Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or become adept at turning off the TV as soon as you hear Question Time’s twinkly theme, then you’ll be well aware that the next UK general election is fast approaching. And with under two weeks to go until the polling stations open, all of the main parties have launched their manifestos, setting out the key reasons why you should vote for them on 4 July.
Which leads us to the big question in this week’s special election-themed episode of the road.cc Podcast: What are the parties saying about cycling?
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Helping him dive headfirst into the key parties’ manifestos – and scavenge any scrap of detail from them about active travel (which was more difficult than you might think) – Ryan was joined by road.cc stalwart Simon MacMichael and Sarah McMonagle, director of external affairs at Cycling UK.
With Cycling UK launching its own five-year plan for active travel recently – which has called on whichever party takes the keys next month to No. 10 to boost cycling funding considerably and reconsider how our cities, towns, and neighbourhoods are planned – Sarah, Ryan, and Simon dissect the good, bad, ugly, and frankly non-existent of the different parties’ pledges related to getting about by bike.
> Does cycling policy need a reset after the election?
Far from the relatively optimistic outlook on active travel of the 2019 manifestos across party lines – which, as we note was a different time when it comes to the political consensus on cycling – they find in this year’s plans for government very little on a topic that continues to stoke ‘culture war’ debates in the national press.
While Sarah’s cycling reference league table highlights that almost every party barely mentions cycling or cyclists at all in their manifestos (Reform’s document fails to refer to cycling at all, which we took as a positive sign), we discover that when they are mentioned, it tends to be – at least when we look at the parties fighting to be the government – quite vague with little detail on spending, siloed from other forms of transport, or sometimes hostile (the ‘war on motorists’, anyone?).
And finally, we ask: Do any of these manifesto pledges, based on short-term vote winning strategies, actually matter? And should we instead be optimistic about the direction of active travel over the next five years?
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