What's holding up Sheffield's cycle lanes?

Dear readers — six years ago, the Combined Authority asked people right across South Yorkshire to put their ideas on a map for how the city could be made friendlier for walking and cycling. It got a huge response, with tens of thousands of comments across the map.

Since then, other than the much vaunted Dutch roundabout and nearby roads, it doesn't feel like a whole lot has changed. So we asked David Bocking to take on the issue for the next instalment in Sheffield's Big Questions. What's been the hold up? Are pirates to blame for the delays? And what will the council do now it's been given a load of new cash to tackle the issue?

But first, your Tribune briefing, featuring an adorable young salmon, the latest twist in the Liberty Steel saga, and someone pressing Ctrl+A, Delete on an enormous scale.

Your Tribune briefing

⚖️Chris Brain, former leader of the Nine O’Clock service that met in Sheffield in the 1990s, has been found guilty on 17 counts of indecent assault. The jury is continuing to deliberate over a further four indecent assault charges and one charge of rape. The prosecution told the court that Brain recruited attractive women to be part of a “homebase team” to support him and his family – but also provide sexual favours – and that these women came to be known as the “Lycra lovelies” among members of the congregation. Brain has denied all the charges.

🐟Some great news from the River Don — for the first time in hundreds of years we now have proof that salmon are breeding in Sheffield. An Atlantic Salmon parr (think of it as a salmon toddler) was found during a survey this month, which means not only are the salmon making it up the river, but the conditions are good enough for them to spawn and complete the full life cycle. The Don Rivers Catchment Trust (DRCT) now wants to remove or modify two weirs in Oughtibridge to help the salmon travel higher, as well as cutting “notches” in all the weirs to help the young salmon get back to the sea.

👮We’ve all been there — a clumsy slip of the mouse and you’ve deleted that all-important file. But erasing over 96,000 files is a slightly different matter. That’s what appears to have happened at South Yorkshire Police, where a “mass deletion of data” took place in July 2023, destroying masses of bodycam footage forever (due to there being no backup solution). In a rebuke, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said that “SYP has not been able to provide a definitive explanation as to how the deletion occurred”, and told them to upgrade their data management processes.

⚖️High drama at the High Court yesterday as, yet again, Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Steel came back to face a winding up petition — something it’s managed to defer more times than we can remember. Liberty Steel, which runs plants in Stocksbridge and Rotherham, had managed to secure financial support said to be tens of millions from asset manager BlackRock earlier this week, and is hoping to pull off a “pre-pack administration” where they ditch the debts and start again. But lawyers for Liberty’s thoroughly fed up creditors revealed the government was already preparing to step in, and had lined up special managers to take it on.

It was just as Judge Barber was saying that they needed to take another couple of weeks to work out what both options would mean that, in a shocking reveal, the court were told that a government barrister was already present among them. The undercover advocate dropped the disguise and revealed that the government had the order drafted and ready to go. The judge told everyone to calm down (“there is too much at stake for the court to shoot blind”) and they’ll all be back for round 15 or whatever it is possibly as soon as later today. Read our full piece on Liberty Steel here.

Where Are Our Cycle Routes?

Still gradually appearing in piecemeal fashion, is the simple answer. Nobody in the world of transport planning talks about cycle routes much any more, for two main reasons: 1) most people don’t cycle very often (1.5% of trips in Sheffield are made by bike) and 2) cyclists have been given such a bad press in recent years that politicians think the public don’t want to hear any more about how they’re building “bloody cycle lanes that nobody ever uses.” (See below).

But that doesn’t mean cycle routes are disappearing. Around the UK, planners are now being asked by the government’s Active Travel England agency to provide safe and pleasant walking, wheeling and cycling routes, built to much higher standards than the scary red lanes of the past, painted on the road in the hope people would happily cycle with their shoulders inches away from buses and articulated lorries.

Sheffield Council has received a little over £120 million to spend on routes (and other infrastructure) for walkers, wheelers and cyclists up to 2027. This is an exponential increase in funding, more than ten times the amount than was typically given in the years before Active Travel England was set up in 2022, planners tell us. And the council are looking with some confidence at a further £300-400m from the government to spend on walking, wheeling and cycling in Sheffield between 2027 and 2035.