Seeking inspiration outside of York, campaign members Andy Shrimpton, Lizzie Morris and Andy Farndale visited Leicester to check out how they do active transport.  

One sunny day in May, Lizzie and I made our way by train down to Leicester where we hooked up with new member Andy Farndale. We were there at the kind invitation of Andy Salkeld, Active Travel Team Leader at Leicester City Council, who met us at the station and after a short walk, presented us with Bromptons for our tour.  The Bromptons live in a city centre cycle hub in Town Hall Square, located in the ground level basement of a grand 19^th century municipal building. The building is currently disused, but not the basement, which bursts with activity and hosts a number of cycle and e-bike fleets, cycle advocacy and inclusion schemes, as well as the community cycle activists who run these operations. All these schemes have separate funding streams but their co-existence in the same place on such a scale is testimony to the strong leadership and a joined-up approach from the council.   

Our tour mainly took in the city centre to highlight key points of council intervention which Andy was keen to stress was more about ‘placemaking’ than improving transport. As we argue in 42 Ways to Transform York, cycling happens as a happy consequence not just of installing cycling infrastructure but as a result of getting so many other things right. A key example of this is Jubilee Square, once a dismal car park, but since 2013, transformed a mini park and event space. On the day of our visit, it was teeming with human life, criss-crossed with pedestrians and cyclists stopping for ice cream and soaking up the rays. But the square is not unique and the plan is to link up and invest in multiple such ‘sticky’ spaces with safe active travel routes between that you can stroll along or cycle.    

At the heart of this is approach is a shared space philosophy applied to the car free parts of the city centre. In York we call its equivalent, the ‘footstreets’, for a reason – because cycling in banned! Not so in Leicester, where cyclists and pedestrians mingle freely – yes even the delivery riders on e-bikes, and yes, even the teenage tearaways! But the difference is that you also see plenty of ordinary everyday cyclists. Indeed, even in Leicester’s equivalent of the privately owned Coppergate centre cycling is permitted, albeit with appropriate signage. Naturally we asked Andy how they all got along. Very well he said, and pointed out that such spaces are self-regulating and that all parties naturally adjust their behaviour according to the density of usage. It was encouraging to see this example of a city that is totally permeable to cycling. Because of this Leicester, unlike York, has an instant central cycle network, to which it can add, sending new routes out to the suburbs. Perhaps if York had adopted the same approach we would be in a much stronger position.

Leicester has far fewer cyclists than York and Andy admitted that there was still much work to be done connecting the radial routes and outer parts of the city. Evidence of progress on this is visible however immediately outside the main station – once a huge multi-lane traffic thoroughfare, but now with less car lanes, two-way cycle lanes on either side, and a pedestrian/cyclist super-crossing.  

Overall, we left impressed by a sense of purpose and leadership on active transport in the city. Andy is clearly a public servant who appreciates its transformative potential to improve people’s lives -something we could well do with in this city!