September 2010 – Cycle Ipswich

The next meeting of Cycle Ipswich will be on Friday 24th September 2010 from 7pm until 9pm at the Brewery Tap, Ipswich.

The Brewery Tap is located on Cliff Quay, just behind the Riverside NHS medical centre. There is a map on the Google place page. There is not much secure bike parking, so bring a lock and some lights for getting home afterwards. The Brewery tap have an excellent selection of bar food and restaurant meals, as well as local beers and other beverages.

We’ll be starting a consultation on cycling and rail in Ipswich. We’ll be looking at recommendations in the following areas:

Security
Storage
Ticketing
Routes to station
On train cycling provision
Other areas…

The aim is to provide an objective and balanced priority list of recommendations for future improvements.

We will publish our conclusions in mid-October.

If you have something you want to share with us, why not post at our discussion forum?

Proposal for a bike ride with a purpose

I’d like to propose a bike ride to take place on 10/10/10 – preferably
at 10 o’clock!

The climate change organisation 350.org has teamed up with 10:10 to
get people to do constructive work parties to combat/highlight climate
change. You can read more about this here:
http://www.350.org/about/blogs/getting-work-2010-our-new-plans.

The point of our bike ride would be to follow selected routes on the
Ipswich Cycle map and feedback to a central document. We might for
example, use the crowdsourcing software provided by http://www.ushahidi.com/
which was developed for disasters and emergencies but which can easily
be used for other purposes. (You could well argue that climate change
is a disaster, of course.)

The document could then be used to lobby IBC and SCC/HA to fund and
organise improvements.

We could meet in the centre of Ipswich and then split into twos and
threes and each group could ride a pre-agreed route. The point of the
crowdsourcing would be to upload problem areas of routes to a map from
our mobiles. We could also supply a questionnaire for those who prefer
that. I haven’t tried the software as yet.

I have talked to the Transition Ipswich Transport Group about this and
I’m sure that some people from there will support it.

Please let me know if there is any enthusiasm for this project. I
would need at least a couple of other people who are keen to get it
organised. I was involved in organising the 350.org/ Transition
Ipswich bike ride last year but I still consider myself to be a rookie
in these matters!