leedscyclingcampaign's blog

Leeds Cycling Campaign recently wrote to the Council to object to a proposal to change a road closure on South Parade in Headingley.

We argued that the proposal to relocate the closure will re-provide a rat run along Derwentwater Terrace and Ash Road – very similar to the situation prior to installation of the current temporary closure, when the rat run was up Ash Gardens to Ash Road.

It's easy to become negative and disillusioned when you are faced day in, day out, with with poor facilities, intimidating junctions and aggressive drivers - but it doesn't have to be like this. Leeds Cycling Campaign is developing a vision for what Leeds might look like in the future, something very different to what we have now and a whole lot better for cyclists. We held our first workshop a week or so back where we threw everything we could think of onto flipcharts.

We're meeting this Thursday at the Adelphi - 6pm for the formal stuff, then 7pm onwards for more active campaigning. Everyone is welcome: we need your support and ideas - and The Adelphi does a nice pint, and food, too :-)

This evening I spent 15 minutes in the company of Mark Burns-Williamson, West Yorkshire's Police Crime Commissioner. You can read all about who he is and what he does here, but in a nutshell his job is to hold our police force to account - and as far as cycling goes he has some work to do. 

This fine sunny spring evening a group of us decided to try out cycling around the centre of Leeds. The idea was to do the sort of thing a normal human might want to do in this fine city - go to the train station, bus station, and visit the splendid Peddalers' Arms ('cos it's great) - on a bike. To be honest our expectations weren't that great. Most of us already had some experience of cycling in Leeds and had a fair idea of the sort of issues we might face.

This evening, Ben Hamilton-Baillie talked at Leeds Met Rose Bowl about cutting edge street design - cars, cyclists, pedestrians, junctions and the need to rethink the best way of mixing all these together in both a functional and elegant way. His approach is to do away with all the usual paraphernalia of paint, signals, signs etc and replace all this with...well, nothing really. Perhaps a bit of subtle paving to hint at some shapes, but that's it.