Dear Sustrans

Notice of cancellation of funding

I have been funding your work for about a decade. Only a modest monthly donation, but these things add up. Today I have cancelled my Direct Debit. What you are doing is not what I want you to do, and I will no longer fund it.

What I want you to do is promote cycling as sustainable transport and to construct a national cycling network. Your name certainly suggests this work and for a long time I hoped that was what you were doing. But you‘re not.

You began so well, as the Bristol-based group who campaigned successfully for the Bath-Bristol bike path. That is a useful route between the two cities. It is now somewhat congested, which lessens its usefulness, but this only underlines the demand for good-quality routes.

In the decades since then, Sustrans has become a national organisation employing people around the country and handling tens of millions of pounds. What has this achieved?

The National Cycle Routes are not fit for long-distance travel, or even commuting. Take, for example, NCR 1. On the map it looks like my way in and out of London to the north east, a cyclist’s version of the M11. I have twice attempted to use it to reach Cambridge and been defeated both times. The Lee Valley section to Ware is too narrow, too congested, too obstructed and too badly surfaced to make progress. Compared to what? Compared for example to my route north-west from central Copenhagen to meetings in Bagsværd. I take the Hillerød motorway, which is equipped with comfortable bike paths. To leave London, I feel safer on the A1010, the old coaching road.

You will object that your work is not to serve experienced cyclists like myself, but to attract those not now riding. Very well – but to what?

Yesterday I again rode on the Lee Valley section of NCR 1, returning from a ride in Epping Forest. It was a perfect winter riding day, clear and cold. We stopped to admire ducks, talk to strangers and pet ponies. We took it carefully or walked over cobblestones, negotiated narrow muddy corners and dismounted for the gates. We had a delightful time. Everything was as it should be for a ride in a park. But you have no business claiming or designating this as a cross-country cycle route. The same is true of other paths suited to recreational riding that you have designated as NCRs: for the Thames Path, for NCR 61’s use of the Grand Union Canal towpath.

When you have a choice between the recreational and the useful, you choose the recreational. Take NCR 57, which can be picked up from the Metropolitan Line at Chesham and followed to Oxford. At Great Missenden it detours through picturesque Angling Spring Wood, a muddy detour to be avoided by any rider intent on reaching Oxford. At Wheatley it ignores the useful cycle path into Oxford beside the A40 for a picturesque ascent of Shotover Hill, across rutted gravel roads.

And this is the nub of my quarrel with what you are doing. You are promoting recreational riding for families and children where they can be out of the way of motor traffic. That is not a bad thing to do, but it is not sustainable transport and it is not the national cycle network we need. It does nothing to help us ride to work, to school or the shops. It does nothing to help me get between cities, as the Bristol-Bath path does. When I ride off from home in London to the shops or to see friends I see nothing of your work helping me. And when I ride across country I have learned to be wary of your routes.

Worse, you occupy a prominent place in the political landscape and consume a large part of the meagre resources granted. You claim to be working on a future of sustainable transport in which cycling plays a key part. By giving the comforting illusion of progress, and drawing resources to yourself, you are, I fear, more part of the problem than its solution. That is why I am cancelling your funding.

Yours sincerely

Stephen Taylor FRSA