June 2012 Street Talks by Ben Whitelaw, The Times - Maintaining the pressure: What's next for #CycleSafe. Brought to you by Movement for Liveable London -
movementforliveablelondon.com
Movement for Liveable London Street Talks - Ben Whitelaw 11th June 2012
1. MAINTAINING THE
PRESSURE:
what’s next for #cyclesafe?
Ben Whitelaw
Communities Editor
@benwhitelaw
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19. 35,000 pledges of support
10,000 points on our crowdsourced map
7,000 reader stories
4,000 emails to MPs
Thousands of #cyclesafe tweets
Hundreds of #ilovemybike photos submitted
Before we started our Cities fit for Cycling campaign http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cyclesafety/ in February, cycling was not on the Government agenda. Fast forward six weeks and that is radically different: an inquiry into cycle safety has been scheduled by the House of Commons Transport Committee and the Department of Transport have committed to devising a national plan to encouraging safer cycling http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cyclesafety/article3342688.ece. As far as progress goes, you couldn't get more dramatic. The Times campaign is a fantastic example of digital campaigning in an age in which newspapers have yet to grasp the power of social media for change. The numbers speak for themselves: 32,000 people have pledged their support with name and email address, 7,000 contributed reader stories about their experience of cycling http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cyclesafety/article3314591.ece#tab-5, about 30,000 tweeted using the #cyclesafehashtag and 3,500 emails to MPs from our public campaign page http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cyclesafety/contact/Our carefully tailored online campaign page brought about a swell of support across the web and triggered a debate in Westminster Hall which was attended by 77 MPs http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cyclesafety/article3330616.ece (on a good day there are 20 MPs attending a debate like this one). We've followed this up with a crowdsourced map that allows users to pinpoint that exact pothole they would like to see fixed, which has received over 6000 submissions http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cyclesafety/contact/ and will allow us to work with local authorities to improve the state of cycling in the UK. To put that into context, other campaigns, for example The Evening Standard's Dispossessed Fund and The Telegraph's campaign for numeracy and literacy, have achieved less in a longer period of time. Such has been the take up on the campaign that the Guardian has endorsed the campaign in their editorial http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/27/cycling-safety-campaign-casualty-rates and other media outlets have rallied around the issue. We have created a campaign that has united rival media organisations As far as campaigns go, you can't get more powerful than that.