The City Council is asking for feedback on their Ambitions for the City Centre to help them define what should be in the Vision document that they are working on. Amongst the background explanation is the statement “Tinkering around the edges is no longer enough and we need to develop a clear, bold and importantly collective vision to tackle issues head on and to demonstrate that the city centre has a long term future.“
There is the opportunity to provide your input as to what you think is important and we would encourage you to do so (obviously emphasizing the need for greatly improved cycling provision).
There are a number of themes each dealing with a different aspect of how the city centre could be changed to address the, so called unprecedented, challenges, such as “Long term issues such as an over-reliance on a declining retail market and limited city centre living and office markets have been compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic“. The Council asks for feedback on some or all of the 12 themes.
The themes ‘Accessibility and Connectivity’ and ‘Climate Change’ have relevance to cycling with statements such as ‘we will need to make the city centre attractive to walking and cycling’. However, while making the city centre more attractive to people riding bicycles is an admirable aspiration, to be truly effective, a city wide network of connected cycle routes is needed to facilitate riding bicycles to the city centre (as well as riding within the centre).
We urge people to feedback their thoughts to the council using the webpage or contacting the relevant officer identified on the webpage. The drop in session end on Wednesday 31 August 2022.
UPDATE
The consultation remains open until the Wednesday 21 September 2022, and we urge people to feedback using the council website.