Three MCA members, a dog and a beaver went to Ashbourne recently to talk to Ashbourne Community Transport, who run the vital Moorlands Connect service. The aim was to help plan their next publicity campaign. User numbers for the service are on the up, but we need more people to get on the bus to ensure its long-term future.

Last October, the County Council gave Moorlands Connect funding for the next two years, with an option to extend. It was good to see a county officer at the meeting to lend their weight to the new campaign.

Operating an on-demand service, which allows people to request bespoke journeys, brings different challenges than running a scheduled bus with fixed times and set stops. Accordingly, the priority over the next two years will be not just bringing more of the same type of user onto the bus but attracting new groups to help balance the flow during the day.

Moorlands Connect provides a vital transport option for school and college students who represent the majority of bookings twice a day but this does not always exclude other users especially those who travel to work.

The new campaign will focus on midday travel to ensure a good flow of users and is ideal for holiday makers and visitors allowing them to visit a range of attractions and venues without a car. This should not only improve the visitor experience but help local businesses and our beautiful environment by reducing the number of cars using our roads.

Read more: Connecting with Moorlands Connect

We offer a basic bike safety check / minor repair service at our monthly Repair Cafes, but in October we also helped out with the Chain Reaction project in Biddulph and Cheadle.

In Biddulph, we helped sort through over a hundred bikes ready for the Bike Sale and then gave residents a free bike safety check and basic repairs. Over 90 bikes found a new home that day, and the team were kept busy for three hours with a steady queue of customers.

Later in the month, we helped out again at Cheadle – checking bikes and promoting the bike marking service that Staffordshire Police offer. A number of bikes were provided free of charge to the local youth workers to help youngsters in the town.

Collaborating with a local women's refuge, volunteers from Moorlands Climate Action, the County Council's Waste Minimisation Project Officer, Gemma Wall, and Paulette Upton from Cheadle Town Council, I pulled together a basic bike maintenance and repair session which took place at Tean Road Rec in Cheadle on Saturday morning, 5th July.

Several young people from the refuge, who were keen to get involved and wanted a bike of their own, were invited along to the session where they engaged with the volunteers from Moorlands Climate Action during the workshop, which showed them some basic bike maintenance and repair skills. The young people each chose a bike that had been sourced by Gemma and her team from local recycling centres. They then worked on their chosen bike with the volunteers.

The idea for the workshop was to provide reclaimed bikes to people who need them, get more people cycling for better physical and mental health outcomes and give those engaging with the session some basic bike maintenance and repair knowledge that they could take away with them into the future.

All the bikes used on the day came from local recycling centres and were delivered to the rec ahead of the session by Gemma, who also provided helmets and lights as part of the project. One of the participants couldn't even ride a bike before Saturday so it was amazing to see him cycling around on his own bike after working on it with MCA volunteers Dave and Dan.

In total, seven children and young people from the refuge received a bike of their own, all for free. Paulette from Cheadle Town Council put up the gazebo for the event and provided tea, coffee, water and biscuits, which had been kindly donated by Morrisons supermarket in the town. It was a great team effort on the day with the beneficial impacts of improving local health inequalities and promoting positive environmental practices.

This might be the year that some small steps are taken towards more sustainable ways of getting around in the Moorlands – and then again it might not.  The new County Transport Plan is out soon, and closer to home, an exciting new cycling initiative is underway in the Moorlands. But over it all hangs the strained nature of national public finances and Reform taking control at County Hall.  

At present, the Government is working on its Comprehensive Spending Review, which is due to be published on 11 June.  The Campaign for Better Transport has been lobbying hard for improvements to public transport, focusing specifically on prioritising investment in local transport; moving to long-term funding settlements that would allow increased stability and security; and targeting needs-based bus investment in underserved areas, (Moorlands Connect being a classic example) to ensure every community has a reasonable level of service. They’re also pushing on other initiatives designed to redress the balance between climate-friendly transport and fossil fuelled alternatives.

As mentioned in our Spotlight article, the County Council is developing a new Local Transport Plan for Staffordshire, which aims to shape the future of transport, considering all the ways we get around, including walking, cycling, wheeling, public transport, rail, cars, and freight. This is supposed to help accelerate the shift towards active travel and to public transport; national funding guidelines dictate this; but the Reform Party is avowedly ‘pro-motorist’ and may yet have something to say on this. The Plan will go out for public consultation very soon, so there will in theory be an opportunity for us all to have our say. To keep in touch, you can go to their dedicated website page Let’s Talk Transport.

Despite increasing sales of electric bikes, Leek appears to have reached saturation point where cycling is concerned, although we would love to be proved wrong.  However, Leek is not the only town in the Moorlands and we are thrilled to be associated with Chain Reaction, a project run by Biddulph Town Council, Outside Arts, Staffordshire County Council and others to promote cycling across the Staffordshire Moorlands. Boosted at its launch by a long distance off-road ride to London by Biddulph Town Mayor, Nigel Yates, and companions, its motto is “Recycle, Ride, Revive – Pedalling for a Greener Future for the Moorlands”.  See their website above for full details.

It would be fair to say that, at the moment, the project seems to have many parents but lacks a clear overall guiding hand. MCA would like to support this, and there is funding available, but we await a clearer picture before we commit. In the meantime, we continue to promote an occasional cycle repair service at some of our repair cafés.

For those of us who care about sustainable transport, it’s good to see the government is running a consultation, or call for ideas, with a view to developing an Integrated National Transport Strategy. It’s targeted at transport workers, members of the public and organisations, so this is a good opportunity to get your views heard. The deadline is 20 February 2025, so those of us who want to contribute will have to strap our skates on promptly.

For more information, it’s worth seeing what the Campaign for Better Transport has to say, along with their line on Active Travel - Walking, Wheeling and Cycling. Another organisation to check out is Living Streets (formerly The Pedestrians’ Association). It has a long and noble track record, campaigning to make our streets safer, with some key successes along the way, such as the driving test and the provision of pedestrian crossings.

Locally, MCA participated recently in a discussion with key councillors and a senior officer in SMDC on how we could work together on climate issues. It was generally a very helpful and productive meeting but we seemed to get nowhere on providing facilities for cyclists, particularly in town centres, although in theory they support active travel. The usual response is that it’s a county issue but the exact division of responsibilities appears opaque to some of us. Maybe local government reorganisation will change this? If so, perhaps we should be working out exactly what we want, if we aim to encourage more people to cycle actively in Moorlands towns, rather than be confined to cycling as a mere leisure activity. What do you think? Should we have a cycle forum to determine what would be realistic requests? If you agree, please tell us what you think via the contact form below.
Cycle Forum Link

Those of us who have cycled extensively abroad are very aware of well-designed and signposted cycle lanes, which make it clear where cycles have priority over cars. The high point of this is the Dutch-style roundabout - a joy to cycle on for us benighted Brits. We applaud those local authorities who have had the foresight and courage to introduce them in the UK, despite the inevitable controversies caused by unfamiliar layouts and widespread unawareness of changes in the Highway Code that give priority to pedestrians and cyclists at road junctions, as part of the recently established hierarchy of road users. Such roundabouts may not be necessary in small Moorlands towns but better provision for cyclists is still needed, along with better public understanding of the new road user priorities.

Photo credit:  E. Dronkert, Signs of Cycling, Cropped, CC BY 2.0

The results of our summer survey on the Moorlands Connect bus service are now in. Although we weren’t in a position to run a proper passenger survey, we thought it would be useful to ask people away from the bus service if they knew about it, had they used it and what did they think about it.

With that mind, we set up a paper survey at all our stalls, and at other events we attended throughout the summer in a range of different locations. We also set up an electronic version with a click-through from our newsletter and website, although the response to this was very limited.

The results were interesting, although not entirely unexpected. Of the 40 responses, although most had heard of the service, very few (five) had actually used it. However, one of our primary aims was to find out why people were not using it, and the answers were revealing.

Those who had used the service had found it great, others had friends or relatives who benefitted substantially from it and a fair few, who said they had their own transport now, expected that they would probably use it in the future – the terms ‘brilliant’ and ‘excellent’ figured prominently, along with ‘lifesaver’ and ‘vital service’.

Of the barriers to use, primary reasons seem to be: lack of information, difficulty with the booking app, poor internet connectivity (a particular problem in the Moorlands) and a restricted phone service from the bus company.

We appreciate that many of these issues are outside the control of the bus company but we will share the results with Moorlands Connect and particularly with the County Council, who are responsible for county-wide transport.

Click Here for the Full Results