Cyclist.ie elects new Chairperson

Mike McKillen was the first chairperson of Cyclist.ie – The Irish Cycling Advocacy Network – from its foundation in February 2009. At our Council meeting on 12 March he announced that he decided to get off the ‘bike’ in order to let new legs pedal it into the future. Seven years in the saddle is long enough, particularly since as Flann O’Brien wrote in ‘The Third Policeman’, if you sit in a saddle for too long you fuse at a molecular level with the leather!

Colm Ryder (from Dublin Cycling Campaign) was nominated and elected unanimously as our new Chair at the Council meeting on Saturday 12 March and has taken over from Mike. Colm has plenty of energy and ideas so the steering and direction of the ‘bike’ are in good hands. Mike will still be involved in Dublin Cycling Campaign and with whatever has to be done in Cyclist.ie.

In handing over Mike said “I wish Colm well in the role. He has a great bunch of volunteers and an able National Cycling Coordinator in Dr. Damien O’Tuama”.

Mike is pictured above on the left, on his own bike; Colm is on a Dublin Bike, on the right

The Bike Wars Are Over, and the Bikes Won

When I accepted Mayor Bloomberg’s offer to become Transportation commissioner, I told him I wanted to change the city’s transportation status quo. The DOT had control over more than just concrete, asphalt, steel, and striping lanes. These are the fundamental materials that govern the entire public realm and, if applied slightly differently, could have a radical new impact. I saw no reason why New York couldn’t become one of the world’s great biking cities — or why it wouldn’t want to. But the act of actually achieving it launched the bitterest public fight over transportation in this city since Jane Jacobs held the line against Robert Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway half a century earlier. By the time the fight localized — in October 2010, when police attempted to control hundreds of dueling protesters for and against a new bike lane along Prospect Park — The Brooklyn Paper called the proposal “the most controversial slab of cement outside the Gaza Strip.” Read article

See also: Inside the Story of How Cycling Changed New York