Pathways for Progress
MAG asks the next Government to mandate discrete motorcycle policies in all local transport plans.
Transport policy increasingly focuses on the need for sustainability. Unfortunately, sustainable transport as a concept currently lacks any kind of definition. Conversations quickly reduce to a list of three favoured options rather than a consideration of what makes a transport system sustainable.
Sustainability is the intersection of three fundamental pillars: economy, society and environment. To achieve sustainability there will always be trade-offs between the three in a careful balancing act. The conversation, however, seems to be increasingly reduced to focus purely on environmental concerns creating the very imbalance that is the enemy of true sustainability. The lack of coherent policies supporting and promoting motorcycling over the last two decades has led us to a position where a quarter of local transport plans fail to acknowledge even the existence of motorcycles, with many more only viewing them as a road safety problem.
Motorcycles can and should play an influential role in a diverse multi-modal transport system.
MAG has consistently campaigned for pro-motorcycling transport policy and regularly offers help and advice to policymakers based on our Pathways for Progress document: https://wiki.mag-uk.org/images/9/96/Pathways_For_Progress_v2.0_2019_10_30.pdf
Individuals can be forgiven for a lack of understanding of a transport mode of which they have no direct personal experience. But that lack of understanding and interest results in the benefits of motorcycling being, at best, under-exploited but in most policy areas, wilfully destroyed.
Government must mandate clear guidance on pro-motorcycling policies within the sustainable transport vision. These policies must be introduced to all Local Transport Plans.
A healthy and growing community of riders will be one benefit of pro-motorcycling policies, certainly, but wider society will also benefit. Benefits can only be delivered if our next Government is prepared to Move on Motorcycling.
MAG is asking riders in the UK to get creative in their approach to placing motorcycling in the general election discourse. The ‘Act Now’ page recently added to the MAG website offers a template letter for riders to use when asking candidates for their views on motorcycling issues. Please visit the ACT NOW page now to see how you can get involved.
If you have never been a MAG member, have let your membership lapse, or are thinking you need to save some money by not renewing this year, we would love you to join, re-join or stay with us. If, like us, you are passionate about motorcycling, want to see motorcycling continue in the future, and want to preserve all that you love about it, we hope it will be an easy choice to make. MAG’s strength is in numbers. The riding community can demonstrate strength when it unites. If you want to say you played your part to defend motorcycling, please… join MAG today