Council set to spend £100,000 on hiring a new officer to improve walking and cycling

The council is set to spend £100,000 on hiring a new officer to improve walking and cycling in the city.

Worcester City Council wants to spend the money on hiring a dedicated active travel officer whose role would be to beat the drum for walking and cycling around the city.

The holder of the new role would be expected to support and develop walking and cycling projects in Worcester, champion the city’s various bike hire and cycling-to-work schemes and promote existing routes and help design new ones.

The cost for the three-year job would be around £100,000.

The council’s policy and resources committee meets in the Guildhall next Tuesday (February 8) to discuss the plans.

Committee papers say the dedicated active travel role will work in a similar way to the council’s environmental sustainability officer – a role created in the wake of the council declaring a climate emergency in 2019 – which has since helped develop a new environmental strategy for the council to use for the next decade.

The environmental strategy includes a handful of projects and initiatives that see walking and cycling as the most important part of tackling congestion and dangerous levels of pollution in parts of the city.

Councillors have already agreed to set aside £50,000 on building and improving facilities at its buildings – including secure cycle parking and changing rooms at the Guildhall, Museum and Art Gallery in Foregate Street, Astwood Crematorium and its Sixways depot – to allow more staff to cycle to work.

Work started last week to build a new walking and cycling bridge across the River Severn in Worcester.

The centrepiece project – in a number of active travel measures that will total more than £9 million – will be built from the city’s Gheluvelt Park to the former Kepax landfill site.

The multi-million-pound work, the case for which will be put forward to councillors in March, would see work carried out on canal towpaths between Diglis and Sixways in Worcester, the extension of riverside routes south towards the Ketch and new walking and cycling routes routes serving Ronkswood.