It is commendable that Active Travel at last is being embraced in Northern Ireland. There are, however, several factors that do not form part of the Active Travel Delivery Plan (ATDP) which must not be ignored if the ATDP is to succeed. If you have not done so, please reply to the public consultation linked in my previous blog at the very bottom here.
The most important of these factors is the Hierarchy of Road Users, adopted in GB and made part of the Highway Code there in 2022. It protects the most vulnerable road users and puts the onus of looking out for them on "larger" participants. DfI decided not to follow suit. My take on this decision was outlined in a number of blogs
here (Thoughts on the 2022 Highway Code Changes - if you read this one, you can skip the others)
here (DfI's Active Travel To-Do List),
here (At Last, Progress with DfI - NB: we provided our thoughts on the Highway Code Changes and their applicability to Northern Ireland but have not heard anything back since),
here (Open Letter to John O'Dowd)
here (Addressing Conflicts Between Drivers and Cyclists),
and here (Another DfI To-Do List)
An Active Travel Delivery Plan will only succeed if the people partaking in Active Travel (by definition the most vulnerable road users) are protected in law by the Northern Ireland Highway Code. Unless the 2022 GB changes are adopted here in Northern Ireland, DfI's ATDP will end up as a monumental failure, rivalling the Renewable Heating Initiative disaster in its ability to waste huge amounts of public money. Without those changes the public take-up of AT will be low as rational residents will consider Active Travel too dangerous a mode of transportation and instead drive their cars everywhere.
DfI should also follow Wales' successful lead in introducing a blanket 20mph speed limit on residential streets. The introduction of that speed limit has lead to a significant reduction in the number of Killed and Seriously Injured on Welsh roads. I would not be surprised if it also let to a reduction in insurance premiums for drivers. Adopting a 20mph speed limit on residential streets in Northern Ireland would encourage more cyclists and pedestrians to try Active Travel. DfI should also introduce additional traffic calming measures on residential streets.
At the same time pavement parking should be made illegal. A parked car blocking a pavement will endanger pedestrians (who may or may not be able to squeeze past on the pavement) and wheelchair users (who definitely will not be able to squeeze past).
Perhaps the next point will be covered in a later version of the ATDP but just to be sure that DfI works with full transparency in mind, I am raising it now. As tax payers the public should be seriously concerned about the absence of any SMART objectives (Specific/Measurable/Achievable/Relevant/Time-bound) associated with the ATDP in its current form. These must be part of the final plan.
The plan's framework currently is devoid of any metrics that can be used to measure objectively whether progress on the Delivery Plan is a success. The absence of SMART objectives is at the root of Northern Ireland's budget crisis and needs to be addressed not only by DfI with respect to this project, but across all government departments dealing with projects of a similar size. We had similar DfI-sponsored consultations to the present one for the Belfast Bicycle Network back in 2016 and in 2022, neither of which achieved anything meaningful apart from generating hundreds of thousands of pounds in consultant fees.
We would suggest evaluation metrics should include yearly statistics outlining progress on
Length of new cycle paths
Length of existing cycle paths that were upgraded
For each settlement: length of cycle paths in KM per 1,000 local residents
Number of re-designed junctions prioritising cyclists' progress
Number of re-designed roundabouts providing safe navigation for cyclists
Number and distance of streets where traffic calming measures have been introduced
Route Connectivity: how many kilometers of Priority Route cycle paths are continuous/uninterrupted?
Directness: are new cycle routes as direct and efficient as possible from a cyclist's perspective?
Signage: - how many new signs are there? Are they clear and consistent for both cyclists and motorists?
Lighting: how many kilometers of new cycle paths/greenways have proper lighting to make nighttime cycling safe?
Number of new (green) bike boxes installed at intersections
Number of old (formerly green) bike boxes having been restored and made fit for purpose
Number of new cycle racks installed
Number of safe cycle storage facilities at public transport hubs, with details of their capacity (number of bikes that can be parked there)
Accessibility: are the cycle paths/greenways accessible to cyclists who either have a disability (i.e. use a trike which may not fit through width restrictions) or use a non-standard bike (cargo bike, tandem etc) that may not fit through some swinging gatesIf not, why not?
Traffic Volume: how has it been affected since the installation of new cycle paths?
Modal Shift Analysis: how many people have switched from using their car to some form of Active Travel?
Comparison of pedestrians' and cyclists' Killed or Seriously Iinjured statistics for each year of the Development Plan with the previous ten years
Town and City Centre business: how has traders' turn-over changed? Was there a positive or negative effect?
Percentage of the actual amount spent on Active Travel vs DfI's annual Active Travel budget (taken as 10% of its total annual budget)
Headcount of DfI staff working on Active Travel, with details of whether they actually cycle or not
Public Awareness: publicity is needed - what percentage of the population is aware of Active Travel? Use it? How much money did DfI spend each year on publicising Active Travel?
Training/Education: how many people/pupils have been trained to use Active Travel safely? How much has been spent on this in the past 12 months?
Stakeholder Engagement: who was involved at the local level in feedback on the planning process and the actual building of the infrastructure? Which suggestions were realised? Which ones were not and why not?
Monitoring and Adaptation: who at DfI is responsible for monitoring how well the ATDP is proceeding? Will the progress report be publicly available? What measures will be taken if progress does not meet agreed benchmarks? If there are no benchmarks, why not? How will DfI judge the success of ATDP without clear SMART metrics? There needs to be DfI accountability.
The Time-bound metric deserves special mention: not only will the formulation of the Delivery Plan take time (probably more than we anticipate), but there will be literally dozens of local consultations and planning applications that need to be processed. In the meantime the clock will be ticking and allocated funding must be spent appropriately. DfI must schedule remedial work on already-existing cycling/Active Travel infrastructure to ensure that available funding is unused only because the planning process is causing delays in getting work started.
To save DfI some work, Active Travel England (ATE) has developed a suite of tools to support the development of designs and the assessment of design quality for active travel interventions and schemes.
DfI must also ensure that Translink buys into Active Travel. The last time we checked Translink had no AT team and no plans to set one up. Its current Policy of Carriage does not facilitate AT during the morning rush hour because non-folding bikes are not allowed before 09:30. If you want to get people out of their cars and use Active Travel, the train network has to play an important role. Remove that 09:30 rule and provide more room for bikes on the train carriages. If need be, add a couple of carriages to the trains on the Bangor-Portadown line. Oh, wait: the platforms at the new Grand Central Station are too short to accommodate longer trains so that's not an option. here's an idea: just run more trains!
Perhaps Translink should read this blog on how easy it is to make its system Active Travel compliant. Or this one. Or this one. And a related one. And one on differential pricing as practiced by Translink, highlighting how government-sponsored Active Travel (or a lack thereof) leads to significant rail ticket price differences between Translink and Irish Rail.
Next, we would also like to highlight some local issues with the ATDP that require input and push-back from Ards and North Down Borough Council to be resolved.
First, the ATDP Strategic Environmental Impact Assessment Report (it's 93 pages long, no need to read it - I gave up after page 45...) categorises Derry/Londonderry and Bangor, County Down differently. We would argue strongly that Derry/Londonderry and Bangor should be classified and prioritised the same: Derry has 85.000 inhabitants, Bangor has almost 70.000. This mis-categorisation puts Bangor at a significant disadvantage when it comes to Active Travel funding, despite being the only city of the settlements outside Belfast that make up the "Belfast metropolitan area”.
The 2023/24 DfI Annex B – Eastern Division Spend of Active Travel Capital Expediture states that the only Active Travel spend in Ards and North Down amounted to £9.000 for improvements to the Comber Greenway and new lighting there. Annex G lists six councils who received a total of £1.3 million to improve "Greenways and cycling". ANDBC was not even listed. The £9.000 amount to 0.1% of the total £10.2 million spent on Active Travel that year. Quod erat demonstrandum: mis-categorisation = ignored!
Bangor really should serve as a test-bed for Active Travel planning. Start with our Gransha Road proposal and get a huge amount of school traffic off the roads.
Following on, there is a distinct imbalance in the length of cycle paths in different settlements in Ards and North Down (a big thanks to our member Michael Allen for the analysis below).
Partially resulting from the mis-categorisation mentioned above and despite being the largest city in the borough and Northern Ireland's largest commuting town, Bangor is being seriously short-changed when it comes to how many meters of cycle paths it has per 1,000 residents: just a mere 80 metres of cycle path per head of population, a fifth of Holywood's allocation. That imbalance needs to be corrected.
Our changes proposed in last week's blog would change the mis-allocation of resources to:
While still not perfect, this would be a much fairer allocation of public resources, commensurate with Bangor's population growth.
We then drilled down into the 2024/25 budget and the 2025/26 draft budget to check how much of DfI's budget should be allocated to Active Travel:
Resource Delivery relates to maintaining existing infrastructure while Capital Delivery relates to building new infrastructure. By our calculations, one could argue that DfI could have allocated £90 million to AT during the current financial year, based on 10% of the transport total. We already know that the actual spend will be significantly less - around £10m and much of it going to improve Belfast's cycling infrastructure - because until recently the department had neither an Active Travel team nor a viable Active Travel strategy in place. The DfI already cautioned that the financial ramp-up will take at least two or three years because of friction losses as the new team formulates its ATDP, completes its hiring process, deals with planning approval and develops its AT delivery operating procedures.
We then looked at the overall resource allocation as outlined in the Delivery Plan and calculated what the available budget could in fact buy. If we are conservative and consider only the Capital Delivery part of the 2025/26 draft budget, this would imply there should be £55 million available for Active Travel infrastructure. Going from £10 million last year to £55 million this coming financial year will be impossible. It now becomes clear how the delivery process of the ATDP needs to be rethought.
In the first five years of the ATDP most of the Active Travel budget will have to be spent on reworking and revising existing infrastructure because the planning approval process for new infrastructure will be painfully slow. That implies the main focus will be on maintaining or improving existing infrastructure, which is fairly cheap and would be considered a Resource Delivery cost. This will lead to a massive Capital Delivery under-spend. How and where will the remaining available funding be spent? Will it be ring-fenced for the future? Or will it be dumped into fixing pot holes or into NI Water's decrepit sewerage system (pun intended)? That's not building or maintaining Active Travel infrastructure. In the interest of full transparency, any underspend should be explained transparently and ring-fenced for future AT investment.
The current version of the ATDP needs a considerable amount of additional work to ensure its success. Our campaign group is available to highlight local issues to both DfI and the consultants responsible for formulating the next revision of the plan. Click here to get in touch.
If any reader has time, please attend the public engagement event on Monday, February 10, 2025 from 14:00 to 19:00 at Bangor Castle and ask for clarification on the questions raised in this and last week's blog.
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