How can I help?

Join us!

Of course we would like you to join us. That will make our position stronger when we speak to the local councils. Click here to see how you can become a member.

Becoming a member is great, but not enough to get Reading to change. We need your help since we are an all-volunteer organisation. You can help us in many ways.

Observe!

All the people involved in the campaign are cyclists and we keep our eyes open, but we don’t cycle everywhere and we don’t see everything. The same is true for the planning of new infrastructure.

Planning Applications are listed on the Council website and while we do keep an eye on those we are not able to read everything nor do we always fully appreciate the consequences for cyclists for all new plans. So help us out by being critical of your surroundings and let us know when something deserves our attention.

And keep an eye on the Council’s planning documents to check what is happening in your area. And if you see something let us know via emailFacebook or Twitter. You are the one using these roads so you know best!

Campaign!

We need help campaigning. This can be done in all sorts of ways.

A lot of our members and sympathisers are great letter writers. They write letters to newspapers to point out dangerous road situations for cyclists, badly designed infrastructure or bad planning. This is absolutely vital. We need to keep our issues in the press to keep up pressure.

Some lobby their ward Councillors on their own accord and write objection letters when they see traffic planning that doesn’t cater for cyclists. All these actions are important and we urge you to do the same.

It also helps to coordinate our actions on specific campaigns. When one person writes a letter it is easy to ignore; when fifty do, it is not. When we start a thrust for a specific issue we will make this known via email, Facebook and Twitter. Keep an eye on those and join the peleton!

Volunteer!

Occasionally we have a stand at a public event. Here we try to make people aware of our organisation and hopefully interest them. We would love more people to help us out with this.

The same is true for our newsletters. We hand deliver these and we could use help with this. If you don’t mind delivering a few of newsletters in your area let us know. We are currently actively looking for people that can deliver newsletter in the Woodley and Coley areas. We would appreciate it!

These are other occasions when we need some help, for example our annual cycle census in Bike Week. If you are interested please email us and we will put you on the volunteer list. This does not oblige you to help; it just means you consider it OK if we ask.

Come to the committee meetings!

We alternate monthly committee meetings and open meetings every third Wednesday of the month. Our committee meetings are open to all members and you are welcome to join and give your input – we can use the knowledge and creativity you bring.

We do have vacant committee positions, and if you are interested you can come to a committee meeting to see what it is like before you commit to anything.