What to do about it?  Newcastle Council apparently think that retail businesses will leave if the don't get free car parking, more on that latter.  Kim Harding has suggested that the solution to getting more people on bikes is taxing car parking, I'm not so sure.

I'm convinced that the way to get large numbers of people shopping by bike is really quite straight forward.  You take places where the majority of shoppers are already walking, you make them a bit more bike friendly, you put in a few cycle routes covering the last mile or two in each direction and then you do a bit of advertising.  These places are called High Streets, in all likelihood there is one near you and you may be one of a tiny minority who already rides a bike there.

OK, its a bit more complicated than that.  Cultural shift takes time, any activity will get early adopters, and then become normalised as folk see their friends and neighbours doing it.  Infrastructure will evolve, what works on a basic level for 5% of people will need continual improvement to work eventually for 50%.  Some locations will work better than others, where I live leisure cycling is pretty strong and it is normal to see bikes on the high street even though mode share is only around 2%.   Tonight at my local Sainsbury's local there were 6 cars in the car park and 2 bikes, unusual but not amazing.

To get people to shop by bike in these places you need to implant the idea that this is an attractive thing to do, and it can be combined with other pleasurable things to do like meeting friends for coffee etc.  The decision point at which High Streets generally win or lose customers is when people either decide to pick up a set of car keys, or pick up a coat and umbrella or in the case of a small minority get their bike out.  Comparatively few people drive to the High Street, typically about 20%.  In my neighbourhood once people get in their car they tend to go to places like Silverlink Retail Park.
Silverlink sits on one of the best sections of cycle route in the country, part of NCN10, as does Royal Quays, its baby brother "Outlet Mall" which is a couple of miles South.



Although I am what most people would call a keen cyclist, I've never used a bike to shop at Royal Quays and at Silverlink I've only done so once.  I live around 3 miles from either, so at the edge of cycling distance for most people but not a big deal for me, I go within a mile of either of them on the way to work each day depending on which route I take.  I've used a bike to shop at the B&Q near Silverlink a couple of times, but again something about these destinations suggests that the car is the most appropriate way to visit (see photos).  It is quicker to get to these locations by car than it is by bike.

Now you could as Kim suggests tax the car parking at these locations, but what would happen in practice is that the landlords who run the car parks and their retailer tenants would come up with a way to absorb the cost and make it invisible to customers.  High Streets wouldn't be able to do this so any tax that fell there would become a visible up front cost. There is already a powerful deterrent which makes it possible to attract people away from places like this, they are ugly, traffic congested hellholes (OK, thats just my opinion, find me a beautiful car park and I will eat my cap).

Politically and locally it is not difficult to sell the idea of making it easier to get to the shops by bike.  The same routes that serve the High Streets also tend to serve schools.  Businesses like the idea of free advertising and local government making it easier for people to get to their shop.  Yes there will come a point where a few parking bays need to be moved, but it is not strictly necessary to go to war with local retailers and try and take their parking away or tax them on it.  I've unashamedly tried to convince shopkeepers to support pedestrianisation and traffic reduction because it would free up space for more car parking.  Hopefully they will be back in a few years wanting cycle stands put in the parking bays, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

Now for Newcastle.  The CTC were in town today and Carlton Reid has reported that the subject of car parking came up and Newcastle's cycling officer made the point that "employers say they want free parking or they will leave".  I may be misquoting, but to hear this from Newcastle Council is not surprising.   Why the subject came up I don't know, perhaps the CTC had difficulty parking and were protesting the charges?  More likely they were suggesting that imposing high city centre parking charges was a way to boost cycling.

Local context is always important.  When Newcastle say this they are talking about retail employers.  Newcastle are deeply involved with city centre retail, care a lot about it and see it as one of their big success stories.  Newcastle City Council own 50% of the Eldon Square city centre Mall, its an asset to the city worth hundreds of millions of £.  Retail rents on Newcastle's Northumberland Street are some of the highest in the country.

Newcastle have successfully kept a thriving retail sector in the face of competition from Gateshead's Metro Centre Mall, in stark contrast to Gateshead City Centre which is dead as a doornail.  Ironically Gateshead are launching the regeneration of their town centre at the same time as trying to promote a relief road to ease traffic congestion at the Metrocentre.  Similarly North Tyneside are clamouring for road junction upgrades at Silverlink and the same time as trying to regenerate their tradditional town centres, noone seems top make the link that making it easier to drive to these places does not help the High Street.

Personally I think that trying to get Newcastle to encourage cycling by raising city centre parking costs is unlikely to go down well.  In the middle of the biggest recession since WW2 retailers are screaming for support from government in places like Newcastle and will react very badly to anything like this.  Retailers care about footfall, if cheap parking generates footfall they'll have some of that, if buses and bikes generate footfall they'll have some of that too.  City centre retailers do not expect parking to be free, but they do like it to be low enough not to put people off.

In Newcastle what we should be doing is getting a couple of well engineered cycle routes into the retail area, separating the cycle traffic from the motor cars who are trying to get to the car parks and the bus traffic trying to get to the bus station.  Do this and it suddenly becomes practical to promote city centre shopping by bike to families in the wealthy catchment areas adjoining the city centre.  The marketing budgets and expertise available to an operation like Eldon Square are far better suited to promoting cycling than anything the public sector can do. 

Right now Tyne & Wear is preparing its bid to the governments Local Sustainable Transport Fund.  They've nominated employment areas to be the focus of active travel promotion which with the exception of Newcastle City Centre are all out of town.  These centres include the area around Silverlink, any hope that the local retail centres will get help seems to be disappearing.  The government is telling councils to focus their efforts on areas of traffic congestion and employment growth, so Tyne & Wear is picking exactly the same locations where it also wants big road schemes.

I'm not knocking those who try to promote cycling on out of town business parks, its a good thing.  The built environment matters. As someone who spends a lot of his day job looking at aerial photos I can't help but think money would be better spent trying to get people to ride bikes in places like this
View Larger Map, as opposed to places like this.


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