13. Cycle Exeter

Zsolt Schuller is Cycle Exeter’s Project Manager. I’m meeting him at 4 o’clock, on the Quay. That’s less than an hour away, not enough time to get out to the youth hostel, washed and back. So I decide to hang around town. I pop on trousers and a t-shirt to blend in, and zip the arms onto my Endura jacket. I’ve worn this all day, as an arms-free gilet, and it’s just fab. It’s probably the closest I’ve come to bike culture chic, and it’s quickly become my favourite piece of kit.

With its car-free space and laid-back, at-your-leisure vibe, the Quay feels like the place to be. I get a coffee from the Riverside Café, which shares a great old warehouse premises with an antiques store, and sit outside among the time-rich pensioners. It’s overcast; dry, but a threat of rain; mild, but not enough for t-shirts. Seagulls screech as they swoop onto a slice of white bread, chucked nonchalantly into the water for the amusement of a grandchild.

I head over to Saddles and Paddles, to get a replacement bottle cage and more importantly have a nose. Right on the Quay, the shop’s perfectly located for its business of hiring and selling bikes and boats. From here you can rent a canoe and paddle down the Exeter Ship Canal which runs parallel to the River Exe. Or you can hire a bike and pedal beside the estuary. There are some great pubs down there, including the Turf Locks Hotel, a mile from the nearest road and accessible only by boat, bike or boot. Later, Zsolt tells me they’re creating a 26 mile off-road Exe Estuary Trail, from Exeter down to the sea at Dawlish on the western side and Exmouth on the eastern side. Using the ferry at the coastal end, this will make a great circular ride. More importantly for Cycle Exeter, it’s a key bit of utility cycling infrastructure. 80,000 people live along the estuary and Exmouth, with 35,000 inhabitants, is Devon’s second biggest settlement.

I emerge from the shop to loiter on the Quay. Zsolt turns up, on his bike of course, and suggests a coffee. Straightaway I’m massively impressed by his energy. Near the end of a busy day, he’s made time to meet me. He’s come equipped with maps and promotional literature, clearly wearing his cap of the man who sells cycling in Exeter. He’s young – 29 he tells me later – dynamic and immensely likeable. I’m feeling like he’s won me over before we’ve even started.

I tell him how impressed I’ve been, pedalling along the river to reach the Quay on a route shared with lots of pedestrians, to see no ‘cyclists dismount’ signs, even when I came across narrow bridges. Such signs, a scourge of cyclists, are prominent elsewhere. Lancaster’s got plenty, a travesty in a place which is supposedly similarly intent on boosting cycling.

“We’ve been really lucky”, Zsolt says. “I worked in Reading before, which could potentially be one of the great cycling towns – it’s about the same size as Exeter, it’s got a big university. But there’s just a lack of councillor and officer support there.

“Whereas here”, Zsolt goes on, “we’ve got really keen councillors who want to make Devon the greenest local authority, we’ve got a new Chief Executive – he’s been in place about a year – who’s got a £1,500 touring bike, and who’s pledged, as his ‘Doing it for Devon Pledge’, to cycle to work 25 times this year, and he lives about 20 miles out. He’s quite a young guy. So he’s a really good ambassador.

“Then my boss on the project, who’s the Head of Highway and Network Management, who generally, in other authorities, would be a diehard car driver, he cycles in. The Head of Engineering cycles. So in all the places where you’d usually find barriers, you’ve got people who are interested. That’s the thing, Exeter’s got that”.

It’s not been complete plain sailing. “I’ve had one traffic signal engineer who’s been a pain in the arse, but he’s retired now. Anyway, it wouldn’t be right if there wasn’t one person who was a bit of a problem, would it?”

The city’s demo town project is known as Cycle Exeter. Zsolt tells me it’s “a partnership between the City and County Council. At the City Council – I work for the County – the lead officer there, who’s the head of planning, is a trustee at Sustrans. So it’s just been the right group of people, really”.

Zsolt’s describing what’s sometimes called ‘top level buy-in’, and it’s what cycle campaigners dream of. We strive to persuade powerful people of the benefits of cycling, but it’s a long, uphill, often futile struggle. To have people in place who’re already converted to the cycling cause, what a head start! By way of contrast, Zsolt cites one of the other demo towns, Darlington, where plans to allow cycling in the town centre have recently faced fierce opposition from councillors. Cycling in city centres is one of many controversial issues in cycling promotion. To me, it’s a no-brainer; of course, people should be able to cycle everywhere. Still, people worry about it.

Despite what Zsolt says, riding a bike doesn’t guarantee a pro-cycling attitude, any more than being a woman makes you a feminist, being poor a socialist. Still less does riding a bike automatically instil the capacity to imagine and commit to a rosy cycling future. But there’s no doubt that direct experience of what it’s like to cycle helps a person appreciate some of the difficulties of cycling, and makes them more likely to be sympathetic to the need for improvements.

Zsolt’s clearly tremendously committed to the project, and talks about his work with real passion. So how, I wonder, did he get here?

He did a first degree in Geography at Aberystwyth University; he went there because he loves mountain biking, he’s always been a cyclist. He moved on to do a Masters in Transport Planning at Oxford Brooks University, where he did his dissertation on car-free tourism initiatives. Like me, he’s long felt perplexed that, by cycling, he’s doing something good, yet when he cycles he feels marginalised, pushed to the sides of the transport environment, into the gutter.

Cycling is the reason Zsolt became a transport planner, but once he’d become one he felt most of his work wasn’t about cycling. Because the County Cycling Officer was away on leave at the time, he got the chance to put the city’s demo town bid together, and that led to his getting the post of Cycle Exeter’s Project Manager. It’s the first project he’s managed.

“They took a bit of a risk, but I suppose because I was passionate and enthusiastic, that makes up for a lot”.

Now, to be a cycling officer with a budget feels quite a privilege. He’s part of a three year project during which, he says laughing, he can “go mad”.

So how’s it going, so far?

“I think really well”, Zsolt says, before elaborating in both personal and professional terms. Personally, “it’s quite difficult because it’s like a hobby, so it becomes a bit of a labour of love, so you don’t know when to switch off”.

In terms of the project, “we’ve built around 16 km of new routes in the last year. Looking at the numbers, in the first year of the project they went up about 14%. In the first three months of this year, compared to the first three months of last year – we’ve got a network of automated counters, they’re up by 20%.

“Then we’ve got a Bike It Officer working in the schools. Nationally, I think 2% of kids cycle to school, and we’ve already got it up to between 7 and 11% at most of the secondary schools here”.

“Wow, that’s really good”, I say. Rumour has it that Exeter is doing best of the six demo towns.

“That’s what our bid focussed on. When we go round, I’ll show you some of the schools. There was a big re-organisation of secondary schools in the city, and our Deputy Chief Executive pitched to Cycling England that this created a once-in-a-generation opportunity – ‘new build schools, let’s open them with great cycle routes’. So that’s what we’re trying to do”.

Children of secondary school age are notoriously hard to reach. For many, cycling is somehow just not ‘cool’. But Exeter can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. These new secondary schools provide a fantastic opportunity. They’ve got cycle routes going straight to their doors. They’ve got plenty of good bike parking. They’ve got a passionate Bike It officer working to instil enthusiasm. They’ve got international trails rider Andrei Burton helping with promotion. With all of this, Exeter can’t fail to get kids on bikes, can it?

The goal is to have 20% of Exeter’s children cycling to school, which seems remarkably unambitious. A sceptic might suggest that the majority of any new cycling trips will replace not car trips but walking trips and obviously, it’s the car trips which need replacing. Time and statistics will tell.

I stop asking questions. Zsolt pulls out the wad of maps and brochures he’s brought along to fill me in on everything that Cycle Exeter’s been up to. They’re working on an impressively wide front to promote cycling in and around the city.

Then it’s time to ride. Zsolt takes me on a tour. What a tour! I was about ready to rest, but Zsolt, bless him, has other ideas. We go in, out, around, about, adding another 20 miles to my day’s total. The ride blurs into a procession of cycling facilities. We negotiate busy roads, get in the way of people riding home from work, hop up and down kerbs. We’re ducking and diving our way through the city. It’s staccato riding, quite unlike the smoothness of the long-distance cycle touring which I’ve been relishing on my ride so far.

We head out along the river and canal, down unsurfaced tracks and silent ginnells, behind schools, past kids on BMXs, through the city centre. Everywhere we go, there’s people cycling. Not masses, not like Amsterdam, or even Oxford, but more than the average you see in English cities these days. Exeter’s almost as much of a mystery to me at the end as it was at the beginning, but I get to see an enormous amount of new cycling infrastructure.

Particularly given Cycle Exeter’s push to get kids riding to school, much of this new cycling infrastructure has been created from old pavements, freshly converted to shared use – places where pedestrians walk and people ride, side by side.

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