With the recent announcement of an extra £114 million to be spent on 8 cities that previously won CAG money, Bath is in the running to get some of it. The reason is that one of the 8 cities is the “South West” which is Gloucester, Bristol and Bath.

One of the requirements of the bidding process is that the bid must of been put together in consultation with local cycling groups, which is where you come in. We literally can go fantasy shopping, and Sustrans have put together a ready made shopping list. 

So how is this going to work? BANES asked Sustrans to audit the BANES area and get together a public lead set of cycle routes that people want. From this set which covers Bath, Keynsham, Radstock and Chew Valley there were a set of routes identified as priority. Routes that would really transform the towns and city.

I have put these into a public trello board. This identifies tranches of money that we hope we can have and the order in which we want BANES to deliver these ‘priority’ routes within those tranches. Once the workshop is over and the board is ‘fixed’ this will be presented to BANES at the cycle forum on the 13th of January at the Guildhall.

BANES will then write their bid and submit it as part of the CAG bidding process.

YOU, yes YOU are really important to this process. Please visit the Cycle Bath facebook page and come along to the event.

To give you a feel for the immensity of what we are trying to achieve, here are a list of all the maps with all the Sustrans identified cycle routes that we are ‘playing’ with:

There is probably enough work for £20 million+ to be spent however, we can expect to receive ONLY £1 million. What I am however hoping for, is that we have a curated and well thought out list of routes and that our bid proposal should have multiple ‘reach’ goals just in case the Government recognises that this isn’t just a quickly put together set of projects, but a well thought out publicly led set of routes that have been developed over the last year and want to give us more money. Ideally ALL priority routes in BANES would be funded 🙂

We really do have something exceptional here and have to congratulate BANES on providing us with this set of documents.

See you on the 30th of January in the Kings Arms, Monmouthshire St, Bath at 6pm. If you cannot make it, feed your comments into the process through facebook or via email: https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Bath-Cycling-Campaign/info or even through leaving comments here. I will make sure they are brought up at the Workshop.

Let’s get to work.