mjr
Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
- Location
- mostly Norfolk, sometimes Somerset
It seems like they cycle to local NHS sites despite the trusts, not because of them. I've not heard from workers at the local hospital who I often ride with about the trust doing much. There's a staff newsletter which includes cycling items but I believe that's a medic doing it voluntarily rather than someone doing it as part of their job. There's something about cycling info being on a staff intranet but of course, I don't know what's there and I hope you don't want me to do a FoIA request to find out just now.
As you know, I quite happily "take it out on" other bits of government and industry when it's their fault, but NHS trusts don't even do the bits they could do, on things like building works or travel instructions. Car parking and routes are always included, buses usually, cycling rarely - it's on only 1 of 4 local general hospital "how to find us" instructions and I've never seen it on building plans yet.
At the nearest hospital, despite it appearing as a destination on local cycle route signs, all cycleways stop at their boundary and anyone cycling in - staff or patient - has to give way to motorists and mix with them to the cycle parking. Which isn't signposted, of course. And the covered cycle parking was demolished a few years ago and the space given over to even more cars and I think officially there's now only those awful plastic "streetpod" Sheffield-stand-plus-wheelbender hybrids which damage many bikes with mudguards or even long-cage derailleurs, so now some bikes get locked to the posts under the downhill overhang of one of the buildings and the rest to fences around the site. All they really need to do now is make it so you can only enter or exit from the 60mph A-road bypass and only the truly stubborn deviants will persist in cycling there.
Now that's an exceptionally bad hospital, but even the best near me, Cambridge, is a flaming mess with bad signs and insufficient parking. Is there any hospital site in this country where cycling is a first-class (even equal-first) travel option?
See my earlier comments about being generous with permits for the "can't"s. Working 70 miles away or doing many types of home visit should clearly qualify for a parking permit. But can you say why you feel that some people doing that sort of work means that even an on-site worker living a mile or less along the road should get free car parking? Because that's what blanket free parking means.
Actually, it's worse than that, because uncontrolled free parking means most hospital site car parks will be massively over-demanded (there simply isn't 10m² of car park per simultaneous worker on most sites, even ignoring the need for roadways between them) and anyone doing home visits is likely to end up parking in nearby streets and walking those same rubbish possibly-unsafe routes in!
Whether I have it depends how you look at it. I have free car parking at my home office, which is my usual location these days. I haven't always even had that, when I lived in town. I don't have free car parking at some work sites and do at others. Transport is something that gets factored into the work prices. So would you say that I am being kicked in the teeth sometimes?
When did not being able to store a 10m² vehicle for free become "kicked in the teeth" anyway? Given how little cycle parking there seems to be at NHS sites, have all the workers without space to store securely a 2m² bicycle been kicked in the teeth and then their nose smashed in for all these years?
(edited to reinsert a missing m)
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