Bodmin council admits getting more people to cycle, walk and take public transport is 'unrealistic' - so decides to build another road instead

Peeps, the solution to any number of transport issues can be resolved through one single initiative - affordable housing, and in sufficient quantities to allow sustainable living on local wages for everyone who chooses so to do.

Many of my neighbours commute into the city, displacing local workers who have to live further afield and, in turn they displace yet many more. Of course, for many, this still means the dreaded dual income requirement; the guilt of dumping the kids with strangers, the requirement to collect their Amazon nicknacks by car from the depot because no-one's at home during the day, and the need to treat themselves to a much needed coffee in Costa whilst we bemoan the tax affairs of corporates that force us to close libraries and daycare centres.

And all this whilst being told that cyclists not only live longer, but are actually more attractive to the opposite sex! Is it any wonder that these poor unfortunates, unable to escape their sacharine, pseudo-compensatory lifestyles, see us cyclists as objects of hatred?

Nope, it's affordable housing that'll solve transport problems, not extra tarmac.

Afficionados of the ITV series "Doc Martin", set in some Cornish coastal village, may be familiar with the locals' term for being a bit daft or doolally or bonkers - "going Bodmin".

Sounds about right.

tbh don't blame people for not wanting to cycle in bodmin, EVERY STREET IS UP A HILL.
no joke, if you've not been, go. it's mad.
I'm an ok cyclist, commute approx 20km a day most days, I wouldn't want to go anywhere near bodmin.

also there's nothing there anyone wants to see? town centre is dead, nothing of interest in the area (not sure if the gaol has re-opened?).

Carlos: I agree culture is a large part.

We've somehow managed to convince ourselves that cycling 5 km, or cycling up a hill, is something normal people just couldn't be expected to do. That normal people did this en masse 50+ years ago, and still do in some places, disproves that notion I think.

People are just incredibly resistant to physical activity these days. Personally, I think that notion and resistance needs to be pushed back against, for at least several reasons:

1. The obesity and inactivity epidemic is costing us billions in health costs. It is costing many people their quality of life.

2. Burning hydrocarbons to push 1000 kg+ of metal around, when a good %age of those journeys could easily be accomplished through active transport (walking, cycling) is doing incredible damage to the environment. Both in the short-term, in health-damaging emissions, and longer-term in climate-changing CO₂ emissions.

Also, someone mentioned running an older diesel car. Diesels, older ones especially, emit absolutely horrendous particulates and noxious gases. Thousands are dying prematurely because of diesel emissions. Please think twice before buying a diesel, especially an older one. The sooner they're all in the scrap yard the better.

Work in a similarly sized small rural town and see the same issues. Culture and habit and weather make people think a car is always the answer, while urban issues of congestion and lack of parking don't really exist on a practical level.
Large increases in fuel prices are the only driver for change I can see, but in the meantime I'm trying to at least get the option of some cycle routes where they are an obvious plus.
20mph limits, filtered permeability and other effective sticks will be a while off yet.

Guyz: I went cycling in the Italian Appenines - proper mountains and steep roads - and saw quite a few OAP types, men and women cycling around! (And Italian drivers are a lot more nuts than here, if you can believe that).

Bodmin is in a peculiar position. Nestled in a valley surrounded on all sides by lengthy hills, the roads are main roads used by all the blue chip companies running out fuel and groceries around. People (the locals) are generally struggling to find work. There's little employment here & you have to travel far to go to work, working populations are thin on the ground. However Cornwall County Council do little to assist cyclists with awful routes or no routes at all.
I've cycled Plymouth to Redruth most of which has to be completed on a major trunk road of the A38. I believe they need to invest &.try harder.

mrmo,

I like your last comment, and don't disagree with you. Those are all issues in the short-term. However, you paint a picture of a world shaped by cars to suit cars, and then conclude this makes cars a necessity. That's a somewhat self-fulfilling argument though, isn't it?

And I still don't completely buy it. Even in rural Scotland, there's often still a village or even town within 5 km. That's a 20 to 30 minute cycle at a relaxed pace that even the young and old could manage. There was a time when people used to regularly *walk* those distances, and a time after that when cycling those distances was quite normal (and still is in parts of the world, including developed Europe - e.g. NL).

So I still don't buy it. People *choose* to drive, in large part cause they're lazy (useful evolutionary trait) and driving is cheap enough. If they couldn't afford it, they'd find other ways. Many would be well *capable* of cycling, with a month or two of adjustment perhaps for some, including the elderly.

Things like road safety would improve with more cyclists!

I dare bet that those who want fuel and parking charges raised don't live in the countryside. It doesn't matter though because the rural minority are only of interest when the world wants to see some floods.
My parents would suffer as would many of the elderly. I can't see me cycling the 25 miles each way to work either. I would like to but I don't have the hours in the day.
Another ill informed comment. I see your point but it doesn't work. Bang the costs up in the cities maybe.
I know. Lets have a tax on domestic on street parking. Say a grand a year. That would free up all those cycle lanes people park in and stop urban dwellers having vehicles that they don't need for their 5 mile commute.
As my dad says, "don't have a sheep if you haven't got a field."
good idea? It's as good as anything else here.

mrmo, "in rural areas cars become a necessity very quickly". I just don't buy this at all, this framing of cars as a necessity. Mass-produced cars have been around for only 90 years, and mass car ownership is maybe only a thing of the last 50 to 60 years. Did no one live in rural areas prior to 60 to 90 years ago? I don't think so.

So how did they survive? I suspect they walked, used carts and many used the cheap and efficient *bicycle* - including cargo-bicycles.

Go to the more rural, remote parts of the Netherlands (though, no where is really 'remote'), there are some kids who cycle 10 to 20 km a day to get to school. Ditto in rural China, at least until recently (there's been an explosion in car use in China the last 10 odd years though, esp the last 5).

The issue is that people *prefer* cars, but a car is not a necessity.

Something that can help reduce car use is to separate ownership and use. If you own the car and are already paying for the fixed costs then it's a no-brainer to pay the relatively small amount extra to use it.

Car sharing schemes like street car and zip car can be a huge help here.

I recently read a book about Bletchley Park, the home of code breaking during the war, and how thousands of workers stationed there cycled the lanes of Buckinghamshire on their days off.

The thing is, most of these workers would probably have gone on to own a car after the war, because they could afford it. And we're now seeing things start to move the other way, through a recorded reduction in miles driven, the first time this has happened.

Any economist worth their salt will tell you that a 5 percent supply deficit in an inelastic commodity (like oil) results in a price rise of 400 percent. We haven't seen this phenomenon yet, because of the global recession, but we're competing with new wealth in India and China, and literally millions of new car owners who all want to live like us, so we're likely to see a dramatic fall in car useage in the future, possibly within the time it takes to get round to building yet another bypass in fact.

Bodmin cycle useage may only be 2 percent at the moment, but people without access to cars have tended to get on their bikes en masse in the past, and will no doubt do so again as the cost of motoring rises inexhorbably beyond the point of affordability for huge numbers.

Being someone who commutes to Bodmin (mostly by car, sometimes by bike) and works there, it is not surprising this has happened. It is very hilly, and it does rain quite a lot (high up place, and in Cornwall!). There are a host of complex social, economic and health problems in Bodmin too (it reminds me of some of the poorer parts of Liverpool where I went to college). Of course, it would probably be brilliant if people could get more exercise through cycling as it would improve peoples health, but it is a big ask. Not having a go at Bodmin Town Council, but it is not exactly bristling with dynamic leadership. There is absolutely NO culture of cycling in Bodmin at all. In order to really sort it out, there would need to be comprehensive plan of engagement with the local community to see if they see would see the benefits of getting on their bikes - they would also come up with any viable, less hilly routes. Only then, would it be worthwhile investing a lot of money in it - if the town council did so I think they would be lambasted for wasting money in what is a very poor town. It is quite ironic as there has just been a big investment in a decent mountain bike track in nearby Cardninham Woods (Forestry Commission) and the National Trust are just completing a really big off road cycling centre in equally nearby Lanhydrock. If it wanted to, Bodmin could be a real centre for cycling (with the Camel Trail also starting in the town).

Speaking as someone who grew up in the countryside this is already depressingly familiar.

Step 1. House prices rise beyond local wages. The only people who can afford to buy a house work in a larger town or city and commute.
Step 2. These people get their shopping at the big out-of- town megamarket on their way home [Cheaper, more convenient than the local shops and free parking!]. High street starts to die.
Step 3. Relief road is built to speed people past town as there is nothing to draw people in. Last shop closes. Town is dead.

Note to Some Fella
Beeching may be a villain; but the real baddie in all this was Buchanan. Beeching destroyed all hope of transport inter-modality; Buchanan made the car God.

"Yes a car has running costs, but even so they aren't that much,"

Eh? While I grant that the current reality is that most people seem to want to run a car, that cars' running costs "aren't that much" definitely isn't why. Cars are amazingly expensive. You're looking at easily £70 (MOT + the minor work to make it pass that older cars nearly *always* need) + £125 to £200 VED (older cars tend to be worse for CO₂, for same CC) + insurance (£200 to £400, assuming you're 30+ and full NCB). That's ~£400 to £670 *before* you've even driven the car! If you drive 10,000 miles and average 40 mpg (not bad for an older car, esp in urban/commuting type traffic), you're going to spend a tenner shy of £1500 on petrol, if you can get it for £1.31 / litre!

So that's £1900 to £2170 per year, or £158 to £181 per month. That's not "not much", at least to me!

Further, that's assuming the car, despite being older, won't need anything other than minor maintenance - which I think is unrealistic. Personally, from experience with a 10+-year old car, I think you need to factor in at least £200, if not closer to £400, of preventative servicing and repair work per annum, on average, if you want it to be reliable and not dump you at the side of the road. Usually at the most inopportune moment!

Then there's all the time cars suck. From the time you waste at garages getting exhausts fixed, MOTs, etc.. to the time you waste sitting in traffic, your stress levels rising cause of the jams & the bastard in the expensive car who feels entitled to go down the hard-shoulder then cut-in in front of everyone else, your arteries slowly clogging up, from sitting on your arse for 1.5 hours every day instead of cycling! You can't quantify how much this costs!

For not-that-old people, or those without 3 years of NCB, the insurance costs can easily be double the £400 above, if not more. With £800 of insurance, the monthly costs are over £200!

I think a lot of people are in denial about just how expensive cars are to run, and what awful consequences they have for your quality of life, as well as others!

Building a new road won't be in the gift of the town council - Cornwall County Council are the highway authority. The Town Plan will be a mixture of stuff the town council can deliver on themselves (which won't be very much) and aspirational stuff that they will have to lobby other authorities for.

Oh and I love the way someone upthread airily dismissed the hills because ebikes exist. Seriously? If you're not a fairly committed cyclist then hills (and Cornwall specialises in the short, sharp nasty sort) are a big deterrent. Waving people towards expensive, niche things like ebikes is up there with Marie Antoinette pointing the peasants towards the nearest patisserie.

There must be loads of roads in Bodmin that aren't essential for through traffic. It ought to be possible to create large chunks of a coherent cycling network purely by making those Access Only (Bicycles excepted) and signposting proper bike routes that take them in. A few bollards could be deployed intelligently and one-way restrictions (again, bicycles excepted) imposed to make the use of those routes unattractive to motorists who have no real business there. The network design could initially be implemented very cheaply on a temporary and experimental basis, tweaked a bit, and then installed properly once it had proven itself and people were happy with it.

In a sense, not having much of a cycling network to begin with is not the worst place to be starting from. Places that started building cycle infrastructure many decades ago often struggle a bit now with legacy infrastructure that no longer meets current design standards or their current needs. I read an article about Freiburg in south-west Germany yesterday. Freiburg has a modal share of 27% and is aiming for 35%. Now, that's not a bad position to be in. But it is interesting that one of the big problems they have is with narrow bike paths that are just about usable in winter (when fewer people cycle) and become hazardous in summer, when they are operating beyond capacity and commuters in a mad rush to the office skim past parents trundling along with pre-schoolers in trailers.

Taking a long, hard look at the roads network and allocating certain streets (or at least lanes on certain streets) more or less entirely to bikes results in generously-dimensioned cycle infrastructure that doesn't have to be rebuilt on safety grounds every time cycling's modal share climbs by another few percentage points.

Simply giving cyclists existing roads rather than building "stuff" for them by the sides of roads makes even more sense in hilly areas, since it keeps speedy downhill cyclists away from pedestrians and street furniture.

The real problem here is an abject failure of imagination. With a bit of vision, some courage and a map, solutions could be found within weeks and implemented (on a temporary basis) within months.