A petition for Posties on Pashleys

The Royal Mail is hardly the most popular decision-maker in the UK these days.  If they're not loosing your Christmas card from Aunt Mary in Australia, they are putting up the price of a stamp or busy closing your village post office.  The way the UK press goes on and on about it sometimes you'd think that the closure of a sub post-office is a crime akin to the rape of your Grandmama...

But a recent Royal Mail story did raise my interest - by the end of this summer they will have ceased their contract with world famous Pashley Cycles of Statford-Upon-Avon to provide new postal delivery bikes, and, of the quarter of national postal rounds which currently take place by bicycle a new delivery method will be introduced - a van.  Postmen in the UK have been on their bikes some 120 years, but by this summer there will be very few left. 

To me, the idea that the Royal Mail bikes will be replaced with vans and cars is such a backwards step on so many levels - will the new vans be built in Britain like the current bicycles are? I doubt it. Will they relieve congestion, be faster in urban areas, help to fight our national obesity epidemic, free up parking spaces, be as cheap to run, not consume valuable fossil fuels and be run tax and duty free? No, no, no and no again. What a shot in the foot.


There is a petition on the 10 Downing Street website calling on the Government to pressurise the Royal Mail to ensure that those posties who do wish to continue cycling can do so without any repercussion, and that when the time comes the bikes are not just scrapped but are sent to a re-cycling project.  I've signed it and I'd urge you to do the same:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Royalmailbikes