August 2017) Help rescue 100s of miles of 1930s-era protected cycleways | Bike Boom
August 17, 2017 carltonreid
Between 1934 and 1940 Britain’s Ministry of Transport paid local authorities to install cycle tracks. As seen and heard on the BBC, more than 100 or so schemes were built, resulting in perhaps as many as 500 miles of cycle tracks, some of them protected with curbs. The great majority were built – 9-ft wide and both sides of the roads – next to the new bypasses of the era; a few were built on “trunk roads” through residential areas, such as in Sunderland, Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford. A successful Kickstarter campaign in May 2017 enabled us to start researching some of these cycleways, and now in 2021, thanks to support from the Department for Transport and Sustrans, we’re in the process of rescuing some of them.