RHH NHS Trust

Dear Diane and Helen

You are doing so much but your easiest win is to raise the matter of your neighbouring cycle-walkway - only 800 m from your main patients' entrance

You wrote, "I am sure you are aware that much of the local “green” infrastructure is beyond our direct control."

It is even more beyond, my direct control but we can all ask for our local Cycle-Walk Mudway to be transformed, as a very easy win in our fight for a more sustainable society.  We can speak up for a community that is less addicted to finite fossil fuels that are also dangerously enhancing the natural greenhouse effect to make for a runaway greenhouse effect that was so devastating for our twin or sister planet venus (see Wikipedia).

You wrote, "there maybe underlying factors as to why it is not suitable as a cycle path."  I can assure you, Diane, it has been used for decades as an unofficial cycle path.  I have used it for years, as have others but you have to use a mountain bike to get through the mud in the Dudley section less than a mile from your hospital.  It can be made and USED as an active travel route for staff, patients and visitors, like me.  But you do have to be assertive and insistent and be very patient but, certainly not passive or aggressive of course!

You are doing so much but I would appeal to you that you please join me in emphasising the urgency of finishing what you call the "Kingswinford Railway Walk" so that we can all use it to get to and from RHH by cycle and on foot instead of always by car.

Everything else you are working on is brilliant, as I have read.  However, please Diane speak to the WMCA and Dudley Council about giving our cycle-walkway - only 800 metres from the hospital - a much higher priority in their active travel list of work to be completed.  Otherwise, we will continue to be passed over, ignored, seen as unimportant and thus forgotten for many more years.  We are already the poor relation, the forgotten Cinderella to Big Brother Brum that gets all the attention.  £62 million for their cycle-walkways last decade but only for them.  Please, let's stand up for ourselves!

At your next meeting that is open to the public, may I be allowed to ask for a verbal report on what the trust has done in progressing our hospital cycle-walk mudway so it can be used without wellies or boots or mountain bikes - please?

Who has spoken to whom and what was said, please?  Could I meet with you Diane, to show you what a disgraceful state the cycle-walkway is, when it could be such a superb facility and asset for us all to enjoy using?