London Cycling Campaign | 25th September 2020
With so much change happening both in London and beyond we've been getting a lot of requests for guides on campaigning, background information and evidence to support the effectiveness of walking and cycling schemes. We're in the process of updating our website and getting all this stuff in better order but for now this is your go-to page so get it bookmarked.
The LCC '
Activist Resources' pages have guidance on planning and running campaigns. The
Campaigners Handbook is the core document in this section but there are also useful guides to help you run a
healthy group and meetings,
work with the media, and use social media constructively.
LCC "Infrastructure" pages have tools to help you evaluate scheme designs, respond to consultations and campaign around infrastructure schemes effectively. The core document here is the
Infrastructure Handbook.
As a cycling campaign the pages and documents linked above tend to have a cycling specific outlook. Many LCC local groups and the office are increasingly working closely in many areas with other green, air quality and active travel groups like Living Streets and Mums For Lungs. The
Better Streets Handbook will be really relevant to your conversations with wider resident groups - particularly for Low Traffic Neighbourhood type schemes. It's a bit "rough and ready" but it's where we're pulling together evidence and case studies quotes and more and we've realised it's better to make this available now, than spend longer getting it perfect and shiny. Within it there are lots of links out to excellent work by others in the field including Sustrans and Living Streets.
The
Better Streets Mythbuster contains responses and evidence relating to the many worries and myths that seem to come up whenever an Active Travel or Low Traffic scheme is proposed. Note the health warning at the start - it's better to use these answers to build positive messages as 'mythbusting' can itself reinforce the myths.
Brian Deegan's "Ideas with Beers" started as a Tuesday night after work drink in a Manchester pub but the Covid-19 lockdown has turned it into a weekly national Zoom call from the Active Travel frontier. Each week starts with a news update from Dr Robert Davis of the Road Danger Reduction Forum and is followed by presentations from campaigners and transport professionals. Many of these are collected in the
IdeasWithBeers Archive.
We've also been hosting a series of webinars the past few months that cover a lot of ground. You can read the main points covered and watch them
here.
Our Infrastructure Campaigner Simon munk has also created a huge evidence assessment for the Waltham Forest mini-Holland schemes (after all he does live here, and campaigned for the schemes), you can get to it from the summary blog
here.
Recently unearthed Hackney documents also show that in 10 years, when the borough almost exclusively focused on "Low Traffic neighbourhoods" (LTNs) or modal filtering, cycling tripled and car use for work halved. See more details
here.