Ride to Work Week 2020
Get ready for Ride to Work Week 2020!
From 23-29 March 2020 we’re challenging you to get your colleagues riding to work. Already a regular rider? Register on Love to Ride to log your miles and win prizes!
For every ride you log over 10 minutes you’ll be entered each day to win a £600 local bike shop voucher, lights, gloves and more.
If you share your story of how you replaced a car journey with a bike journey you can even win a £1,800 Ribble e-bike!
Share with your colleagues and register today
8-16th June 2019 – Bike Week
Bike Week is the UK’s annual awareness-raising week to showcase everything that’s great about cycling!
Bike Week aims to get many more people across the UK to give cycling a try. So we are encouraging people like you to get out on your bike between Saturday 8 to Sunday 16 June 2019.
Why not experience ‘everyday’ cycling – whether that’s riding your bike to work, school, to the shops or for leisure – and see how easily it can be a part of your daily life. Hundreds of great events will be taking place suitable for people of all ages and levels of experience to help you enjoy cycling, such as family-friendly rides, bike maintenance workshops, bike breakfasts and group rides.
Visit the website to see what’s happening near you.
You could even organise an event for friends, colleagues or your local pub or club. Simply register with Bike Week to benefit from:
• Event listing promoted across the UK
• Free public liability insurance
• Promotional materials and tips to make the most of your event.
Want to get involved with Bike Week at your workplace? Find out more at the Bike Week website, or download an events pack.
#BikeWeekUK #7DaysofCycling
October 2018 Uni bike rides
Join us for a bike ride every Wednesday afternoon from the 10th October!
Cycling is a cheap, healthy and green way to travel around Colchester.
Each ride will show you some mainly off road and quiet routes to useful local destinations. While on the rides we will point out useful information for students cycling in the UK for the first time, and cycling tips to build confidence and help you cycle more safely.
- Town Centre – to access shopping, eating, services, night life and lovely green spaces, heritage and the arts.
- Off campus student accommodation so you know how to visit your friends by bike! (Including Meadows, University Quays, The Maltings, Greenstead House, Avon Way and Forest Road
- Wivenhoe – as a great place to go locally for an evening or weekend out with good pubs, lovely eating places, art galleries, Wivenhoe Bike Kitchen and lots of interesting sustainability projects
The final ride ‘See Me’ will focus on cycling safely thought the winter months.
For more information about cycling in Colchester visit www.cyclecolchester.org.uk and the Uni’s cycling pages and Essex Blades Cycling Club’s facebook page for more about the support the University offers to cyclists
You will need your own bike. If you haven’t got one yet, Re-Cycle sell refurbished second hand bikes at the Freshers fair. Be sure to get there on time as the bikes sell fast!
Bookings for the bike rides will be accepted up to one hour prior to the start of the ride.
May 2018 – Walking Month
May is national walking month so a great time to focus on promoting walking at your workplace!
Here are a few ideas for joining in in walking related activities and promotions.
Jane’s Walk Colchester returns for its 8th year!
Friday 4th to Monday 7th May
On May Bank Holiday weekend, Jane’s Walk Colchester returns for its 8th year – local walks led by local people on local themes; all given free, in celebration of the late urbanist and activist Jane Jacobs (1916-2006). It’s a great weekend for staying in town!
Find out more and download the schedule of walks from the Walk Colchester website
#TRY20WITHUS
Living Streets’ month-long celebration of walking takes place throughout May!
During May we want to see as many people as possible give walking everyday journeys a go. Living Streets offer 20 top tips to incorporate more walking into your day plus lots of interesting facts and figures to keep you motivated.
Why not organise some lunchtime walks with colleagues or walking meetings?
Colchester Town Centre walking quiz
If you are based near the town centre use the quiz questions to organise some lunch time walks or set your colleagues a daily walking challenge!
Walk the Talk at North Colchester Business Parks
If you work on the business park or Severalls, help us promote Walk the Talk, 12 local walks of differing lengths, that give you information about how much time it will take, how many calories it will burn and number of steps. So you might want try Love Your Heart, or the Crescent Loop, do the Tesco Hop or go for a longer Highwoods Country Ramble. However much time you have available there will be a walk to suit you.
Rate your walk
Tell Living Streets about your everyday walk and help create #walkingcities across the uk. Whether it’s a walk you do every day, or a stroll you take while having a crack at one of Living Street’s fun #Try20 tips – tell them about it and they can build a picture of the state of our Walking Nation.
Walk to School Week is 21-25 May
If you have got kids, focus on 21 – 25 May and incorporate walking into your journey to school, whether all the way or park away from school and stride the rest of the way in. Take Living Street’s pledge, get top tips, enter their prize draw – and be part of the best walk in the best week of the year.
Find out more about Walk to School week
Happy Shoes day fundraiser
On Tuesday, 22 May 2018 thousands of children and grown-ups around the country will be wearing their happy shoes.
Why? They all want the right to walk to school safely, with fewer traffic jams and less toxic fumes in the air. They will be taking part in Living Street’s event; Happy Shoesday which encourages more children to walk to school and raises vital funds for their work.
October 2017 Uni bike rides
Join us for a bike ride every Wednesday afternoon from the 11 October from the University. Choose from a variety of rides with different focuses!
Cycling is a cheap, healthy and green way to travel around Colchester. There are lots of off road and quiet cycle routes that you can use if you aren’t confident to cycle on the roads.
We are working with Essex Blades Cycling Club and the University to offer bike rides for staff and students throughout October to help highlight useful routes, build confidence and familiarise students new to the UK with the highway code and other useful information to help them cycle safely.
If you would like to go on one of the rides please complete the booking form below. You will need your own bike. If you haven’t got one yet, Re-Cycle sell refurbished second hand bikes at the Freshers fair. Be sure to get there on time as the bikes sell fast!
Visit www.cyclecolchester.org.uk for more information about cycling in Colchester, the Uni’s cycling pages and Essex Blades Cycling Club’s facebook page for more about the support the University offers to cyclists
Bookings for the bike rides will be accepted up to one hour prior to the start of the ride.
Summer 2017 Bikeability courses
*Update* The Bikeability sessions will take place at Cpl Budd VC Gymnasium off Berechurch Road. Please email saferessexroads@essexhighways.org to book a place. Please don’t complete the form below! Thanks.
Colchester Travel Plan Club in partnership with Cycle Colchester and Safer Essex Roads Partnership are offering Bikeability sessions again this summer. We are still firming up the venue but are taking expressions of interest for Learn to Ride and Bikeability combined levels 1 & 2. There will be a £10 charge per participant.
Learn to Ride is aimed at anyone from 5 years upwards who isn’t able to cycle. The 45 minute session is a great confidence booster and the instructors usually get the participant cycling on two wheels by the end!
Combined levels 1 & 2 Bikeability is for children from 9 years old to adults, who want to improve their confidence to start cycling on quiet roads. The 8 hour course (over 2 days, 4 hours each day) covers road positioning, communication with other road users, recognising hazards and passing parked vehicles/side roads.
It is highly recommended that parents undertake Bikeability training too, so that you are aware of the good practice your children have been taught and can reinforce it when out cycling with them – you will also be surprised at how much it teaches you and how aware you become of the bad habits you may have got into!!
Either ourselves or Safer Essex Roads Partnership will be in touch soon to confirm the venue and send you the actual booking form.
Signups are now closed
15 June – National Clean Air Day
The first ever National Clean Air Day falls on Wednesday 15th June.
Air quality has been in the media a lot recently as the evidence of the health impacts of air pollution, particularly from motorised vehicles is now very clear, with old people, unborn babies, children and those suffering from lung and heart problems the most vulnerable.
In Colchester alone 143 early deaths every year are attributable to air pollution.
As a town with an air quality problem in specific areas including the town centre (see more about Colchester’s air quality problem and the Air Quality Management Areas), we are very keen to support this initiative and the Clean Air Day organisers have provided heaps of free resources to help us.
Everyone who drives has a responsibility to contribute to reducing air pollution and there are small actions everyone can take that can contribute to making a big difference.
Please use the day to raise awareness of the causes and health impacts of air pollution and ask your colleagues to pledge to make a change to their travel behaviour on the 15th June.
With just one hour of your time, you could:
- Forward the social media message and information to your communications team and ask them to promote the day internally and externally including signing up to the Thunderclap
National Clean Air Day Social media resources
- Put the posters below up around your workplace
Fact2 – Pollution damages our hearts
Fact3 – How to avoid worst air pollution
Poster – Leave the car at home
- Share these leaflets with your colleagues
- Encourage your colleagues to pledge online to make a change on the 15th June at www.cleanairday.org.uk/pledge
There are 4 pledges to choose from
Leave my car at home
Turn off my engine whenever I can
Walk my children to school
Share tips on how to cut pollution with others.
- Promote AirTEXT a free alert service highlighting high pollution level days in Colchester so people with heart and lung conditions can take action if needed. AirTEXT alert service
If you can do a bit more?
There are lots of other ideas and resources available to help you draft a message from your chief executive or managing director, to hold an event, or talk to people about turning off their engines. Look at the resources below for further information.
There are other resource packs for schools and healthcare providers packed with ideas, posters, templates and key messages to share.
Go to the Clean Air Day website for more information.
Colchester Cycle Challenge 2017
We move swiftly from walking in May to cycling in June where our Colchester Cycle Challenge launches on the first day of National Bike Week.
Five miles is recommended as a reasonable distance for people to cycle and recent research shows that regular cycling can halve the risk of heart disease and cancer. Cycling doesn’t only benefit your health, if you use it as a means of transport you also get reliable journey times, often a choice of routes not open to car drivers, and the opportunity to introduce activity into your daily routine without the cost and time needed to go to a gym!
Most of urban Colchester is covered within five miles, so the Colchester Cycle Challenge is a good opportunity to promote cycling and its benefits within your workplace.
The Challenge!
Open to all Colchester businesses and organisations, the Colchester Cycle Challenge runs from the 10th – 25th June.
The challenge can be used to encourage and support people new to cycling to either get on a bike or cycle more, as well as to challenge the regular and experienced cyclists to push themselves to cycle further/more regularly.
Can your organisation top the cycling leaderboard? Can you pit one department against another to see who is the cycling champion?
As our overall aim is to encourage more people into the joys of cycling, we are offering everyone the chance to be rewarded for their efforts. Prizes will be awarded in the following categories:
Movers – Beginners
Shakers – Regular cyclists
Groundbreakers – The competitive hard core!
Active Travellers – Cycle to work/to a meeting at least twice during the challenge.
Plus a BIG SHOUT OUT for the organisation that gets the most colleagues cycling and collectively cycles the furthest!
Help, Encouragement and Motivation.
Sometimes people are a bit nervous about cycling and just need a little nudge of encouragement.
To help colleagues new to cycling to get started, share the Cyle Colchester website with them where they can find information about how to get help to fix their bike, route planning and Bikeability confidence training. www.cyclecolchester.org.uk
To encourage colleagues to take part, could you organise a lunch time bike ride to a nearby café? Could you offer staff a free bike check at work? A free bike breakfast as a thank you for cycling always goes down well? Or how about some sort of prize draw or random selection of a daily cyclist for a prize? Could you offer to buddy new cyclists and help identify and then try out their route to work? Contact us if you are interested in offering Bikeability confidence training sessions at your workplace.
Get creative and invite your regular cyclists to contribute ideas on how others who don’t currently cycle could be encouraged to.
Contact us if you want hard copies of the Colchester Cycle Map or Get On Your Bike leaflet, both can be found electronically as well (via the links)
It may be worth sharing the link to the Essex Cake Escape – a fun way to combine cycling to cycle friendly cafes with free cake! There are cafes locally in urban Colchester suitable for family rides with children, plus cafes across Essex for longer distance cyclists.
Then for additional family cycling fun at the weekend there is the Cycling Centurion Treasure Trail in High Woods Country Park.
Taking Part
We are using the Active Essex Workplace Challenge platform for this challenge and all cycle journeys can be logged either directly on the website or via the Active Essex app. Both Leisure and Active Travel cycling can be logged.
To join the challenge simply …
1) LOG IN (if you already have an account) or SIGN UP at Active Essex Workplace Challenge
2) Once you are signed in go to LEADERBOARDS
3) Click on COLCHESTER CYCLE CHALLENGE
4) Click on JOIN CHALLENGE Log your rides either online or download the Active Essex app.
Enjoy the challenge!
Walk the Talk in North Colchester Business Park
Walk the Talk, 12 local walks of differing lengths is now available to businesses working on the North Colchester Business Parks.
Each walk has its own name and includes details of its approximate length, number of steps, calories burned and time it will take.
So you might want try Love Your Heart, or the Crescent Loop, do the Tesco Hop or go for a longer Highwoods Country Ramble.
Whether you have twelve or fifty minutes to spare there is a walk for you. Get out for a breath of fresh air at lunchtime or take your team out for a walk to come up with some inspirational blue sky thinking while on the move.
Download the Walk The Talk poster.
