On September 22nd, we’ll be leading our sixth North Tyneside kidical mass ride – each time, we’ve seen hundreds of riders, of all ages and abilities, and on all sorts of wheels (and sometimes feet!) join us to ask for safer streets for children and their families to cycle – to school, to friends, to the shops, to clubs and sports, and elsewhere.
This ride we’re marking World Car Free Day, and joining thousands of national and international campaigners calling for #SafeStreetsNow.
We think this is a fairly uncontroversial ask – who could argue against safer streets for children? But we hear lots of local voices doing precisely that, complaining about the new family-friendly seafront cycleway and opposing plans to provide children with safe cycling routes to local school, for example.
In the three years we’ve been organising our kidical mass rides, we’ve seen some key improvements in North Tyneside’s cycling infrastructure – most visibly, the first, beautiful phase of the seafront sustainable route (aka The Sunrise Cycleway, though perhaps we should rename it “The Sunrise Way”, as it is also a great facility for people walking, wheeling, and running), but also shorter paths linking town centres, and metro stations, for example, including on Norham Road in North Shields; South Parade in Whitley Bay; Beach Road in Tynemouth; and Tynemouth Road in North Shields. Many of these smaller projects were consulted on in 2021 and funded by various national schemes such as the Active Travel Fund and the Transforming Cities Fund.
This is all good news but … sometimes the new routes reveal the gaps. And we often see these when we’re planning routes for our kidical mass rides.
Of course, kidical mass rides are very particular – lots of riders (usually between 200 and 300 in total), riding altogether, with lots of children (some very very small) and other less confident cyclists, on a Sunday afternoon – but these particularities show, in stark relief, some of the problems those of us who cycle everyday confront regularly.
We tend to lead two rides – one from Whitley Bay/Monkseaton and one from North Shields/Tynemouth – and vary our routes depending on what’s happening, what we want to draw attention to, and so on. This time, we really want to bring both rides together to cycle – in one big group – the length of the first phase of the new seafront cycleway all the way from Tynemouth priory to the seafront at Cullercoats (to the play park, just past St George’s Church).
From Whitley Bay…
We’ll ride from Marden Quarry along The Broadway using the service roads and the green cycle path (built in 2016). All pretty straightforward – except for the crossings at the side roads and, especially, at Beach Road. OK, it’s trickier to manage with a big group, but these junctions are tough enough for anyone. At Farringdon Road and Hartingdon Road, the roads are wide, visibility isn’t always great, and drivers often speed round the junctions.
At Farringdon Road, the redevelopment of the roundabout earlier this year would have been a perfect opportunity to shift priority to those walking and cycling – especially to and from all the local schools – but all we got was narrowed approaches and one new zebra crossing. We blogged about this back in 2022 and we were disappointed that our comments on the proposals were not taken into account by the council.
At the Beach Road roundabout, again, one new zebra crossing helps – this one is a parallel crossing for cyclists and pedestrians – but it’s still tricky to get past the little Sainsbury’s to that crossing.
And then we get to the end of the green cycle path, where cyclists are thrown unceremoniously back on to the road, just before the roundabout by Holy Saviours.
More than one confident adult cyclist we know has had a terrible experience on this roundabout. There’s no protection at all (apart from the zebras for pedestrians) and impatient and/or unobservant drivers often pull out in front of – or even try to overtake – those cycling on this roundabout. Even if we survive this roundabout, we then have to wonder about Manor Park Road and Tynemouth Front Street – are they safe? will parking and reversing drivers, especially, watch out for cyclists? will drivers be patient?
From North Shields…
We’ll ride from Northumberland Square and, even though we have some shiny new bits of infrastructure to use on Howard St, Norfolk St, Albion Road, and Stephenson St, it’s still not clear how easily and safely we’ll make it through junctions and on to a safe route to Tynemouth.
If we use Norfolk St, Suez St and Stephenson St – all the way navigating junctions and crossing roads – then we can make it on the new short stretch of cycle path in front of the law courts and towards the new parallel crossing just past Kiki’s Kabin – but then what? As we come round the corner, we’re confronted by scaffolding and parked cars on the pavement, now designated as a shared path.
Or we could go up Norfolk St using the cycle contraflow, cross at the other new parallel crossing, but we’re not sure where that takes us and if we can ride on the pavement towards Kiki’s Kabin (even if we can navigate the tight turns, the street furniture, and the A-board).
If we make it onto Grey St and cycle safely to Northumberland Park to reach King Edward Road, then we confront the same issues as the Whitley Bay ride in actually approaching Tynemouth Front Street and getting to the priory.
We could, instead, cycle down Howard St – dodging the drivers, moving and parked, who have decided that the restrictions on motor vehicles on this newly-renovated street don’t apply to them – towards the Fish Quay, but we’d have to ride all the way along Saville St, Charlotte St and Bird St and carefully navigate the steep downhill to the Low Lights Tavern, and then cross Union Road to get to the start of the path along the mouth of the river. And, of course, on a Sunday afternoon, we’ll be sharing the riverside path with dozens and dozens of people walking, many with dogs. At least it’s a car-free route though, and one which will lead us straight to the Priory – but how many little (and not-so-little) legs and wheels will be happy with the steep hills up past the haven?
Ultimately, there’s no safe, accessible route from North Shields to Tynemouth and the start of the Sunrise Cycleway. Such a route was planned, and consulted on, in 2021 – and we had major concerns then.
These are the sorts of questions we spend a lot of time thinking about as we plan our kidical mass rides. We take the safety of the hundreds of riders who join us seriously.
It’s worth remembering we’re trying to get to the Tynemouth start of our brand new, beautiful, multi-million pound seafront sustainable route – and it’s very difficult to do so safely. At every point where we’re deliberating about where to lead our riders, families who want to make the most of the new path will be wondering if they can safely cycle together to the seafront and if they can let their older children cycle there independently. Links to the seafront route from neighbourhoods and schools, for example, have to be prioritised if we really want it to lead to an increase in everyday cycling in North Tyneside.
Each of these obstacles – the crossings, the roundabouts, the junctions, the shared paths, the disconnected and indirect routes, the parked cars, the drivers – are also obstacles to families cycling everyday, not just to the seafront, but to school, to the shops, to visit friends, to the metro. We’d identify similar concerns for every different part of our borough if we tried. If we can’t find safe routes through our neighbourhoods, then neither can hundreds of local families as they try to make ordinary, routine journeys around our coastal communities every day.
We can see that North Tyneside Council is thinking about these issues and these routes – there are some new bits of infrastructure designed to keep those cycling – and walking – safer. But they’re not joined up, they don’t meet up-to-date infrastructure standards, and their delivery is slow. We wrote about some of these routes between North Shields and Tynemouth back in 2021, when the council consulted on some of their planned schemes.
We don’t have answers to all these questions – we’ll be riding possible routes multiple times before our kidical mass – but what we do know is this is why we ride – to look at our streets from the perspective of children and their families trying to cycle, to highlight difficult and dangerous points, to draw attention to how difficult it can be to cycle safely for everyday journeys in North Tyneside, and to ask North Tyneside Council to do more, to talk to cycling families, and to champion their needs.
JOIN US ON SUNDAY 22ND SEPTEMBER AND HELP US FIGHT FOR SAFER STREETS FOR EVERYDAY CYCLING
You can also check out our previous kidical mass campaign blogs:
Our campaign asks from 2023, all of which we still stand by.
Our call for #SafeStreetsNow, reflecting on the incidence of death and injury on North Tyneside’s roads.
I think the simple answer to all the questions is the local authority do not want cyclists in the area as they cause to many problems. Cars rule, sadly.
I find it dangerous to share roads with cars, etc and I’ve been cycling for years.