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Letter from City Councillor Ben Bradnack

Dear Editor,

The Cambridge Cycling Campaign has a duty to campaign on behalf of cycling: a purpose which it fulfils with admirable energy and commitment.

But I was struck by your apparent failure, in a recent edition of your newsletter, to recognize that ward councillors such as myself also have a duty to campaign, in our case on behalf of resident electors.

We are happy to support the contra-flow principle where it is appropriate, but have opposed current arrangements to which our attention has been drawn by residents of the streets involved, whose views we have sought to represent.

The account you have published travesties the views of Labour councillors for Petersfield. This would have been evident, had you also printed the newsletter article to which you took exception, rather than just your version of it. Although it is probably now too late for your readers to make a proper comparison between your account and what appeared in the Petersfield Voice, I am copying to you the original article, and another now going to press, which we believe represent the views of the majority of residents in the streets affected.

I hope that you will have the courage to print these, as well as this letter, so that the issues can be debated in a less one-sided manner than has so far been the case in your pages.

Yours sincerely,

Ben Bradnack
Labour City councillor for Petersfield Ward

Response to Councillor Bradnack’s letter

Mackenzie Road is likely to get a proper island to avoid situations like this where a car blocks the way in for cyclists. However, County Council officers will not accept that there is room to do the same in Mawson Road despite precedent elsewhere in the city and in Kingston Street the planter is to remain stubbornly in the way of progress.
Image as described adjacent

In his letter regarding the continuing nonsensical fuss about converting a few streets in Petersfield to two-way use by cyclists, Councillor Bradnack seems to see ‘residents’ and ‘cyclists’ as two different species. His letter patently fails to see that the people whose cycling he so vehemently wants to restrict in some of his ward streets are his resident electors and those in neighbouring wards. The signatures which we collected and which he misrepresented came from the people using the streets. Cycling in back-streets is a local activity.

In the original article there was only one paragraph referring to the Labour opposition and Petersfield Labour flier, which runs to a whole page. We did give a reference to it, so people could look at it, and do so again here: www.camcycle.org.uk/map/location/15460/

Councillor Bradnack claims to support cycling, but we find it hard to understand how. This is the councillor, remember, who objected to the presence of cyclists at the public meeting called to follow up the issue. Not for the first time. he is obstructing modest improvements for cycling despite three of the streets not being substantially different from neighbouring streets which both cars and cycles can use in both directions, like Gwydir Street, for example.

We challenge Councillor Bradnack to say in which of the remaining one-way streets in his ward he will now support two-way cycling

In his letter, he claims to support contraflow cycling. Therefore we challenge him to say in which of the remaining one-way streets in his ward he will now support two-way cycling.

I repeat what I said in the original article: If simple, effective things like contraflow cycling can’t be done without all this angst, we despair of Cambridge ever making any serious progress for cyclists.

David Earl