Help us publish the Dumfries Missing Links book

Cycling Dumfries was founded to campaign for better conditions for active travel in Dumfries so that everyone who wants to can walk, wheel or cycle for their everyday journeys.

For the past few years we’ve been looking into what we’re calling the Missing Links – the gaps in the network that form a barrier to people walking and cycling, where routes just end, without any alternative but to ride on a busy road, crossings that take ages to give you a green man, barriers to accessing traffic free routes that make it hard for wheelchair users or adaptive bikes, and nearby villages that are effectively cut off by a few miles of fast, busy roads with no provision for cycling at all.

Dumfries does have examples of some good infrastructure for some routes, like the Maxwelltown and Caledonian paths, and the recently built New Abbey Road track which has really raised the game for the area. But the problem is, these routes just don’t connect up, and there are loads of places in and around Dumfries where it’s really hard to cycle or walk to or from at all. That leaves people unnecessarily car dependent, and means we have problems with parking, congestion, and pollution which are causing problems for all of us.

Over the years, we have compiled a list of the worst of these missing links and we’ve looked at what the barriers are and come up with ideas about how to close the gaps. Now we want to get that information into the hands of the people who can make a difference. We think that the way to do that is to literally put it into their hands, in the form of a printed book. Something that’s harder to ignore than a few posts on a website or a PDF.

With the help of the D&G Climate Hub we’ve put together a professionally designed publication with all the missing links that really lays out where the problems are, with maps and photos. All the information they need.

The problem is, as you’ll know if you already cycle around Dumfries, there’s a lot of missing links - and that means a lot of pages. Printing enough copies to get them to the really key decision makers will cost us about a thousand pounds – and if we can print more, then we can reach more people. But that’s not the whole reason why we want to crowdfund this printing.

If you chip in enough to cover the cost of printing one copy then we’re offering you the option to say who you’d like to send it to, with your name, if you want that included. Maybe one of your councillors. Or your local community council. Or a council official. We think it’s going to be so much more powerful a message if it comes from someone local, someone who’s put their hand in their pocket to pay for it. That makes it much harder to ignore.

If you don’t know directly who you’d send it to then we can make suggestions based on your postcode or whichever of the missing links affects you most.

The more contributions we get, the more people we can reach, and the more progress we can make towards filling in some of the missing links.

And that, ultimately, benefits everyone. Because the more people walk and cycle, the more people feel able to leave their cars at home, even for just a few journeys, the better it is for everyone. Better for people who walk. Better for people who cycle. Better for people who still need to drive. Better for the planet. Better for Dumfries.