Cambridgeshire County Council is consulting on its plans to develop ‘active travel hierarchies’. The consultation will be open until Monday 16 September 2024. Here is how you can have your say.
About the hierarchies
The council is developing hierarchies to guide it in prioritising maintenance of routes used for walking, cycling and wheeling depending on how much a route is used, how important it is to users, and any risks associated with it. This is an approach that is already used with routes used by motor vehicles.
Ensuring that more important routes are maintained as a priority, the council will enable users to experience better journeys, and more people will be encouraged to walk and cycle.
The hierarchy will consist of three related hierarchies, for
- Walking and wheeling
- Cycling
- Public Rights of Way
Your input to the consultation will be valuable in helping the council to get this right.
The Active Travel Hierarchy will not promote physical or legal changes to the highway network, such as changes to the surface or status of a public right of way. These changes are subject to other legal and administrative processes.
About the consultation
- This consultation is a chance for individuals, communities user groups and stakeholders to help the council develop and refine the hierarchies and understand which active travel routes and Public Rights of Way matter most. You can give your views at https://consultcambs.uk.engagementhq.com/active-travel-hierarchy
- You can also give location-specific feedback about each of the hierarchies and the county’s public rights of way, and add written comments when you give feedback on a particular location. The maps to do this are at www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/active-travel-hierarchy-map
- There is also a further questionnaire for general feedback on the principles related to an active travel hierarchy, seeking your preferences on priority maintenance activities. This survey is at Active Travel Hierarchy: your feedback | Consult Cambridgeshire (engagementhq.com)
Notes
- A series of Frequently Asked Questions has been developed, which is available on the consultation web page FAQs | Active Travel Hierarchy | Consult Cambridgeshire (engagementhq.com)
- If a particular highway is not shown where you would expect it to be on one of the three hierarchies, it will most likely appear on one of the other two hierarchies. This will be because of how the highway is classified in council highway records.
- If a route is not shown on any of the maps, this is most likely because the route is not recorded as a highway maintained by Cambridgeshire County Council. You can still provide feedback about these routes by adding comments about them in the general consultation, but routes which are not considered to be maintainable by the County Council cannot ultimately be shown on the Active Travel Hierarchy.
Did you know? Cambridgeshire County Council maintains 4,550km of roads; 2,936km of footways, over 550km of designated cycleways, and over 3,000km of public rights of way.
Wow. What a weird form/statement/whatever it is.
What’s hierarchy meant to mean in this context?
How bizarre the language is, not accessible at all.
It’s not very user-friendly, is it? In this context ‘hierarchy’ means putting routes into priority groups for maintaining them. Should we treat some walking, cycling and wheeling routes as more important than others, and why? How should we decide that? What are the most important maintenance activities for routes that people use for walking, cycling and wheeling?