Agenda item - Chairs Communications

3.1         The Chair provided the following communications:

“Officers have been very busy in recent months responding to Government consultations, progress updates and bidding for funding.

As part of the DFT Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy consultation, a response has been submitted that focused on a number of themes including road maintenance, traffic laws and enforcement and road safety training and education.

We took the opportunity to reinforce the need for change in relation to;

-       Pavement parking legislation

-       Driver training for large vehicles – which are doing locally

-       Increases in uptake of Bikeability and pedestrian training – for which there is a lot of demand.

The Transforming Cities Fund is a £840m fund for non-mayoral city regions outside London.  It has a focus on increasing productivity and access to jobs by improving intra-city routes with an emphasis on public and sustainable transport.

The council led on the preparation of the bid on behalf of the Greater Brighton City Region with a priority on the coastal strip from Worthing to Seaford, including the A259.

An announcement of the shortlisted regions is expected by the end of July. 

We have submitted an update report to the DfT on all of the progress being made in relation to the Access Fund for Sustainable Travel that promotes access to education, employment and training.  Among the many successes of this programme are:

-       Visits to over 2,500 residents to discuss their travel habits and options

-       21 travel events with local businesses

-       Delivery of cycle training and maintenance courses for adults.

The project has now begun work in the Lewes Road corridor before moving on to the Eastern Road corridor.  

The council has been accepted onto a Horizon 2020 consortium bid for funding for research into ‘user-centric electric vehicle charging’. 

We have been working with the University of Sussex, Tangent Energy – a company specialising in portable battery power based at the Sussex Innovation Centre and Ricardo, the Shoreham based company that has already helped us identify areas of spare grid capacity and the best areas to site the ‘rapid chargers’.

The other cities in the bid consortium are Barcelona, Grenoble and Brussels.

The focus of the bid is the need to explore ways to meet surges in demand in a city like ours that hosts so many events, as well as other potential solutions to provide user focused improvements to the electric vehicle charging network in the city”.