Another Saturday morning spent replying to email from people worried about cycling to work in September. We’re happy to offer advice on a route, where they can get more help, to go out for a ride with them. But it’s not enough, and frankly, we're worried too. [thread]

These are the sort of things we're hearing: ‘I’d normally be too scared to cycle in Haringey, but I have no choice’. ‘When you cross over into [x] borough, you suddenly feel safer and more relaxed - why can’t Haringey be more like that?’

Even on the often very convoluted ‘quiet’ routes we can suggest, I know there’s a high likelihood of an encounter with someone who’s rat running and wants to get past as fast as possible at all costs regardless of your safety.

These sort of one-off encounters with dangerously antisocial people are enough to ruin your day, or might be scary enough for someone new to cycling that they give it up forever. We’re here to help and we’ll try our best, but honestly it can feel uncomfortable for us.

I wish I could say ‘follow cycleway (x) and you’ll have an easy and pleasant ride’ but I'm afraid Haringey's almost total lack of safe cycle routes on main roads and almost universal through traffic access to residential areas rules that out.

With the bar set this high for entry into cycling in Haringey, and the level of attrition so high due, presumably in part, to people being put off by one too many scary encounters, it’s probably not surprising that TfL stats and @HSscorecard show cycling in Haringey has declined

Over the last few months we’ve seen loads more people cycling in Haringey. We're seeing far fewer now the traffic is back. When the schools are back in September traffic will be worse than ever and I fear we will be in serious trouble

We’ve seen that people here will cycle when they have safe places to ride. Now even central Government is pushing for more of these safe places to be created. We will shortly see some improvements to existing cycle infrastructure in Haringey

But for now if you ask us we will try our best to help. But it feels very wrong that the safety of people in this borough is dependent on the advice of our volunteers’ knowledge of routes, rather than those roads being made safe