As mentioned, been out of cycling for a decade or more, now getting back in. Its interesting Sustrans has come up, as I realised in the last few days that despite reading forums more in the last month or so and reading daily newspapers over my missing decade, Sustrans do not seem to get mentioned much. At one time they seemed to be everywhere in the news, sometimes doing good stuff, often doing bits I disagreed with - I found them very marmite on some subjects, particularly when I realised it was basically a closed shop privately run 'club' almost, with no voting on any aspects permitted for paying members, who appeared to be mostly viewed as cash cows and free labour (yes, I realise volunteers enjoy doing stuff). The new chairperson (?) way back then seemed to be just crowned by the previous one, at least as far as I understood at the time, with limited if any input from anyone else. It came across as a private club run and controlled entirely by the founder. It really put me off ever joining or giving money, which I had been considering before I came across this info and attitude. I had started looking into volunteering as a section ranger for a length of road. Please feel free to correct me if I have got any of this Sustrans history wrong, as I would quite like to be wrong. I also seem to remember the chairpersons / owners (?) salary was thought to be quite significant for the era and job.
Is it I am just not noticing news from Sustrans, has their campaigning (other than Chuggers stopping people) become low key or perhaps they don't have such good media contacts now? I know public funding of things has reduced but there still seems to be some money for cycling, more so than for many other public interests.
Sustrans had an office in Bristol, near the cathedral and as a far as I know still do (again, correct me if wrong). In fairness, this used to be great as a facility - at one time they had a whole wall of bike route leaflets and maps printed by the various regional councils and suchlike. You could just go through the door, browse around the 'routes' wall and discover likely trips and holidays, taking away for free the ones of most interest (as the local councils had printed them) with more complex stuff for sale. They seemed to have quite a few employees behind the counter at desks, but browsing the routes did not need interaction. Sadly one day when I went in, all the routes had been moved to an area behind the desk so they could not be browsed, now you had to ask for individual routes and really already needed to know what areas you were interested in rather than getting inspiration, so I stopped using that service. Fortunately the councils have mostly made bike route downloads accessible via their own websites now.
At some point in the dim distant past I went and looked at the Sustrans website for their own routes and found they were charging for downloads (no idea what the position is now) when they used to give printed (more expensive to produce than downloads) away for free. At the time that seemed very greedy as there was still a lot of cycling funding about, paid for by the public ultimately.
Then somewhat more recently there was that thing in the news about them taking down signage as routes no longer fitting recent criteria, leaving no links between sections etc. The criteria seemed a bit silly given the difficulties of the UK roads. I think that was the last I personally heard of Sustrans, as I was no longer visiting bike forums and saw them mentioned no where else.
I never bother with Sustrans now, so am utterly ignorant of what they do now, but the more I found out about them the more I felt wary of them. I wished they had more competition from other cycling charities/associations at the time rather than being the automatic 'go to', especially with the historic narrow management as the lack of competition (and Sustrans not being a public body or open board of any kind, at least then) seemed a bit unhealthy.
I would also wish to say how much I appreciate all the masses of work done by volunteers via Sustrans and for all the funding from local councils / public tax etc as the volunteers and public funding have created some very nice cycling facilities over the years.
As I said, was a long time back for me and Sustrans may be very changed/improved by now, do update me where appropriate.
