Good green news for Bristol!!

Some good green news for Bristol today (3 pieces in fact)!! Bristol will be the first UK Cycling City, after winning £11.4 million of government cash with plans that intend to:

Create the UK's first on-street bike rental network
Establish a 're-cycling' scheme that repairs bikes and provides them free of charge to deprived communities
Build state-of-the-art facilities for cyclists commuting to the city centre
Create a dedicated cycleway to link the suburbs with the city centre
More than double the number of children receiving cycling training
Develop a Personalised Travel Plan programme, focusing on changing the way people conduct short journeys to work (see here and here for more)

Well done to all involved in winning this cash!! (Would have been even better if the pot of money had been bigger of course!).

Plus the local press reports that rail links to Portishead could feasibly be updated and up and running by 2014 ('Rail link 'could be running by 2014'', Bristol Evening Post, 19 June). Plus Bristol's compostable food waste will no longer be sent hundreds of miles by lorry to Dorset for processing after 2010 as a new composting facility just outside the city should be operating by then ('New 20 yr contract to compost food waste', Bristol Evening Post, 19 June).

Most of the work is still to be done, of course, in all three areas above, to make plans reality in an appropriate way. And then there are areas where there are no adequate plans for: efficiency; renewability; environmental limits; meeting needs; strengthening community; fairness...but more on these aspects of sustainability on other days.