By Bethan Dailey
Approximately 3 years on from starting to cycle to school with my children, and this is as close as we’ve got to a segregated cycleway on Dishforth Road between Ripon and Sharow.
In case anyone is wondering, this temporary cycle/walkway was created whilst roadworks were carried out on the actual pavement, and it lasted all of 2 days. We enjoyed it while we could and appreciated the irony.
Without the roadworks, Dishforth Road continues to get busier and busier and it feels like the school run traffic is trying to go ever faster. It’s a 30mph limit in a residential area and locals have been campaigning to have the limit reduced to 20mph to no avail.
My kids are 3 years older now and we brave longer stretches of road. I cycle in primary position alongside my younger daughter and the elder cycles just in front of us. ‘The cars just have to wait, and if they’re in that much of a hurry they should have set off earlier’ is my general mantra as we puff up the hill.
The kids know the mile long route inside out, and exactly where they can stop and wait to let vehicles past. A combination of pool noodle and Pass Pixi camera sign (available from passpixi.com or make your own) are really quite effective for slowing drivers down (sshh, don’t tell them I don’t own a real camera!)
My eldest goes to high school in a year and very little will have changed in Ripon’s cycling infrastructure by then. In a small, compact, and relatively flat city it is a crying shame that more is not being done to enable people to cycle short journeys here.