City Wardens today handed out bike bells and helped to fit them to cycles on the Deeside Way as part of Aberdeen City Council’s Bike Week events.
The initiative will also take place in forthcoming weekends around the city to encourage cyclists to make their presence known to pedestrians on dual-purpose walking/cycling paths.
The City Council also today started the first stage of public consultation for an Active Travel Action Plan which will look to encourage and facilitate more cycling and walking, with a detailed action plan for the growth and development of the local cycle network.
The plan is aimed to be developed in 2016 and then adopted in early 2016, subject to committee approval. It is designed to be in line with the regional Active Travel Action Plan prepared by Nestrans last year.
The Active Travel Action Plan is designed to be action-driven particularly for network enhancements, as policies for active travel will be contained in the Local Transport Strategy, once it is adopted by committee.
Aberdeen City Council cycling champion Ross Grant said: “It's great to see that many of our younger cyclists are being encouraged to make sure they have bike bells to allow them to make cycling safer when they are out and about.
“The Active Travel Action Plan will be a fantastic way to help encourage more people to cycle or walk about the city.
“We hope that as many people as possible will take part in the public consultation so we can get views from all around the city, and all age groups.
“Cycling or walking is a great way to get around and we want to make it as easy as possible for residents and visitors.”
The first stage in the development of this plan is a public engagement/information gathering exercise, essentially to ask members of the public what they would like to see from an Action Plan, what currently works well in Aberdeen, what some of the barriers to walking and cycling are and what routes they would like to see prioritised for improvement.
A short survey for people to complete in their own time is now available at the website: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/AberdeenActiveTravel and Aberdeen City Council has been engaging with members of the public in and around Bike Week.
The outcomes of this process will then feed into the development of a draft action plan which will then undergo a formal public and stakeholder consultation in the autumn.
A Bike Week Roadshow is taking place at Sunnybank Community Centre on Saturday 20 June from 1pm to 4pm. The event is open to all and everyone is welcome. Several schools in the city are also holding their own events as part of Bike Week 2015.
For more details on Bike Week, visit www.bikeweek.org.uk or follow @Bike_Week on Twitter.