Since June of 2020, Leighton Buzzard’s high street has been pedestrianised, described in the Leighton Buzzard Observer at its inception as an “experimental closure is part of an 18-month traffic order”. This was initially set up to maintain social distancing during a global pandemic, given the high street’s otherwise narrow pavements. While BuzzCycles maintains that the high street in its current exact form isn’t perfect for cyclists, especially the “please dismount signs” on market days, we have always strongly believed that banning motor vehicles from the high street is a very positive step towards encouraging specifically cycling (and also walking) in to the town centre, and thus encouraging people to leave their cars at home. This makes not just the high street, but also the whole town safer to cycle in on account of reduced traffic.
Recently it has came to the attention of your friends at BuzzCycles that there are people out there hard at work trying to convince your local town councillors (who are there to represent you, of course) to reverse the banning of cars from the high street. This is in an attempt to steer (no pun intended) the discussion about the high street at an upcoming partnership meeting (February 2nd) in such a way that the Town Council will no longer support the pedestrianisation scheme. It doesn’t take someone with a Maths degree to work out it has not been eighteen months since the scheme’s inception, either.
Given the first paragraph of this post, you can probably guess that Leighton BuzzCycles are strongly against this. What is the best way you can influence your local town councillors? Email them, of course! Can’t be bothered to write an email? I’ve made it easy for you – please use this email template to email your local councillor. Click/tap on the link and it should take you to your preferred email client. All you need to do is add the town councillor you’d like to email your message to, and edit/remove the last three paragraphs as you see fit. See the bottom of this post in the appendix to see suggested councillors to email. The first two paragraphs are an edited version of that which has been emailed on your behalf by Esther. The contents of this email can be found here, you’re welcome to use more from that email if you’d like, but please remember to try and add some of your personal experience in to what you send. Please keep the carbon copy (CC) to BuzzCycles’ email address, that way we can have an idea of how many people taken us up on this request, and it’d also be absolutely fantastic to see your personal experiences of why you like this scheme.
We hope that we met many of you reading this while we were running our Dr Bike sessions, and it was great to see how you were using your bicycles to go about your daily lives, going to work, running errands and so on. Really inspiring stuff. I suspect most people reading this post are well aware that cycling is not only a fantastic recreational activity, but it’s also a very efficient and convenient means of transport. The main indicator of how many people cycle in an urban environment are likely to cycle in their daily lives is safe infrastructure. It’s not the culture, weather, distance, or hills…it’s the infrastructure!
We have also been struck by how much better the high street is now that more space has been given over to people, rather than private car parking, both on market days and non-market days. Why should the high street be given over to private property storage when research shows that pedestrians spend more in shops than drivers? Shouldn’t we be encouraging those that spend the most? I even saw a child unicycling up the high street recently, they had some great skills! Surely not the sort of thing you’d see if we were all confined to the pavements.
This is something that we can contribute , but we have to make our voices heard. It’s crucial. If cars are let back in to the high street it could be years until this is tried again, and we don’t think such a delay is something Leigthon Buzzard can afford – for the sake of both our health and the local economy. Here’s a TFL Gif I found showing what we’d like to see more of in our town…we think keeping the high street pedestrianised is a crucial step towards this future. Thank you so much for your time, and happy riding.
Appendix
Thanks for getting this far! Here’s the ward map to find out which ward you’re in. The image below shows who represents each ward.
Finally, here’s the contact details of each councillor if you’d prefer to copy and paste the email addresses in.
We’d reccomend you send your email to at least one of your councillors for your ward, perhaps even all of them. If you do send your email to more than one it’d be wise send each individually to include their name at the start. We also have info that the following councillors are more likely to be won over by your email, so it might be worth emailing them too. These are: Dan Scott (St Georges), Gordon Perham (Southcott), Jeremy Silverstone (Grovebury), Sheona Hemmings(Planets), Tony Morris (Plantation), Amanda Dodwell (Brooklands).
Bear in mind that any email or emails at all you do send will be helpful, so thank you so much for your time.