Vision King's Lynn has announced that "Work is advancing to the next exciting stage to deliver two new Active Travel Hubs in King’s Lynn to promote healthier, greener, and more cost-effective travel into and around the town centre." KLWNBUG had not seen the plans for more than a year, so we ask:

1. Are they primarily for Active Travel?
2. Are they even Travel Hubs?
3. Won't they fail like the two pilot cycle hubs?
4. Why haven't we seen the plans in over a year?

Let's explain each concern in turn:

Are they primarily for Active Travel?

These are being funded by the "Active and Clean Connectivity" budget of the Town Deal, which is one of several relatively small budgets that can be spent on cycling. These hubs seem to be using up most of that money. Last we saw, they had 55 cycle parking spaces each and the Enterprise Zone (aka NORA) hub had 56 car parking spaces. The primary active travel route network doesn't link to the hubs. You can see this on the councils' network map, where primary routes are in colour and secondary routes grey:

Hub 1 on Baker Lane is near bits of primary and secondary routes that aren't open yet. Hub 2 on the Enterprise Zone is near-ish an existing secondary route. None of those nearby routes are signed yet.

Are these locations desirable for active travel, or is Hub 1 mainly a way to continue the war on town centre shopper cycle parking and is Hub 2 a way to build KLIC another car park?

Are they even Travel Hubs?

The term "Travel Hub" means something. It's defined in Norfolk County Council's Travel Hub Strategy, as shown here:

Clearly, the Baker Lane one is very unlikely to have bus services and ticket sales. It's behind the toilets in a car park, not a "prominent, well-lit location". So it won't meet the minimum standards. We'll have to wait and see about the other components and the other hub.

Won't they fail like the two pilot cycle hubs?

A bit over two years ago, Vision KL or the councils replaced the busy cycle parking next to Boots with a "pilot cycle hub" in the Baker Lane car park. They installed CCTV, a bike shed, and a repair station... and the repair station was vandalised almost immediately and seemed never to get repaired. Soon after, it looked like someone drove into one of the bollards protecting the cycle parking:

Usage of this bent-and-bashed inconveniently-placed "out of sight, out of mind" cycle parking plummeted. November 2023 was the last time I saw more than 2 bikes parked there, not including mine. I know I'm not there every day, but I've asked the council several times for the usage figures and nobody has given them to me, so I suspect I'm correct in thinking usage is very low.

This isn't the first pilot cycle hub. Before Vision KL existed, the borough council opened one in St James Multi Storey, with CCTV and lockers, locked up overnight, with a big sign on the outside of the building and stickers on bike racks around Baxter's Plain:

It was just too far away from the shops for many people to choose to park their bikes there. They'd rather wait for a space outside the old Post Office or Majestic at peak times! Even people using the swimming pool just across the road still preferred the outdoor racks nearer to the pool and eventually CCTV was added to those too. Before long, the "cycle hub" in St James had become a storage area for Parking Operations signs and supplies, further discouraging anyone from using it. I think I only ever saw one person I didn't know using it.

Then there was a second cycle hub at the bus station as part of the KL Transport Interchange project. It had two-tier racks installed in a space that was too small, so bikes had to be lifted on sideways and crashed into a fence if you wheeled them out of the tilted top level, as the rack is designed for:

Instead of replacing that fence with a line of posts, they removed the cycle parking. 🤦 Let's hope they've learned not to repeat that mistake, at least!

Chapter 11 of the excellent current Department for Transport Cycling Infrastructure Design manual (LTN 1/20, cover below) says "Cycle parking, and routes to and from it, should be clearly marked, overlooked, well-maintained, well-lit and integrated into the built environment." We'll be checking the plans for that, but it's difficult to see how the proposed locations will be overlooked or integrated, and they're not on current cycle routes.

The manual says short stay parking should be "located close to shop fronts" and "small clusters of stands close to main attractors are preferable to one central hub" (except in retail malls, which neither of these are), while long stay parking "should still be close to the main entrances and easy to access from the local cycle route network". These plans are none of that.

The manual says shopper parking should be within 10m of the destination, day parking 30m, and overnight parking 100m. It depends where on the site it is placed, but it seems possible that no other building will be within 30m of the Enterprise Zone parking. Very few will be within 30m of the Baker Lane parking.

Why didn't we see the plans for over a year?

Who knows? I sure don't. One cynical suggestion is that these projects aren't for bike users, so they didn't see any reason to involve us. They include some doomed bike parking to divert yet more budget from cycling to things for cars, as we saw with the still-malfunctioning Strikes cycle crossing resurfacing a long section of the A148 while the cycle route is still uneven as heck. Or in this case, a 230+-space car park near KLIC.

And maybe for the future, when anyone asks about delivery of the more useful planned cycle hubs at Tuesday Market Place, the Railway Station and Baxter's Plain, then politicians would like to say "but we built two hubs and nobody used them"... but they shouldn't be able to say that with a straight face!

We told Vision KL and the councils that the pilot hubs had fatal flaws that needed to be fixed, but they pressed ahead without addressing the problems and the hubs failed. So now we're telling everyone that these new hubs will probably also fail, if Vision have not learned lessons from the pilot ones!

This doesn't mean that cycle hubs or travel hubs are bad ideas. When they're done properly, following the guidance from the Department for Transport and Norfolk County Council, they'll be well-used. But if the Vision or the councils botch them, don't even provide the minimal standard facilities and just shove them on some spare land or behind toilets in a car park, then failure shouldn't surprise anyone.

We would much rather see the hubs at Tuesday Market Place and Baxter's Plain built instead of these two. Or the money used to deliver more projects from the LCWIP, such as signing the route network, or building the section of the Purple route along the HGV-heavy Oldmedow Road that was recently postponed due to lack of funding.

Any Other Concerns

There will probably be other things which we raise once we've studied the updated plans more.

So, thanks for reading this far and we await the plans with interest. Watch this site!