You seem to have got the wrong end of the stick. I'm not going into that much detail on an open forum but the questions often involve total spend, underlying assumptions, ins and outs and specifics of the scheme and choices. I'm not questioning that cycling is going up in some areas but why it is going up. I've been to presentations on particular schemes and often assumptions are fiddled or very obvious omissions made. I'm perfectly happy for money to go to some of these schemes and that they do good but fed up of the very sloppy scrutiny that goes on - I don't think it's helpful for cycle campaigning at all, if you offer very gushing unfounded praise of a council or a cycling charity they'll walk all over you. I'm very much interested in details than vague grand strategies.
The council and transport executive have a variety of different ways, that said for some of them especially the transport executive I wish they'd do some of them a bit more often. They are reasonable enough but some of them can be self fulfilling loops with respect to themselves at the exclusion of other areas. For example policy could be very much focused on bicycle trips to the city centre, this then gets measured more than other things, it goes up and policy is concentrated on this rather than say bicycle trips to large vibrant local shops or particularly large destinations where we have to take the word of the travel plan coordinator say. One of the things that seems better this time round is the local transport plan is very much more joined up, we'll have to see how that does in the context of very large cuts.
On the recent topic of cycling england and schools what I mean by lack of transparency is that the end results are just presented along the lines of we had such and such a bike day and large number x turned up by being bribed with a free breakfast and bicycle checks. John Smith from charity x/council says oh the kids think it marvellous and are really enthused. When you get into the nuts and bolts of it like why such a small percentage of schools were picked or why they were chosen it all gets a lot more vague. We aren't told of total spend, how many people go to the school, %, levels of cycling outside of these events (although some schools themselves are much more interested in that than the actual charity or council) how much per hour, per child, facilities to support the boom (parking) and so on. How much of a council officer's time is spent on it, how much they earn, why the plans aren't more ambitious, underlying assumptions etc. Some of those questions don't necessarily even have bad answers it's just you have to go fairly long lengths to find out the answers - it's a lack of transparency.
