Nottingham's cycling czar...
Bann will no doubt be the man who gets some of the praise, but most of the flak, from the city’s vocal and informed community of urban cyclists, for the work which is set to be officially launched in late May. Even as Bann arrived in Nottingham in January, folks were discovering that he’d been in charge of highways and parking at Sheffield City Council when a narrow cycle lane was installed. Emblazoned across the front page of the Sheffield Star, the headline read ‘The Most Dangerous Cycle Lane in Sheffield?’. A YouTube clip of the squeezed cycle lane at Furnival Gate has been doing the rounds among Nottingham cyclists. Such things have a way of following you around on social media.
It’s unfair to judge him on this alone, and Bann tells LeftLion the cycle lane has since been removed. As he says, he worked in Sheffield for ten years and has worked at other authorities which were praised for their cycling work - York and Gateshead. Now in Nottingham, he has the ‘Cycle City Ambition’ project on his hands, which includes building and improving four major cross-city cycle routes and linking them together in the city centre.
The cross-city routes will include at least two new dedicated, segregated ‘cycle superhighways’ – one between the city centre and Dunkirk flyover via Castle Boulevard, the other along Daleside Road in Colwick. The cycle lanes in both will be double-laned and separated from traffic by concrete kerbs up to 1m wide. Bann hopes that work on the Castle Boulevard section, already one of Nottingham’s busiest cycling routes, will begin this autumn and should be completed in spring 2016.
Both of these lanes will be true firsts for Nottingham and should encourage nervous and reluctant cyclists to get out on two wheels. However, it will be interesting to see how the new cycle lane proposals are received by motorists in the consultation process since both new lanes mean a reduction in road space.
Of the other two cross-city routes, the northern one will follow the Mansfield Road/Hucknall Road route - where there are already narrow, traffic-choked lanes - while cyclists heading south will be sign-posted towards Clifton along the new track adjacent to the new tram line. The trickiest part of the job is working out how these routes will connect so that cyclists can cross the city centre without the current rigmarole of: ride on the pavement, pedal the wrong way down one-way streets and dismount at various ‘cyclist dismount’ signs.
Yet the attempt to create seamless and easy cross-city centre routes may only provide partial solutions. Truth is, the planners don’t yet know how to connect up the city centre. One option is up Castle Road and onwards towards Canning Circus – a steep route guaranteed to put off the fair-weather cyclists that the council and government want to see out on their bikes. Privately, Bann believes the route will stick to Maid Marian Way, which isn’t quite so steep.
Gerrit?
The big cross-city plan also leaves huge areas of inner city Nottingham untouched. While St Ann’s will get a new ‘cycle corridor,’ the large residential areas to the west, including Aspley and Broxtowe, currently get nothing. An earlier plan to connect the city’s public parks by cycle tracks has also been put on the back burner. Even the planned work almost didn’t happen as the original bid for funding to central government was turned down in 2013. Fortunately, the £6.1m was then taken on by the D2N2 local enterprise partnership. It’s this that’s paying for the work and Bann’s £44-48k salary. Why £6.1m? He says it works out at £10 per head over his three-year contract.
Bann admits he didn’t know Nottingham well (“I thought it was a flat place”) but started his job with a recce by cycling the four cross-city routes on a Citybike. He must now have iron leg muscles since he took one of those heavy clunkers up Hucknall Road. But what difference can Bann’s presence and salary make to the implementation of plans which existed before he was appointed?
His answer is that he’s meant to make a connection between cycling per se and ‘road space transformation’ which is the bigger picture of improving the relationship between roads and the ‘public realm,’ including public spaces and walking. “I didn’t appoint myself and they [Nottingham City Council] wanted a dedicated resource to help deliver these plans,” says Bann.
“They didn’t think they had that and they wanted someone senior enough to do it. They wanted someone who could deliver cycling and road space transformation because of the connections between the two. If you have separate groups looking at this separately, you can miss joining them together. So the job is about someone who can drive it forward, who can lead the process, has experience of local government projects and has enthusiasm for it - and I certainly have: I’ve been cycling for thirty-odd years, been a member of the CTC for 25 and I’ve cycled to work for most of my life.”
Bann talks positively about having cyclists’ needs built into road and public realm design from the start, and then to have cycling provision assessed for effectiveness and safety. Such audits were a process he helped begin in Sheffield as a response to criticisms by the city’s cyclists and it sounds as if he wants a similar process here.
“Over a period [at Sheffield] we tried to educate our engineers and planners about cyclists’ needs but it wasn’t easy because there wasn’t a strong single [ruling] party like in Nottingham. It was Labour and the Liberal Democrats and cycling got caught in the middle because people were saying ‘Why are you spending so much money on cycling when only 2% of people cycle?’ That’s the big issue because aspersions would be cast on the authority for being anti-motorist when we really wanted a balance where we promoted cycling, walking, buses and cars.”
Although there may not be enough money to fund all of the planned improvements in Nottingham within his initial three-year tenure, Bann hopes that more funding will become available. But how will his own effectiveness be ‘audited’ in the meantime?
“I suppose if after a year we haven’t delivered some of the scheme then there would be a big question mark over me. The issue is that we’ve put together a proposal with the best intentions where you want to grab as much money as you can and say this is what you want to do and set out clearly, ‘Here are our schemes, this is the cost.’ So I’m hoping to get good delivery in the first year, but it may not be everything. From a road space and cycling point of view, if I haven’t delivered on time then I’ll have to go or my contract will not be extended. If I’m successful, I’d like to continue.”
And if he isn’t judged to be successful – well, Bann has enough experience of dealing with cyclists to know that he will have to swap his furry Russian hat for a steel helmet.
Got a biking story to tell? Email mark.p@leftlion.co.uk
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