Way ahead
1 The government, road safety organisations, the NHS, local authorities, cycling organisations and the MET Office should coordinate campaigns to raise the awareness of cyclists to the hazards of cycling in freezing conditions. Re-establishing the Think TwICE campaign would contribute to this objective.
2 Employers should adopt flexible working practices so that cyclists can choose to cycle when the risk of ice has passed rather than feeling pressurised to cycle to work at a fixed time.
3 The MET Office should, in accordance with the recommendations submitted to the MET Office to improve ice forecasting, set out at https://icycleweather.wixsite.com/iceandcycling/2-ice-forecasting-paper
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Significantly improve the detail and accuracy of ice forecasting to bring in line with almost all other weather predictions such as rain, cloud, wind, UV levels and temperature. This should include hourly forecasts using individual locations and maps showing the hourly distribution of ice. These improvements will be in place of the current situation where ice is often subject to a generalised forecast for a very wide area with no specific start or finish times.
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Publish accuracy targets for ice forecasting and performance against these targets-to give cyclists confidence in the forecasts.
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Publish road surface temperatures – to remove the public’s confusion that ‘temperature’ forecasts are a reliable guide to ice risk.
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Publish the ice forecasts as a mobile app.
4 Local authorities to carefully consider the treatment of cycle paths to mitigate the ice hazard e.g.
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Recognising that when building cycle paths arrangements for treatment during icy conditions are to be taken into account
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Progressively considering treatment of existing cycle paths on a priority basis and
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Ensuring that best practice is applied to treatment by means of an open exchange of experiences between all the local authorities
5 Weather forecasters and mapping organisations should cooperate to produce a phone app that reliably forecasts weather along the route of any planned cycling journey. There should be particular emphasis on ice and other high risk weather conditions Repetitive journeys such as commuting should be able to be stored and recalled. There should be a function to overlay gritted routes.