Portrait project celebrates Shoreham’s pop-up cycle lanes – in pictures

Adam Bronkhorst, a member of community group Shoreham-by-Cycle, has photographed and spoken with more than 50 people using the pop-up lanes in Upper Shoreham Road, asking them to share their thoughts on the scheme. He said the project helped prove how much the scheme was being used. “Some people don’t take my word for it when I say they are really busy,” he said. And this is backed up by the numbers: data from West Sussex County Council, which is monitoring traffic, shows that 407 cycle journeys were made on Tuesday, September 29. Even on Friday amid heavy rain, more than 100 journeys were recorded, Mr Bronkhorst said. When it comes to the feedback from cyclists, he said the main word that kept coming up was ‘safety’. “Most people say that they are riding on the road when they didn’t do so before because they feel safer,” Mr Bronkhorst said. He has photographed people ranging in age from three to 78, and said there were particularly high numbers of women and children cycling on the road. The monitoring data shows that usage peaks at between 8am and 9am and again at 3pm, showing that many are using it to get to and from school.

His own son uses the lane to cycle to Shoreham Academy, and Mr Bronkhorst said his family has used their car a lot less since lockdown. Mr Bronkhorst said the cycle lanes in Shoreham were being received ‘a lot better’ than those in Worthing and Brighton, pointing out that no car space had been taken away to create the lanes in the town. While he and the rest of the Shoreham-by-Cycle group ‘definitely’ want to see the cycle lanes remain in place going forward, they said some improvements should be made – in particular, making the lanes wider. But he said: “It’s a great start. It is doing it’s job by encouraging more people to cycle, and people who wouldn’t normally cycle.”