Guardian Bike Blog video

Boris Johnson’s jolly-good-fun image is so bound up with cycling that it’s easy to forget that his road management strategy as London mayor has always deferred to the London motorist. His 2008 transport manifesto led with pledges to “put the commuter first” by “making traffic flow more smoothly,” and it was clear long ago that the Conservative mayor had no intention of allowing his cycling policies to result in car, van and lorry drivers slipping down the road-user hierarchy. This video clip showing a section of one of Boris’s “cycle superhighways”.

It has taken the Netherlands 25 years to build up its culture of respect among its road users, and the law plays a big part too. Read more

On Monday, the fashion student Min Joo Lee, 24, became the 13th cyclist to be killed in London this year. She was hit by an HGV while navigating the Kings Cross one-way system near York Way.

The blogger Olaf Storbeck wrote that Joo Lee’s death was sadly predictable given the “appalling” road layout in the area. He called it one of the “worst death traps for cyclists in London”. Read more

DUBLIN HAS been ranked within the top 10 cycling cities in the world.

The Danish authors of the list said they were “surprised” that Ireland’s capital ranked as the ninth when they looked at 80 major cities around the world.

They said the city was undergoing a “grand rebound” in cycling thanks to “a wildly successful bike share programme, visionary politicians who implemented bike lanes and 30km/h zones, and a citizenry who have merely shrugged and gotten on with it”. Read more

Local cycling federation and tourist organisation warn that bike congestion in the Danish capital can make riding intimidating. Read more

Most arguments against bike lanes are absurd. Consider this: we have wide roads everywhere to accommodate cars, most of which carry only one person. On either side of many of those roads, we have pedestrian sidewalks. In most large urban areas, we also have bus lanes and transit systems such as subways and rapid transit. When cyclists ride on roads, drivers often get annoyed. If they ride on sidewalks, pedestrians rightly get angry. Full article

Riding in an assertive position in the middle of the lane is recommended as safe practice in certain situations – but it can provoke hostile reactions from other road users

Guardian Bike Blog

Full article

A comparison of the Dublin & Melbourne bike hire schemes

Outdated one-way systems designed for a car-dominated world mean even the most law-abiding among us risk a £30 fine … see Guardian Bike Blog