Before 2020, Ellis Palmer Babe had never cycled before.
However, in January of that year he decided to purchase a hand cycle from a store in Fazakerley.
He was unsure where he’d be able to gain confidence out on the roads, but three months later, the roads across the city region emptied as a strict three month lockdown came into effect.
READ MORE: Liverpool 'lags behind' when it comes to active travel
Today, Mr Palmer Babe has clocked over 13,000 kilometres on his travels from his home in Birkenhead across the city region.
He told the ECHO: “Lockdown meant I was able to build up my confidence on the roads slowly but surely. There’s no reason why we can’t have something similar now, if people just take a second or two to think about other road users and be more patient.”
Mr Palmer Babe believes the city region has some of the best cycling infrastructure in the UK, namely the coastal route from Seacombe to New Brighton, with huge active travel potential in the regeneration of Dock Branch Park.
However, he admits this top quality infrastructure can be patchy across the full region
He added: “It's a bit of a hodge podge. For example, the Dock Road cycle route is good but it ends at the Sefton border.
“I cycled it from Liverpool One but there was no continuation and I ended up stuck in a puddle.
“There are some good parts of North Liverpool but it can end in a maze.”
There are similar stories of how March 2020 paved the way for a greater embrace of active travel - and ultimately where some ideas have lost momentum.
In Liverpool, £4m was put towards establishing pop-up cycle lanes across the city to incentivise cycling post lockdown.
In late 2021, the city region’s £710m transport funding committed to building the third phase of a 600km cycling and walking network, expanding on the 113km and 60 routes that have already been delivered or are in progress.
This followed on from the launch of Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram's active travel campaign in May 2021, saying "we need a revolution in how we live our lives and get about."
But more funding and more pop up lanes hasn’t transformed the city into a cycling haven overnight - one to rival other European cities or even other cities in the UK.
In Southport, active travel plans have been put on hold after a mixed response to pop up infrastructure from its residents.
In other cases it’s led to fierce debate.
The pop up cycle lane on West Derby Road in Liverpool became the centre of a protracted argument after it was controversially ripped out last July.
A public consultation on new plans for the cycle lane ends this Friday, but it's clear there are many issues to be ironed out to find a harmony between car and bike
Cllr Dan Barrington, Cabinet member for Climate Change and Environment, has admitted that the pandemic has had "a huge impact on how we travel" and the city council is working trying to "grasp" this opportunity. This will also result in the creation of a survey to find what barriers there may be for people and active travel.
He said: "We are ramping up investment in cycle lanes – temporary and permanent – to provide people with more opportunities and incentives to leave the car at home, be it to shop, to go to school or to work.
“There’s much still to be done to change the dial on people’s attitudes and behaviours but by understanding what motivates them, steadily creating the infrastructure and raising awareness of our cycle lanes and the wonderful walks to be had, we can start to make a difference.
"Along with other partners, we will be looking to promote active travel activities throughout 2022 to highlight just how easy it is to walk and cycle in Liverpool, and how much difference it can make to people’s quality of life and our city’s environment."
‘Moving in the right direction’
With Liverpool aiming to be net zero carbon by 2030, active travel is seen as a key area to help reduce emissions.
However, Liverpool and the wider city region remains a car dominated city and new active travel infrastructure at The Strand, Kingsley Road and West Derby Road is unable to turn the tide on its own as a patchwork entity.
According to Liverpool’s current interim chief highways officer Karen Agbabiaka, the city “lags behind” others when it comes to active travel and that “We need to get used to sharing our roads with cyclists and pedestrians in Liverpool.”
The City Region's cycling and walking commissioner, Simon O'Brien, is aiming to use 2022 to address these gaps in infrastructure and make the case for relatively simple fixes that could significantly improve the region's active travel network.
He told the ECHO: "We have nice infrastructure at The Strand, Regent Road and Leeds Street, but they all don't meet so they're all just islands.
"If we could put all of our efforts into joining up infrastructure at Regent Road, The Strand, Liver Street, Park Lane, then on to Princes Avenue, then suddenly you'd be able to go from the far side of Sefton Park and all the way out to more or less Bootle - traffic free. The disconnects are only small. And these disconnects appear all over the city region.
"The task I've been set by the Metro Mayor is to go around the boroughs and find out where these disconnects in infrastructure are, and quickly engage with the public and get those little disconnected fixed."
But how does Liverpool and the wider region move to convert more four wheel users into two?
In the view of Dr Alex Nurse, a lecturer in urban planning at University of Liverpool, it’s not solely about lines on tarmac and segregated lanes - though more of these are important.
He told the ECHO: “We saw in lockdown, it's not about education. People are prepared to do it. It's just they want the means to do it safely.
“It's also not about ripping roads up. During the life cycle of a city, things get worked on all of the time. As they're resurfacing, upgrading junctions, the council just needs to start ticking bits off. And over time what you'll see is networks appearing.
“I think things are moving in the right direction.”
However, Dr Nurse is keen to stress that things aren’t yet “moving fast enough” and it will only be in a couple of years that we see something “coherent and credible” in part due to the £710m transport settlement.
Ultimately, the infrastructural fix isn’t a quick one.
He added: “If you look at London, it was slow and it was steady there. Now you're seeing them reaping the rewards of a decade of hard work. The honest thing is Liverpool is at the start of that decade.”
Dangers
While new infrastructure can encourage more people to opt for bike over car, there remain large safety fears about cycling across Liverpool and the city region.
In September 2021, a demonstration was held at Liverpool’s Pier Head in response to the number of cyclists and pedestrians killed or seriously injured in Liverpool over the last eight years.
The demonstration was organised by Cycle Liverpool and Elke Weissmann, a reader in TV and film at Edge Hill University.
Ms Weismann explained to the ECHO how Liverpool has the worst rate of cyclists and pedestrians being killed or seriously injured per kilometre in the UK.
At the time of the demonstration, over an eight year period, 1119 cyclists and pedestrians had been killed in Liverpool which worked out to one fatality per kilometre.
She told the ECHO: “The demonstration was organised to draw attention to these terrible rates here in Liverpool.
“But walking is almost even worse in the city. If people want to ditch their car, then we need to provide safe walking and cycling infrastructure. And that doesn't exist.
“In Wavertree, there's the Wellington Road, Rathbone Road and Picton Road crossing which is horrendous and there's no pedestrian crossing. There's mothers and kids running over hoping they won't be killed. And that can't be the case anymore - it's the 21st century.
“If we don't have pedestrian crossings that make walking safe, how can we expect drivers to get out of cars?”
Hearts and minds
The approach to improving cycling and active travel is one that often centred on infrastructure.
Given roads have mostly been designed with a car first approach, and cycling infrastructure faces disruption from motorists, the drive to create liberated active travel space feels necessary.
But many groups across Liverpool don’t see the battle as one that’s primarily fought over new tarmac.
This is the view of Daniel Robinson, who set up cycling cooperative Peloton in 2012.
Originally working as a therapist, in his own words, he “got a bit fed up of the one to one counselling room.”
When helping a friend who was battling alcoholism, he organised a cycling trip to Scotland.
This led to Mr Robinson wanting to establish ‘therapeutic communities’ in his work, collective activities established to “transfer the conditions that I create in a counselling room.”
Peloton was born and the cooperative ran Liverpool’s CityBike scheme for five years.
It now runs BikeKiosk at Liverpool University, providing maintenance and bikes, as well as a cargo bike delivery service.
It also arranges monthly group rides designed to explore “Liverpool, ourselves and each other.”
Mr Robinson told the ECHO: “For all the money that's been put into people's hands to get people on bikes, for all the bluster about what's important, it was a pandemic [that changed how people view cycling.]
“I went into [Peloton] all green thinking cycling can save people's lives, save money and it's even good for people who aren't cycling. ‘Surely everyone will go for this?’.
“And then I realised that it's not that simple. People are ground into their own habits. Cars themselves are like family members.”
Mr Robinson believes a culture of “us and them” has been able to proliferate between cars and cyclists, therefore making it harder to close the schism and find a working balance for active travel.
He added: “We need to get car drivers on board. How we do that is we suggest better cycling infrastructure will make their journey better.
“We need to wrestle the argument out of the hands of the few and get it into everyday people and in the areas where infrastructure is getting done. We need to understand the value of cars.”
Mr Robinson lives near to where the contested West Derby Road pop up cycle lane was installed.
He believes it paved the way for a negative discourse between cyclists and car users, further entrenching the binary choice.
He said: "The West Derby Road became a case of us and them which is just modern vernacular. Culture wars and wanting an enemy.
“You need a collective for a long term strategy. You need to win hearts and minds. Getting more people on bikes, speaking to more car users, chatting to more businesses about getting stuff done.”
Ibe Hayter had a similar experience of lockdown and is hoping to see active travel expand further in his community in 2022.
In March 2020, he set up Cycle of Life, which works to encourage more people in L8 to take up cycling.
He told the ECHO: “I’d always had this interest to work out why people don't seem to cycle in my area. It saves you money, good for the environment, good for health. There were lots of positives but nobody was into cycling in our community.
“When I initially started Cycle of Life, it was to get people to overcome barriers. If there were reasons why they didn't want to cycle, I wanted to find solutions.”
Mr Hayter explained how many key workers in L8 were struggling to get to work due to the pandemic’s impact on public transport timetables.
With Cycle of Life he then sought to get bikes to key workers who needed them, while arranging group rides to raise confidence on the roads.
He added: “When you see other people doing something, it doesn't seem so strange and something that isn’t done in your community. That was the idea behind it.
“Once people started cycling, people were saying to me ‘it's like a whole new world’. There's places that in a taxi or public transport you've never stopped to look at. By cycling, you do the same areas and routes, but it's like you're in a new city. It's empowering for people on a micro-scale.”
Similar to Mr Robinson and Peloton, Cycle of Life sees the key to encouraging more active travel in discourse and setting an example.
In L8, new cycling infrastructure has been installed on Kingsley Road which Mr Hayten sees as a positive.
However he feels the lack of cyclists, residents and drivers being around the same table when plans are made can lead to furthering a divide.
He added: “Even though new infrastructure is positive, we need to think about how we get these messages across and how we work with communities.”
With millions already poured into pop up cycle lanes and headline active travel schemes set to continue at The Strand in the spring, there appears to be willingness to reinforce ambition with funding.
But the true cost of breaking down the ‘us and them’ culture that pervades active travel routes remains to be seen.
If anything, it’ll be a price that needs to be met as the city gears towards achieving net zero carbon by 2030.
