Membership Survey Outcome

Thanks to all those members who completed the survey. It has proved very helpful to inform us of what we should do; there is a short summary below, followed by our proposed plans to take forward club group rides under the ongoing restrictions.

We had responses from 104 of our current 281 members, so 37%. Of those, a bit more than half (57) are currently riding in an ad-hoc group. The breakdown of responses was as follows:

Ride preferences:

New Arrangements

So, the proposed new arrangements are as follows:

Starting from Sunday 27th September, initially for Sundays only, we will move to a more “turn up and ride” system, but with necessary additional steps:

• Everyone who attends completes a very simple registration in advance using a form on the website so we have the Test and Trace data required.
• Riders turn up at Hornbeam and report to a marshal on arrival. They are allocated an assembly area by ride, and are divided into groups.
• Medium and Medium Plus rides only – see later comments on short and long rides.
• Each ride fills up as groups of 6, with the 7th starting a new group, 4 car parking spaces away in the same bay.
• Before the first ride sets off, there might need to be a bit of balancing between groups for each ride, managed by a marshal.
• Rides leave at 10 minute intervals. If one ride catches another then, by agreement, one ride stops and waits for a period to allow a gap.
• There are no nominated ride leaders, so route finding is a group responsibility.
• Rides will be open to all members regardless of whether they are currently riding in an ad-hoc group or not.

If this system is sufficiently popular and it works well enough then we would do the same for Wednesdays, but as there is no defined ride programme for Wednesdays it would also depend on sufficient volunteers as marshals and setting a route as “Ride Sponsor” rather than “Ride Leader” as more than one group might do the ride.

For Short rides, it is assumed that a ride leader is often/usually needed. Whilst there are some volunteers already (thank you!), that means there is an issue about numbers as we can only have five riders per ride leader to form a group of 6. As the numbers involved appear to be reasonably small, the proposal is to put those interested into a WhatsApp group and hopefully the volunteer ride leaders can manage groups that way. Simple registration is still required. We will email those who expressed an interest.

For long rides, the numbers seem small so the same approach is proposed, but self organising rather than with volunteer leaders. Simple registration is still required. Again, we will email those who expressed an interest.

We hope that this revised approach better meets the needs of members. It does depend on the volunteer efforts of a few and it might need adjustment as we learn to cope with the new normal. Please be constructive with feedback and be safe and sensible on rides as much as possible. If you have other proposals or comments, please email .