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What £1.4bn buys: 1,800 miles of cycle lanes or one big roundabout

What happened to Chris Boardman’s plans for the UK’s biggest cycle route network in Greater Manchester?

Almost exactly a year ago, Chris Boardman – the Olympic champion turned walking and cycling czar – revealed a bold vision: Greater Manchester was to turn itself into a Dutch-style cycling paradise by building a huge, joined-up 1,000-mile network of walking and biking routes called Beelines, after Manchester’s civic symbol, the worker bee.

A year on, the network has changed its name to the Bee Network after a rather embarrassing copyright infringement, and has now expanded to cover 1,800 miles. Yet so far, only only one tiny section – a bit of towpath in Wigan known as the “muddy mile” – has actually been started, and the first wodge of money has already gone.

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