Road Safety and Active Travel to School
Debate between Wera Hobhouse and Layla Moran(2 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)
I thank you for chairing the debate, Mrs Hobhouse, and congratulate my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover), on securing it.
I am the MP for the dreaming spires. If we think Oxford, we think Headington stone and copper roofs and bicycles everywhere; indeed, 20% of people in Oxford commute to work by bike. I am also proud to be the MP for the No. 1 school in the country for cycling to school, Cherwell school in north Oxford: 58% of the students cycle and only 11% get there by car. In part, that is facilitated by an incredibly popular segregated cycle lane that runs all along the road towards the school, but many parents will point out that the cycle lane is at the very end of the commute to school, and there are no segregated cycle lanes all the way up the Banbury Road and the Woodstock Road. There was a plan for the Woodstock Road and a plan to look at feasibility on the Banbury Road, but the Labour city council decided that it wanted instead to spend the money on what local people call the vanity bridge to nowhere, elsewhere in Oxford. That was a crying shame, because the return on investment of segregated cycle lanes is not to be underestimated.
In Abingdon, we have our own problems. National cycle route 5 passes through the town centre, but cyclists need to dismount exactly halfway down the route. Councillor Neil Fawcett has been instrumental in securing funding for a redesign, as a result of which the route will be safer and faster.
Oxfordshire is led by the Liberal Democrats and we are greatly ambitious for cycling in our county. We want to increase the number of cycle trips from 600,000 a year to 1 million by 2031. My question to the Minister is: what other pots of money are there that we can bid for? Each one of these schemes is incredibly good value for money. They produce safer, faster and healthier schemes, which is what we all want for our constituents.
Wera Hobhouse (in the Chair)
I will impose a one-minute limit on speeches now, so that we can get as many in as possible.