Portsmouth CTC
Part of Cycling UK
This article first appeared in the forces pension society magazine Pennant and is reproduced here by kind permission of the editor.
John Sullivan is a Royal Air Force pilot with over 4,000 flight hours, and a keen cyclist. In this article he describes why collisions can occur and, in layman’s terms, how some of the techniques of flying fast jets can be used to increase your chances of survival on the roads.
The cycle infrastructure built in Havant Borough over the last 4 years has been a success but the amount of cycling has not increased as quickly as hoped. Feedback indicates that many people are uncomfortable cycling in cycle lanes on busy roads and are concerned that there are few off road cycle routes that could be used to gain confidence.
Staunton Country Park and Havant Thicket is a 1000 acre site adjacent to Leigh Park and Rowlands Castle with easy cycle access from Cowplain. A reservoir is planned for the centre of the site. The surrounded area is a mixture of woodland, meadow and scrubland that includes cycleable tracks. They have not however been marked out, mapped or publicised and include several short muddy sections, consequently few people use them.
In the early 1990s the A3 road north from the A3(M) was replaced by a dual carriageway that, for the vast majority of cyclists, does not offer an acceptable safety level. The Highways Agency built cycle tracks alongside the A3, south from Queen Elizabeth country park to north Horndean and from Petersfield to Liphook. The critical section for cyclists, through the Butser cutting, was left without cycle provision with the loss of the primary cycling route across Hampshire’s South Downs. Over 10 years of campaigning by a large number of cyclists failed to get this unacceptable road design rectified.
CTC organised a petition to gauge support for the cycle route. Several local cycling clubs and Queen Elizabeth Country Park supported the initiative. 3894 people signed the petition. The comments provided have been analysed to estimate the value of the route to the community. That assessment was used to support the South Downs National Park Authority bid to improve cycling in the national park. The bid was successful and a total of £788k was obtained from the Department for Transport and local funding to construct the Butser Cutting route. Work has to be complete by 1st April 2015 to meet the conditions of the funding
The South Downs National Park Authority has obtained £5.1m (including £3.8m from the Department for Transport and £1.3m local funding.) to improve cycle infrastructure in the national park, announced 12th August.
Close to 100 people have joined next year's ride already! It's looking like it will be fully-booked this year.
Part of the reason is that the ride is returning to Paris. There are two routes:
Trish Farnham, Martyn Roberts and I are already signed up. It would be great to see you there too.
There are more details on the Hayling Cycle Ride web site.
Andy Henderson
You may already know there are several CTC members on the committee of the Cycle Hayling campaign group. Cycle Hayling exists to promote cycling on Hayling Island and to help bring about changes to the cycling infrastructure.
You can read more about the Cycle Hayling projects here.
We've written some articles you might be interested in. In particular:
If you'd like to support Cycle Hayling's activities - you don't have to live on Hayling - then please register your support. In return, we'll send you an occasional newsletter keeping you up-to-date with what's happening.
Andy Henderson
The bike I ride through the warmer months is a road/race bike with drop handlebars. You can see a picture of it on the right.
The bars came wrapped in white bar tape. That's a pretty daft idea because they get grubby really quickly. You can see they are pretty bad in the picture, but they got worse.
I'd not replaced bar tape before but, having read a few articles on the web, I decided I could do it myself. This article describes how I got on.