Northampton Local Cycling & Walking Infrastructure Plan (LCWIP)

Consultation closing on 5 October 2025

Seven years since it was first started, the Northampton LCWIP is out for consultation West Northants Council (WNC). To respond, email LocalTransportPlan@westnorthants.gov.uk.

Key concerns and questions
  1. It’s 7 years since a plan was started, so why is this described as being at an “early stage”? The council still hasn’t delivered on the Abington Scheme for which it received funding in 2020. At this rate, it will be well over a hundred years before we have a proper walking and cycling network.
  2. The recently completed Local Transport Plan (LTP) says the council wants walking and cycling to become “the natural first choice for short trips”. Yet this LCWIP feels like an afterthought. Why wasn’t the LCWIP completed before the LTP?
  3. After all this time, why are there still key routes missing from the plan? There’s no route from Abington to the town centre, no route along Harlestone Road to Duston, and no route from Kingsthorpe to the station.
Proposed routes

We are told that the routes included in the plan are only “examples”:

“the proposals are in an early stage of development and give examples of what can be delivered. A later step will decide if they are actually possible to be brought forward.”

Yet some much-needed routes didn’t even make it into this very tentative plan! These include:

  1. A route from Abington to the town centre. This is difficult to understand, as the council is already committed to building a route along Abington Park Crescent yet there’s no plan link this to any route into the town centre.
  2. There’s no route along Harlestone Road to Duston.
  3. There’s no walking route from the station to the bus station
  4. There’s nothing about a route along Beech Avenue. This route would build on existing infrastructure, as it would:
    • link the Moulton Park to the Abington Active Travel Scheme via Bradlaugh Fields
    • link two of the town’s major parks
    • provide a route from this densely populated area to local schools.
  5. The route from Kingsthorpe to the Town Centre is given a single paragraph with practically no detail, and there’s no branch to the station.
Planning
  1. There needs to be a coherent tie-in between the LCWIP priorities and the timeline for the building of Northampton’s Sustainable Urban Developments (SUEs)
    • By doing this, developers can be asked to contribute towards key routes that will provide routes from the SUEs to the town centre.
    • Linking SUE development to the network development would make this more of an action plan and less of a theoretical document
  2. Planning policy needs to be revised to ensure that all future developments link properly to existing cycle routes. Currently our new developments are actually fencing off active travel routes and encouraging car use (see Scholars Green and other developments around Bradlaugh Fields).
Funding

We shouldn’t need to wait for specific funding for the small and obvious improvements. The Local Transport Plan prioritises walking and cycling, so small improvements should be carried out using the existing highways budget. The highways budget covers signage and parking for cars, so it should also cover signage and parking for bikes.

Signage

The LCWIP needs to include a coherent plan for signposting. There is no coherent signposting of walking and cycle routes throughout the town. Many are out of date, missing, or unhelpful. Only very committed individuals would work out (for example) how to cycle or walk to Kingsthorpe from Spinney Hill, even though there’s a good route.

Cycle parking

The plan should include the creation of cycle parking at all local shops. How are we going to encourage people to cycle when they pop to the shop if there isn’t anywhere for them to park their bike?

Our Charter outlines what really needed to make this plan more than just another policy document.

Make sure you have your say by emailing LocalTransportPlan@westnorthants.gov.uk