Made to Move – Chris Boardman’s plan to transform walking and cycling in Greater Manchester

On 15 December 2017, Greater Manchester’s walking and cycling commissioner, Chris Boardman published his much anticipated report. Here’s the official press release from GMCA and the report itself can be downloaded as a PDF. If you don’t want to download the report, you can view it below. 

As you’d expect, there’s been a fair amount of coverage in the media, including articles from British CyclingThe Guardian, BikeBiz, road.cc and Manchester Evening News, who for some reason chose to focus on dangerous driving and school run aspects of the report.

I very much welcome this report and support the 15-point plan outlined in it. I think Chris and his team have a very challenging job on their hands. Securing the funds to support it will just be one of the challenges, having the 10 Greater Manchester councils on-board is another.

Right now, Chris and his team have the support of the Greater Manchester council leaders. I hope they remain supportive in the future, when it comes to making difficult and sometimes unpopular decisions. If done properly, it will ultimately mean some loss of space for motor vehicles on our roads.

I suggest Chris’ team start by addressing some of the shortcomings in TfGM’s proposed cycling implementation for the Metrolink Trafford Park Line. Oh and maybe get Manchester City Council to allow cycling in St Peter’s Square, as featured on the cover of the report.

I wish Chris and his team all the luck in the world, knowing that my family and I as well as the rest of Greater Manchester will be the ones that stand to benefit. This is our opportunity to really make a change, let’s show the rest of the UK how it’s done!

 

One thought on “Made to Move – Chris Boardman’s plan to transform walking and cycling in Greater Manchester

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s