Joint working with Somerset County Council.
In the early part of March the BACC team met with the Somerset County Council (SCC) Transport Policy team to discuss the possibilities of creating a joint working partnership.
As you can see from the attached photo, the BACC auditing team met with SCC Technical Lead Officers (TLO’s) and three ‘new’ employees, Active Travel Officers (ATO’s). This combination of knowledge & experience added with our shared passion to see a transformation of cycling & walking infrastructure within Bridgwater areas is an exciting new partnership.
We set up an agenda to discuss our joint approaches to active travel initiatives and the potential to produce ‘joint’ cycling and walking route feasibility studies. Could we combine BACC’s on the ground cycling audit work and local knowledge with the SCC transport team leadership and overall document governance? In short, we determined that we potentially could.
BACC; prepare the route groundwork, create basis mapping, conduct a public survey, take pictures, suggest numerous design interventions, review land registry, ownership, and film a route video.
SCC: Govern the route selection, create the feasibility study documentation, review ecology, support public survey, review Public Rights of Way (PRoW) and create detailed area and route maps.
Following several presentations and a thorough detailed discussion, we agreed to formulate an action plan to prepare feasibility study guidance and from there find a way to jointly work to create Bridgwater cycling & walking feasibility studies
