme provides £millions to be spent in a particular year or two. Use it or lose it. I've been involved as community forum chair as a resident where we saw through such stuff to oppose or support it and, for final 17 years of working life, as council employee mining incoherent data systems for data to generate meaningful performance planning and monitoring information.

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chrisonabike replied to E6toSE3 | 12 months ago
2 likes

I'm sure this applies to much public funding, but would you say this is worse for cycling / active travel monies than e.g. roads?  I don't know but suspect so because:

a) active travel infra and specifically cycle infra is much less (not) regulated than other road infra - seems no-one is "in charge" other than the relevant council and no "standards" apply (LTN1/20 and others are still "more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules").

b) the way funding for this works appears to be "sometimes throw some crumbs out for the pigeons" than any long term programme that the bureacracy can rely upon.  This looked like it *could* change with Active Travel England but I believe that has all fallen by (ATE still exists but funding for schemes seems to have been essentially removed).  In Wales and certainly Scotland levels of funding are much higher but I'm hazy on how this is actually to be managed.

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mattw replied to chrisonabike | 12 months ago
1 like

I'd comment that those areas assessed by ATE as having capacity to deliver active travel are the ones with stable long term funding, eiter via Regional Mayors of finding not dependent on Govt (eg Nottingham Workplace Parking Levy).

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redimp replied to bigwheeler88 | 12 months ago
0 likes

I agree but limited resources should be carefully prioritised

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