You can use our example email below to create your own email to Councillor Peter Hardy at Buckinghamshire County Council (the final decision maker on this issue). Do also send it to Simon Glover, who is in the Cycling and Walking team at BCC.
Please take the parts you most agree with and it is very important to add your own words and thoughts on this issue so that your email is counted as a personally written email (councillors get a lot of emails that all look the same, which don't 'count' as much as personally written emails).
If you want your email sent in the local press, where they might publish it in their "letters" page, also copy in the Bucks Herald and Wendover News.
Re: Please save our cycle route
Dear Peter,
I am writing to you as a Wendover resident who lives close to the proposed cycle route/ regular cyclist - I live at HPxx xxx. I think the current cycle route should be installed without delay and ideally as planned in November 2011, so that Wendover does not lose the investment in a sustainable travel link between the Princess Mary Gate development and the schools and High Street. Set out below is my support for this route and why I think it must be installed:
· The scheme is deliverable now and is needed now since Princess Gate development is nearing completion and full occupation – the sooner residents from this new Wendover development have the option to make the school journey by bike, the more likely they are to make that choice rather than add to the problems already seen on Manor Road with car congestion.
· A cycle route delivered in good time after the development is completed is the right of those living in Wendover, as the agreement with the developers in obtaining the land at the Princess Mary Gate site was that they would invest in a sustainable cycle route to the schools and the High Street. That was over three years ago: At the Public Inquiry to determine the planning application to develop PMH site HM Inspector made it a condition of granting that development application conditional upon a dedicated cycleway being provided between the development and the schools complex as well as Wendover’s centre.
· To fail to deliver this scheme would be a dereliction of the Councils duty to comply with a planning obligation and their general duty to spend taxpayers’ money wisely as well as to foster safe sustainable transport modes for residents and pupils.
· 11% of children already cycle to the schools on Manor Road (BCC figures).
· Since £170k is now not sufficient to fund the works an additional grant of £120k from Sustrans, a national sustainable transport charity, has been secured. Consequently ratepayers are not required to find any of the funding. This £120,000 has been offered but will have to be returned if it is not used soon.
· If BCC fails to go ahead with the scheme in the face of opposition from WPC the Highway Authority (Ratepayers) will have to find the whole of the cost of an alternative scheme at some future time which is very unlikely.
