Cycle planning papers from UK campaigners' conferences and seminars

The papers were talks given at the federation's conferences and seminars, written up or presented as slides and collected afterwards. Speakers came from local groups, national bodies such as CTC and Cycling England, universities, councils and consultancies. The topics ran from design standards and local transport plans to health, helmets, trams and cycle maps. Each conference moved round the country, hosted by a local group, so the list also reads as a map of where campaigning was active at the time.

The record below keeps to what the programmes stated: the event, the place, the date, the speaker and the title. It does not summarise what each paper argued. Where a fuller record of a paper exists on this site, the entry links to it. The papers themselves belong to their authors.

The spring conference of 2001 was held in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. Don Mathew gave a review of cyclists and pedestrians, and John Franklin gave a paper titled "CCN's Campaign for High Standards". That autumn the conference moved to Chesterfield, with a policy update from Don Mathew, Malcolm Wardlaw on "Stepping stones to a better cycling future" and Richard Armitage on travel plans and cycling. The same year Michael E Jackson won the Falco Lecture Prize at Velo-City 2001 with a paper on promoting cycling as a normal part of a healthy lifestyle.

In autumn 2002 the conference went to Liverpool, where Kevin Mayne, then director of CTC, spoke on the future health of cycling.

The autumn 2003 conference was held in Sheffield, at Conisbrough. It had the broadest programme of the early years: Dr Alison Hill on cycling and health; John Parkin and Robin Field on a code for planning, designing and maintaining roads and tracks for cyclists; Derek Palmer on local transport plans; Roger Geffen on "Look Bike, look forward"; Hugh McClintock and Dave Morris on cycles and trams; and Graham Allsop on the Sheffield cycle map.

Spring 2004 took the conference across the Irish Sea to Dublin, where Shane Foran of the Galway Cycling Campaign spoke on Irish bicycle planning. In April 2004 a separate workshop on helmets was held in Birmingham, with papers from John Franklin and Guy Chapman.

The conferences of 2005 were in Godalming in the spring and Warrington in the autumn. In autumn 2007 the conference was in Oxford, and John Franklin gave a pre-conference seminar for local authorities on the principles of cycle planning. Warrington hosted again in autumn 2008.

On 29 and 30 May 2009 Manchester held two linked events. The first, "Cycling Futures", was a seminar for professionals: John Franklin returned to the principles of cycle planning, and speakers from Arup, Cycling England, the Local Government Information Unit, Essex County Council and Leicester City Council covered infrastructure design, local transport plans and promotion. The second day, "Cycling as a Solution", was a conference for campaigners, with talks on health, the economic benefits of cycling, climate and community cycling, and workshops on communication, fundraising and influencing local decision makers.

In spring 2012 Birmingham hosted a seminar called "Winning the Arguments". The speakers were Professor Bruce Lynn, Dr Peter Ward, David Dansky, Malcolm Wardlaw and Martin Porter QC, and the programme put medical and legal speakers side by side. A separate page covers Winning the Arguments in more detail.

The autumn 2012 conference was in Bristol. Dr Adrian Davis spoke, Roger Geffen came from CTC, and the programme included Cyclescape, which describes itself as an online campaigning toolkit for cycle campaign groups around the UK. The conferences from 2012 onwards are listed on the conferences page.

Some of these titles are more than twenty years old, and the guidance they discussed has since been replaced. Even so, the list is useful in two ways. It shows which questions kept coming back: design standards for roads and tracks, how local transport plans treat cycling, the evidence on health and helmets, and how groups put a case to a council. It also shows who was making those arguments, and which national bodies, councils and universities were in the room.

The fullest record on this site is the page on the principles of cycle planning, the seminar John Franklin gave in Oxford in 2007 and again in Manchester in 2009. For anyone preparing a response to a council scheme, it is a sensible place to start before opening the current design guidance.