By Al Pagan
There are moments, cycling through Worcester, that feel like a gift. The river glinting in the morning as you ride along the riverside. Cutting through Gheluvelt Park or across Pitchcroft, through Diglis nature reserve, the shared-use pathways slicing you through the city with ease. Crossing the water on Diglis bridge, Sabrina bridge, Kepax bridge — each crossing opening up parts of the city that used to feel disconnected, the river glinting below. Smiling at people. Talking to people. Loads of people. You're not passing through in a tin box — you're in the city. You hear it, smell it, you're part of it. Getting around Worcester by bike is, quite obviously, one of the most brilliant things you can do — for your health, for your head, for the simple pleasure of not sitting in the same queue day after day.
I've been doing it for over twenty years. My partner Leisa and I raised our daughter without a car — we hire one when we need to, borrow one, tag onto friends' insurance. But most days, we walk and we cycle. We don't say that to sound virtuous. We say it because we've had two decades of watching how the city treats people who choose to move this way. And the gap between what's said and what's done keeps showing up in ways that are hard to ignore.
Leisa and I were heading to Manchester for the weekend. Train from Foregate Street. Leisa rides a cargo bike — fully loaded with our bags. The plan was simple: cycle to the station, lock the bike in one of the new Bikedok secure lockers at the Arches, get on the train. The lockers had been launched with a council press release less than a month earlier. "Cycling to Worcester's city centre just got a lot easier," it said. "Genuine peace of mind," said the Bikedok co-founder. Councillor Hannah Cooper stood in front of them for the photo.
We'd heard from other Bike Worcester parents that they'd tried using the lockers without success. But we were optimistic. This was the replacement for the free, covered bike parking inside Crowngate that had recently closed — a facility that had been oversubscribed for almost its entire existence. Surely the council's shiny new alternative would work.
The app took our payment: £20 for 64 hours. Then nothing. The locker refused to open. The booking didn't appear in the app. No confirmation. No QR code. Nothing.
We tried the support chat. It returned raw JSON — a mess of curly brackets and error codes, the kind of thing you see when a server is on fire and no one bothered to write the front end that hides it from humans.
We tried the support email. It bounced. The one and only address the app gives you when things go wrong — and it doesn't exist.
Leisa's loaded cargo bike sat unsecured at the public racks outside the station all weekend while we were in another city.
I'm a web developer. I build things that live on the internet. Sometimes my sites go down. When they do, I make sure they're back up within minutes. Because if you're charging people money for a service — if you're putting infrastructure in public space with a council press release — you make damn sure every single part of it works. You test the payment flow. You test the locker unlock. You test the support email. You test it again before the journalists show up.
It appears nobody did.
The support email address that bounces is not a minor bug. It's the absence of accountability infrastructure around the entire thing. There is no number to call. There is no backup. If something goes wrong — and it did — there is nobody. You are just a person standing by a bike locker with a train leaving in 10 minutes, with less money, a broken app, and a bike you can't secure.
Here's the thing: drivers don't experience this. If a council opens a new car park, someone has tested the ticket machine. The barrier works. If it breaks, there's an intercom button that connects to a human being. Because driving is treated as essential infrastructure. It's maintained. It's accountable. It's subsidised — to a degree that most people don't even register. The cost to the public purse of maintaining roads for private cars is astronomically higher per journey than anything spent on walking and cycling routes.
But active travel? Active travel gets the press release and then the shrug. It gets the ribbon-cutting and then the abandonment. The thing that was supposed to give you "genuine peace of mind" gave us a weekend of worry and £20 gone. And nobody at the council, and nobody at Bikedok, appears to have noticed.
Worcestershire County Council's own internal briefing slides, circulated to district colleagues, lay out the reality plainly.[^1] Two "red lines" from the current Administration govern what schemes can even be considered:
No loss of car parking spaces will be accepted.
No loss of road space will be accepted.
The same presentation notes that the County "has very few permanent traffic counters, and even less permanent active travel counters" — so the data to measure whether walking and cycling are working barely exists. It also acknowledges that Worcestershire is "amongst the last, if not the last transport authority in UK, not to charge for on-street car parking," which it describes as the "principle factor that incentivises car use and local congestion."[^1]
The council knows that free on-street parking drives car dependency. It knows it. And still it chooses not to touch it. Still it rules out, as a matter of policy, reallocating even a sliver of parking or road space to people walking and cycling.
You can see those red lines at work in the council's formal response to the LCWIP consultation.[^2] Bike Worcester submitted detailed feedback on all 23 proposed routes — the council's own engagement exercise. When residents asked for a direct cycle route along Hylton Road, the answer came back: "not considered deliverable within the available highway." A safe route on London Road from Spetchley Road to the city centre? "It is not possible to upgrade London Road for inclusive cycling, so cannot be added to the map." Ambleside Drive, a link to local shops? "The available width of the highway would not accommodate cycling facilities." Route after route, the same phrase: not deliverable within the available highway. When the starting assumption is that not a single inch of road space or parking can be touched, of course nothing is deliverable. That's not a feasibility assessment — it's a foregone conclusion.
This is the circle that never breaks. The council says active travel matters. Its own officers identify the policies that suppress it. But when the moment comes to do something — to give a fraction of the generous space allocated to cars back to other ways of moving — the answer is no. Before any scheme is even sketched, the red lines are drawn around the car. The words on the press release stay on the page.
A note on who's who: highways and the LCWIP belong to Worcestershire County Council — a body whose administration has only recently changed, so the red-line policy may yet shift. The Bikedok lockers were launched by Worcester City Council, a separate authority with an arguably more active-travel-friendly leadership. The City regularly says its hands are tied by the County. Bike Worcester has never accepted that argument, and for good reason. The City has its own levers, and it mostly chooses not to pull them.
When the City published its Active Travel Action Plan for 2025–28, Bike Worcester's response highlighted nine areas where the City Council could act independently of the County.[^3] Among them: a progressive car parking strategy using the council's control over its own car parks; a city-wide programme of secure on-street cycle hangars and transport hub parking; and a proactive stance on removing on-street parking bays to create space for parklets, cycle parking, or safe crossing points. These are not things the County can veto. These are the City's own decisions. The plan addressed none of them with any ambition.
And so we get Bikedok. A piece of infrastructure launched with a photograph, but not tested. A replacement for something that was free and always worked, now paid and broken. A service where the support email doesn't exist. The cycle repeats: build something half-finished → people can't use it → "see, no demand" → no incentive to do better next time.
I want to believe the words. I want to believe that the City Council and the County Council genuinely mean it when they say active travel is a priority. I've seen what good infrastructure looks like, and I've seen what it does to a place. Cycling in Worcester is already brilliant — imagine what it could be if the infrastructure matched the ambition.
So here's an invitation to every councillor and every officer whose name appears on these documents: come and try your own infrastructure. Download the Bikedok app. Put a bike in a locker. See if the support email works. Ride one of the LCWIP primary routes at rush hour with a child on a bike. Experience what you've built — and what you haven't.
And then ask yourself: does the care we put into this match the words we say about it?
If you believe active travel matters, build like it matters. Test like it matters. Answer the phone when it goes wrong like it matters. Because someone who tries to do the right thing — who puts their bike in your locker, or their child on your cycle route — and finds the thing broken — might never try again.
That's not just a failed locker. That's a door closed on a future you say you want.
We'll keep cycling. The river will keep glinting. The city is too good, and the people too warm, to give up on it. But we need you to mean what you say.
Stand by your word.
[^1]: Worcestershire County Council officers, internal briefing presentation, slides on "Active Travel" (red lines) and "Impact of COVID-19" (on-street parking admission). [LINK TO UPLOADED DOCUMENT]
[^2]: Worcestershire County Council / Jacobs, "Worcester LCWIP Stakeholder Engagement Exercise: Bike Worcester Response," May 2026 (document ref: B2367231-005). [LINK TO UPLOADED DOCUMENT]
[^3]: Worcester City Council, "Active Travel Action Plan 2025–28." [LINK TO UPLOADED DOCUMENT]