As most of you will be aware, the final decisions on the city deal excluded all cycling schemes outside of the main city itself. The belief within the board that made the final decision was that people would not cycle more than one or two miles. The only consideration was “will people cycle the entire route” between Royston and Cambridge. For example, people using sections of the route were not taken into account. People who could cycle to the local railway station on a folding bike and use it the other end were ignored. People who work outside of the main city were ignored. The notion of a cycle or scoot to school, rather than being driven, didn’t seem to enter the collective consciousness of the board.

This belief can be changed though. As a campaign we need to gather evidence of the journeys people cycle in order to demonstrate the type of usage people make by bike. We all know journeys of considerably more than a mile or two are regularly completed. But those journeys of a mile or two are still to be celebrated. It’s a great way to get some exercise, reduce congestion and parking problems around the village shops and most importantly, it normalises cycling. The more people that are seen on cycles, the more it catches on.

So what can you do?

We need to capture the type of journeys people do. Do you cycle to the shops or school? Do you avoid the A10 like the plague and use the Fowlmere Newton road instead? Do you cycle all the way to town? We need to capture as many of ANY journeys made by bicycle, however big or small.

We are exploring ways to allow people to log their rides, but to start we are going to use two popular internet forms of media.

1. Twitter. If you use the hashtag #a10cycle with a small line of text like Foxton – Addenbrooks, 5 miles, we’ll be able to see that.
2. Strava. We have created a club called a10cycle on Strava, the popular (and free) activity logging site. If you are already a Strava user, you can simple join the club https://www.strava.com/clubs/a10cycle

If you like to track your activities and fancy giving GPS logging a go, Strava do Android and IOS apps for free that use your smartphones GPS.