"It's just too dangerous": Popular cycling event cancelled due to "grave state" of roads

The cycling club behind a popular Cambridgeshire cycling event has called of this year's edition due to the dangerous potholes that cover the route.

Speaking to the BBC, the club secretary of the Histon and Impington Bicycle Club, Chris Davie, described the state of the roads on the Strawberry Community Cycle Event route as "grave" and said it would be "very dangerous to cycle through".

The club feared that participants in the family-friendly event — which has been running since 2015, attracting up to 400 participants, and offering four routes ranging from seven miles (11km) to 55 miles (88km) — could be injured in falls caused by the poor state of the county's roads.

Mr Davie said the event, held in September, is a "fantastic social event bringing the local villages together" but would not be held this year as "the state of the roads is just too dangerous".

"Everyone loves it and they're really disappointed we've had to cancel it this year," he said. "It's just too dangerous for families and cyclists to ride the route.

"It's about protecting the safety of families and cyclists, and with the potholes you can easily come off, break a bike, damage yourself as well as getting in the way of other traffic by trying to avoid potholes. It's very dangerous — you sometimes take your life in your hands — and I'm an accomplished cyclist."

Cambridgeshire County Council said it was sorry the organisers had "chosen to cancel the event" and emphasised it had enjoyed "working very successfully" with the event "over a number of years."

"However, we are dealing with a large number of potholes across the county and cannot unfortunately focus all our resources on a single event," a spokesperson said.

"We are constantly working to repair potholes and keep Cambridgeshire's roads safe for all — we fixed 45,000 potholes last year alone — but resources are a constant challenge.

Mr Davie accepted that "the local council has done what it can to fix what it can" but compared road maintenance to dentistry. "Unless you maintain it continually you end up with these deep cavities in the road that need a patchwork quilt trying to fix them, and that's just not an adequate solution," he said.

In the past couple of weeks we have reported about the struggles of Ride the North sportive's organiser, battling with the council to get road improvements in order to allow his August event in Aberdeenshire to go ahead safely.

Last week, Neil Innes was left in disbelief after visiting a road he was considering redirecting the route along, to avoid more serious defects, only to find it had been 'repaired' using a sea of loose chippings.

Aberdeenshire Council later told road.cc there had been a "slight delay in undertaking the sweeping part of the process" of surface dressing. However, Mr Innes' concerns with the council went beyond just this incident as the council said it would not repair other defects on the route nor let the organiser hire a contractor to fix them himself.

Elsewhere in Scotland, in February, we reported that a cyclist had raised the alarm over "dangerous" potholes on 2023 World Championships road race routes.

Last month defects were repaired, in works described as "crude" by local riders, a member of Tadej Pogačar's Slovenian team reportedly saying the Scottish roads are the "worst they'd ever seen".