Grants awarded for Reading ‘green’ travel projects

A total of eleven organisations across Reading have successfully secured grants from the Council’s Sustainable Travel Challenge Fund for this year.
Successful groups will deliver a range of initiatives from campaigns that encourage walking and cycling, to the introduction of loyalty schemes for people who use sustainable travel around town.

It is the second time Reading Borough Council has offered groups across Reading the opportunity to bid for cash as part of its Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF). Last year it was Caversham’s ‘Beat the Street’ which grabbed the headlines as part of the first round of grants.

Successful charities, businesses and voluntary groups were those who scored well on LSTF objectives. They are:

• Launchpad proposes to help those with either a history of homelessness or at risk of homelessness to start a new way of life by providing in house cycling training along with a second hand bicycle, plus the opportunity to join a cycling club and take further training.

• St Martins Catholic Primary School aims to achieve a permanent change in attitudes so that walking or park and stride become the preferred journey to school. It promotes walking to school through mapping and way markers for pedestrian routes to the school.

• Grace Church, Caversham plans to install a cycle shelter to encourage the hundreds of people using the building each week to cycle rather than take the car on what is often a local journey within Caversham.

• Reading Bicycle Kitchen offers a ‘fix it yourself’ bicycle maintenance project where cyclists can hire a work stand and get hold of tools and advice as needed.

• Reward Your World will build on the success of last year’s Challenge Fund project where it developed a smart phone app to promote and encourage sustainable travel in Reading. This second phase will incorporate new features into the app including gameplay techniques for individuals to publish their travel activities, sharing information on traffic issues and incidents, extending the loyalty scheme for Park and Ride and car sharing, and enabling people to access to the app via their preferred social media.

• University of Reading will develop and pilot an urban design audit to better understand the quality of cycle journeys in Reading. It will aim to produce a design guide to show how to create places that enhance and encourage cycling.

• University of Reading Students’ Union plans a new cycle shed and shelter as a work base to enlarge their current project, Unicycle, which collects abandoned bicycles from around the campus and, using volunteers, repairs them to loan out to students.

• Readibus will run a scheme, ‘The Virtual Readibus’, that researches through case studies the feasibility of some people with restricted mobility making journeys by mainstream public transport with the help of a Readibus guide.

• CTC plans to set up new adult cycle clubs and to forge links between existing youth cycle clubs and other groups to reach and engage the wider community into cycling. The proposal includes particular consideration for minority groups.

• MPIE Ltd proposes a high quality freight journey planning solution across the Reading Borough, aiming to reduce congestion and free up road space for bicycles and public transport and reduce HGV traffic in sensitive areas such as residential areas and schools. By its nature this project will help reduce carbon emissions.

• Reading Voluntary Action Group aims to promote its building as an active travel hub, including providing shower facilities to people using the building and working nearby. The group will also help to overcome other key barriers to active travel, including safety and lack of fitness, by running fitness courses targeted at those who do not normally exercise regularly.