Are you building in active travel?

When done well, active travel connects communities. It gives a realistic, healthy alternative to driving a car. It is integrated with public transport, improves our physical and mental wellbeing and helps cut emissions and create a more positive vibrant environment. But how do you do it? What’s it like on the ground?

The latest training and guidance session finished in March and we are already fielding enquiries for more courses. We have been asked about dates for the summers and also September and early October. Enquires have been from south west and north Wales and even Manchester and Gloucester. CEWales is leading the way in active travel and well over 100 people have had either virtual or classroom-based training and guidance set up by Just Ride the Bike on behalf of CEWales and run by Phil Jones Associates.

In response to demand and positive feedback we want to run another set of our four 90-minute slots of training and guidance in July and September. Dates will be released soon. Please let us know which time of year suits you best and any specific issues you want the session to cover. It might be a an issue relating to a housing development, a school street or a trunk road. It doesn’t matter. Contact either andrew@justridethebike.com or info@cewales.org.uk.

We also want to get outside and see what’s really going on via ‘real place’ learning.

In this ‘real place’ workshop Constructing Excellence in Wales will work with Phil Jones and Associates and Just Ride the Bike to visit a problem place that should benefit from active travel design and policy but might be difficult to achieve. We will look at a place and then do a workshop to ‘reinvent’ the streets for future travel. As a delegate you will be walked through the site, consider ideas and designs and with the help of an urban designer as well as a transport planner to help with facilitation ideas will be captured using live sketches on the day.

Our vision is that each site based half-day event will be hosted by a local authority or delivery agency and will be split between 60-90 minutes on site and a further 60-minute session off site indoors to discuss the findings of the ‘real place’ visit.

It is a fully integrated learning experience that will address some of the local issues and as a group share best practice and potentially shape a solution.

Are you interested in attending? Are you interested in hosting a live, real place workshop complete with weather, hi-vis and proper best practice sharing of ideas and collaboration? Yes – then please contact either andrew@justridethebike.com or info@cewales.org.uk to register your interest or suggest a site. We have already had some excellent suggestions and one or two possible sites. We hope to commit to at least one site in the next month or so and set a date for a workshop in June.

We are also seeking to run our well-regarded series of four 90-minute training sessions again in Look out for updates on these opportunities and please contact us for more information of if you have a special request and want to ask about bespoke, one-off training.