End the Mud Bath
Derby City Council have submitted a planning application for the building of a multi-user path through Darley Park running from near the Abbey Inn to the rowing clubs by Handyside Bridge. Derby Cycling Group is strongly in favour of the creation of this path and would like to ask all members to register their personal support for the plans as well.
This path will enable a whole range of new cycling opportunities both for everyday journeys, leisure cycling and for tourism. It will create a circular route with the Darley Fields path which will enable families and people new to cycling to begin riding in a pleasant and peaceful environment and will hopefully help to get more people cycling in Derby. Please connect to the council website and express your support
The application is open for comments until 26th September (deadline extended); the planning reference is 05/17/00567 and you access it via this link: https://eplanning.derby.gov.uk/online-applications/ .
When viewing the documents, the key ones are:
. Design and Access Statement
. Proposed Plan (with details of the path design and alignment)
The Council have already held consultation events and well over 90% of the respondents were in favour of the plans. However, when similar plans were submitted a number of years ago, a very small but vocal minority managed to get the ear of the planning committee and have the plans voted down. We don’t want this to happen again!
It is important that the Council decision makers can see the overwhelming level of support for the creation of the path, not only to give better connectivity of Darley Abbey to the city’s cycle network, but also as the next (first?) part of the aspirational off-road cycle route all along the Derwent Valley between Derby and Matlock connecting together all the Derwent Valley World Heritage Site locations. Visit the Derwent Valley Cycleway website for more details: http://derwentvalleycycleway.org.uk/
The proposed path was discussed at the DCG Members Meeting on Tuesday 5th September, and as ever there are one or two areas of detail which we will be discussing with the design team; these relate to the surfacing of the boardwalk – which must be non-slip in the wet – and the width of boardwalk. However the benefits of this scheme for cycling are huge and we urge you all to support it please.
Loughborough University have done a lot of research on behalf of the DfT (see this link for full details) including the chart on the left showing the areas that drivers can see directly, those they can see in their mirrors, and those that are invisible.
