Green Party would 'take billions' away from roads to invest in cycling

The Green Party has told cycling campaigners that it would take billions of pounds away from road programmes and invest that into cycling.

Speaking at Cambridge Cycling Campaign’s meeting last week, the city’s Green Party candidate Rupert Read pledged his support to increasing cycling infrastructure projects if he is elected.

“If you want to have someone who is not just pro-cycling in the context of being pro everything else, for someone who really believes in cycling, walking and public transport, and is willing to take hard decisions to show that, then you need to be voting Green,” he told the meeting.

The Cambridge News reports that Dr Read said that the party would spend huge amounts of money on sustainable transport projects like cycling.

Dr Read was just one of the Prospective Parliamentary Candidates speaking at the event, all of whom agreed to increase the amount of funding in cycling.

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Lib Dem’s Julian Huppert, the city’s previous MP, said that his party would commit to spending £10 per head on cycling, as did the Conservative candidate Chamali Fernando and Labour’s Daniel Zeichner.

Dr Read and Miss Fernando were the only two in favour of hire-bikes in the city, with Dr Huppert reflecting that the failed Green bike scheme in the area led to a catalogue of problems including thefts.

“It’s a massively expensive thing to do,” he said. “The problem with running it on a smaller scale in somewhere like Cambridge is a lot of those administrative costs just get really, really big.”