The Strawberry Line - Active Travel Route success story in Somerset

16 May 2024

The Guardian  16 May 2024   Laura Laker

‘It’s unbelievable the difference a path has made’: how volunteers are building a cycle network a yard at a time

In the past two years, multiple sections of a hoped-for 76-mile rural cycling and walking route spanning Somerset have sprouted up around the small town of Shepton Mallet, seemingly every few weeks.
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“It’s placemaking and community enrichment in a way I don’t think any of us realised it would be,” one of the brains behind the change, the Somerset councillor Ros Wyke says. “It’s unbelievable the difference a single path has made.”

Active travel routes offer one of the highest-return transport infrastructure investments going, delivering on everything from health to rural tourism, access to employment and education, and to the environment. And yet in the UK it can be fiendishly hard to deliver them -

- a sentiment which resonates meaningfully with those in TBI who have been working since 2014 to create an Active Travel link between Avoch and Munlochy to enable walkers and cyclists to avoid the fast traffic on the busy A832.  This remains an active project, and we hope that greater involvement by Highland Council may lead to resolving the issue of landowner consent which has been the main cause of delay.

Read the article about the Strawberry Line

Strawberry Line website