For cycle parking, the Tower Hamlets officer will pass on your request to the relevant officer in a neighbouring borough. However, there is no guarantee as to how long this will take or whether you will get a response from that borough. If it's obvious to you that your idea is in Hackney, for example, then it's best if you contact Hackney directly.

For street fault reports, the CTC website will automatically exclude your report from the listed reports under the 'Tower Hamlets Rangers' scheme; but don't worry, it's stil being submitted via their site to the relevant authority. It simply won't 'count' as a Tower Hamlets Rangers submission.

For the Audits you are advised to check carefully before you go out on site to do your audit that it is definitely within the borough of Tower Hamlets. As with the cycle parking, the Tower Hamlets officer will pass on your information to the neighbouring borough, but this may take some time and there may be little chance of anything occurring as a result.

No – there are costs involved with running any volunteer scheme, and there are plenty of reasons why it’s useful all round for local cyclists to let the Council know about where improvements could be made. This is useful when the Council makes the case for funding and when it wants to put in place measures on the street to encourage cycling. The Council will still send out engineers to look at suggested schemes, so this project is not replacing professionals with volunteers. It’s simply a good way of giving the Council the ‘heads-up’ because they cannot be everywhere all the time.

We want to be able to brief and train Rangers on the types of suggestions that can be made in this project, so that it’s of most use for Tower Hamlets Council. This will increase the chance of your suggestion being put in place, and helps to open channels of communication between the Council and volunteers. Being signed-up to the scheme as a Ranger also means that you’ll know what’s happened to your suggestion and what the Council is going to do about it.

Yes, at only 2% of journeys by bike there is a long way to go before Tower Hamlets experiences the kind of cycling levels found in The Netherlands, Denmark or even other parts of London!

The Council and TfL are continuing to put in large-scale schemes such as Barclays Cycle Hire across the borough for 2012 and the Cycle SuperHighways.

The Local Implementation Plan - which was put to extensive public consultation - sets out what the Council is doing for transport and can be viewed through this pdf LINK TO ‘LB Tower Hamlets' Final LIP2_For Upload.pdf’  More detailed information can also be found through the Council's Cycling Plan. As such plans are refreshed or updated further consultation opportunities will arise

As individual traffic schemes become ready for implementation - whether related to cycling or not - local residents are consulted, so watch out for leaflets through your door or notices in East End Life and on the Tower Hamlets Council website. If you have strong views on significant measures that could be put in place for cycling, contact your local councillor and consider joining the London Cycling Campaign.

These are all ways to put your views across about the bigger picture for cycling. But this Volunteer Rangers scheme is about small, lower-cost measures than can be put in place in a piece-meal and therefore flexible way as funds are found.

That's fine - we still have paper copies available via PDF files. If you are a logged-in you can see copies of forms for each of the three ‘reporting’ duties on the Street faults, Audit form and Cycle parking pages.

If you are doing Smarter Travel Help by delivering maps/leaflets, please just make a note of where you drop them off so that you can report this here.

As with most specialisms, to save time lots of acronyms get sprinkled in, and it’s assumed that everyone knows what they mean. Well fear not, here’s a quick summary:

CTC – Cyclists’ Touring Club. The name of the national cycling organisation that campaigns for better cycling conditions

FAQs – Frequently Asked Questions. (Sorry.)

LBTH – London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Greater London is split into 32 boroughs plus the Corporation of London (covering the City). Tower Hamlets is one of them and obviously the most relevant to this website. You can see the border of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets on the maps shown in the Rangers Home, Audits, Smarter Travel, and Cycle Parking pages on this site. Sometimes we refer to LBTH as Tower Hamlets Council which is basically the same thing; it simply flows a little better in the text (and generally people do know what ‘the Council’ is).

LIP – Local Implementation Plan. This is the document that Tower Hamlets Council produces to describe how it will implement the Mayor’s Transport Strategy locally within the borough. All boroughs must do this and they are renewed every few years. At the present time (2011-2012) the Mayor of London Boris Johnson produced a second Mayor’s Transport Strategy because he is the second democratically-elected Mayor of London (after Ken Livingstone who produced the first Strategy).

MTS – Mayor’s Transport Strategy – see above.

THW – Tower Hamlets Wheelers. They’re the local cycling group affiliated to the London Cycling Campaign (LCC).

Check the Latest News & Events page to find out about when the Council is next due to meet with Volunteer Rangers to give an update and discuss issues. When logged in you can also see which Audits have had a decision made on them by the Council at the Audits Submissions page.

If you have submitted a street fault report via www.fillthathole.org.uk and it is still under the 'Open Hazards' tab, showing up as 'Reported', this means that the Council has not actioned it yet. If you think that too much time has elapsed and it should state 'In progress' by now, or that it has been 'In progress' for too long and should have been completed and put under the 'Closed Hazards' tab (as 'fixed') by now, then please email sam.margolis@towerhamlets.gov.uk and he will endeavour to find out what is the situation, from his colleagues in Highways Maintenance.

Yes, there is a small budget to cover reasonable costs such as refreshments if you submit a lot of suggestions by making special trips, or for child-care. This must be discussed in advance, please contact us.

We will provide you with a puncture repair kit which you can take with you on Ranger duties. There is a list of bike shops in and near Tower Hamlets (this is not exhaustive).