Bath Cycling Summit

Yesterday, I was invited by the Bath Cycling Campaign to attend the Bath Cycling Summit as a representative of Somer Valley Wheels. I was going to do a little write-up on the event, but to save myself the bother I'll just link to the appropriate page of one of the event's sponsors, road.cc for you to read if the mood grabs you.

So many cycling organizations... so many web-links...!

It was interesting to put many faces to names and to partake in the current fashion of "networking".

Of the event, the most telling was how much talk was going on and how little was happening in the three-dimensional world. Maybe I'm just getting a little bit impatient and just a tad cynical in my old age but it would be really good to see some serious results on the ground while I'm still able to make use of them. Quoting from the road.cc report about Bath & North East Somerset Council's sum total of pro-cycling achievements over the past 12 months, which amounted to... "...making a councillor a cycling champion, opening a path through the park that everyone rides on anyway to bikes, and realising that a bridge that's one way to cars could have cyclists going the other way. Even so, cycling in Bath has grown by nearly half in the last six years apparently, possibly in spite of the council's meagre efforts (and some that actively discourage bikes)".

The best news of the morning's proceedings was that the Two Tunnels project looks set to start very soon..."everything looks to be just waiting for signoff...".

The chairman of the session, Bath MP Don Foster, closed proceedings by informing us that a litre of petrol contained the equivalent calories consumed by a cyclist over 1000 miles (1600km). That may well be true, Don, but the stuff tastes horrible.