Among highlighted measures will be the partnership of Essex County Council and Sport England to launch the Essex Design Guide last year which promotes the creation of walkable communities and connected cycle routes at the very earliest stages of town planning.
Existing, new and proposed infrastructure measures that make up the £15m South East Local Enterprise Partnerships Local Growth Fund (SELEP LGF) sustainable transport package will also be revealed to conference attendees. Cycle County, Active County 2019 is the 7th annual event in the Cycle City, Active City event series, an annual conference organised by Landor Links and hosted by Essex Highways, which aims to increase cycling and walking within the UK’s towns, cities and counties.
It is the UK's premier networking event for public and private sector professionals tasked with enabling, implementing and improving better provision for active travel, and embedding its use for more short journeys and more parts of longer journeys.
The focus of the conference is on walking, cycling and other active modes of transport, and the benefits such transport can bring to communities across the country such as better mobility, improved health, cleaner air and greater social strength and cohesion.
In previous years this event has been hosted in Manchester, Leeds, Leicester, Newcastle and Birmingham and now the event is coming to Chelmsford – with a focus on how planning cycling and walking routes can help counties, not just major urban centres of population.
Two directors at the Department for Transport, Stephen Fidler, Director of Local Transport, and Rupert Furness, Deputy Director of Active and Accessible Travel, will be keynote speakers on the opening morning of the conference followed by a Q&A session.
Christopher Heaton-Harris, Minister of State for Transport, was due to be keynote speaker but events now require him to be in the House of Commons.
This address will be followed by a panel discussion chaired by Esther Kurland, Director of Urban Design London. The panel will consist of Cllr Kevin Bentley, Deputy Leader of Essex County Council and Cabinet Member for infrastructure, Tim Hollingsworth, Chief Executive of Sport England, Sílvia Casorrán, Cycling lead in Sustainable Mobility of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, and Mac Ferrari-Guy, Founder of Bikestormz Nation, an activist-led cycle education group.
The event is hosted by Essex Highways, a partnership between Ringway Jacobs and Essex County Council. The event is sponsored by Active Essex, another Essex County Council partnership agency which aims to reduce inactivity in the county.
Cllr Kevin Bentley, Deputy Leader of Essex County Council and Cabinet Member for Infrastructure, said: “Essex Highways is pleased to host this unique event. Our objective is to make it easier for people to travel across Essex, bringing communities together and connecting people to services, employment and learning opportunities. If we are to limit congestion, keep people and local goods deliveries moving while at the same time reducing pollution, then we must embrace cycling and walking as alternative transport.”
The event is sponsored by Anglia Ruskin University where the conference will take place in Chelmsford on Thursday 5th September and Friday 6th September.
The other conference sponsor is Forward Motion, an initiative funded by the Department for Transport to encourage people to think differently about the way they travel around south Essex.
The conference is supported by The Department for Transport, engineering solutions consultants WSP, jobsintransportation.com, Local Transport Today and Mobycon, a cycle path design company from the Netherlands.
Among the confirmed speakers are Mark Jenks, senior urban designer of Midlands and East Sustrans, Helen Akpabio, Sustainable travel planning manager at Essex County Council and Andy Martin, urban design advisor, Transport for London.
Jason Fergus, Director of Active Essex, which is supporting the event, will also be speaking at the conference about Essex’s whole system approach for tackling inactivity across the county.
He said; “I am delighted, alongside my colleague Tim Hollingsworth, Chief Executive of Sport England, to share some early findings of the Essex Local Delivery Pilot understanding local community need, behaviours of inactive residents in Essex and how important active travel is. This agenda has a big part to play in influencing behaviour change and encouraging people to move more.”
All conference attendees, who are drawn from across Europe, are invited to take part in a four-mile cycling tour of Chelmsford. These tours have proved very popular at previous conferences and city residents may see large groups of cyclists enjoying the tour while the conference is on.
For in-depth details of Cycle County, Active County 2019, and for tickets, which are still available, go to http://landor.co.uk/cyclecounty/programme.