Barnet Council has agreed to look for more locations to install cycle parking hangars after Labour councillors raised the issue in a member’s item titled ‘Making it easier to get cycle hangars installed’ at last week’s Environment Committee (9 Sep).

The member’s item from Cllr Jo Cooper said: 

“Barnet’s long-term transport strategy acknowledges that the lack of safe cycle parking stops people cycling – a third of victims of bike theft have stopped cycling and more than 50% of Londoners regard lack of cycle parking provision as a main obstacle to cycling. We therefore call for an assessment of how to increase the provision of residential cycle hangars in Barnet and make the installation process easier.”

Cllr Anne Clarke, (Childs Hill ward), spoke at the meeting in favour of making it easier for residents to get a cycle hangar in their local area, and highlighted how difficult it currently was to get one agreed in Barnet. The current process means a resident must identify a location, then find six people to independently request the same location, and then get the agreement of all three ward councillors. This would then trigger a local consultation, at the end of which a cycle hangar might be installed. For one resident it had taken two years to get one cycle hangar installed.

Cllr Jo Cooper said: “Since the lockdown we’ve seen a real hunger from more residents to take up cycling, and we need to support them, at the moment the process makes it very hard.

“During lockdown Camden and Brent installed over 30 bike hangars each. Barnet installed zero, and there are only two on street cycle hangars in the whole of London’s largest borough.

“It’s good that the Committee agreed to look for more suitable locations for cycle hangars, but we should be using community infrastructure levy funds to make sure we install them, like Camden has done – not waiting for other people to fund it. And we should be making the process easier.”

Ends.

 

Notes:

  1. A copy of Cllr Jo Cooper member’s item can be found here: https://barnet.moderngov.co.uk/documents/s59811/Members%20Items.pdf

For more information contact:

cllr.j.cooper@barnet.gov.uk

cllr.a.clarke@barnet.gov.uk

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