Draft Local Cycling & Walking Infrastructure Plan

Background

As part of its Gear Change cycling and walking plan for England, the government want to see walking and cycling become the 'natural choice' for short everyday trips and to access public transport. Helping more people to walk and cycle more often can tackle climate change and air pollution, improve health outcomes, reinvigorate high streets and relieve traffic congestion. Investing in our roads, streets and paths to make walking and cycling easy, enjoyable and safe is an important step in unlocking these benefits.

To support this, all English local transport authorities are being encouraged to publish a Local Cycling & Walking Infrastructure Plan (LCWIP): a localised ten year plan for investing in walking and cycling facilities.

In the future, central government funding for an authority's highway and transport projects will be dependent upon an LCWIP being in place and evidence that walking and cycling improvements are being delivered.

Developing the LCWIP

To start the development of this LCWIP, we held our Big Conversation last summer, writing to every household and business seeking comments on whether, where and how walking and cycling improvements should be made. The 827 responses received from the Big Conversation, together with our existing Cycling Action Plan developed with community input in 2018, have formed the foundations for this LCWIP. Travel demand and safety data, national best practice, government guidance on planning walking and cycling networks and new national guidance for cycle infrastructure design have also been taken into consideration.

The plan brings these things together to recommend priority locations for feasibility studies.

No feasibility studies have been undertaken to date, which means it is not yet possible to confirm that improvements at any location listed in the LCWIP would be achievable. Neither have any plans been developed for what we would do at any listed location.

Feasibility studies will be the next step. The LCWIP will be used to guide where studies take place. We will work with local communities to develop ideas where studies confirm projects could be taken forward.

We recognise that the locations in this report are unlikely to form an exhaustive list of where improvements would be beneficial, and where additional opportunities are identified for initiatives that will compliment the overall shape of the borough’s cycle network these can be adopted into future versions of this plan.

Feedback

A draft of the LCWIP is now available to download from this page, and we are keen to get your feedback. We will use all feedback to refine the document before publishing a final version.

Once you have read the document, we would be grateful if you could respond to the feedback survey below. Thank you for taking the time to help us improve the plan.

This survey is now closed and we are reviewing responses.