One fifth of adults worldwide will be obese by 2025, predicts study
UK is on track to have the highest obesity levels in Europe, while a fifth of world’s obese adults live in six high-income English-speaking countries
Diversity and Intermodality on Top in Mobility Agendas to Save Our Cities
Economic and environmental pressure challenges cities around the world to provide their citizens with an attractive, healthy and liveable living standard. As the world’s urban population is expected to increase by 50% by 2050, mobility demand rises. Read more
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
Waterford Greenway
Cycling too dangerous? Our justice system shares the blame
So 70% of parents think cycling in London is too dangerous. With this week’s acquittal of Aslan Khayardi, you can see why. Apparently it is acceptable for a driver to
- break the 30 mph speed limit by over 20mph on a road “shared” with vulnerable road users, while
- overtaking a cyclist at less than half the recommended safe passing distance.
Boris Johnson: ‘I wish I’d built more segregated cycling routes for London’
As the London mayor nears the end of his time in office he looks back on what he’s achieved for cycling in the capital – and the hostility he’s faced. Read article
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
Secure Cycle Parking
Slowly and belatedly, secure cycle parking is beginning to appear, especially at stations (thanks Irish Rail), where it is essential to encourage cycling, especially to support so-called multi-model journeys
Submission by Maynooth on Dublin – Galway Euro Velo #2
Our member organisation Maynooth Cycling Group (see also Facebook) has drafted our Part 8 submission to Kildare County Council about the proposed Royal Canal Greenway that forms a critical part of the Dublin to Galway Euro Velo Route #2.
The Part 8 planning process deals with the route from the county boundary with Dublin through Kildare to Maynooth. This is an important sector of the overall route as it passes close to major employment centres based around Leixlip, Celbridge and Maynooth. It needs to be a high quality greenway so that it takes commuters out of their cars to reach the likes of Intel, Hewlett Packard, etc. There are lots of schools along the route and it will need good connections to all schools if we are to get many more students to use their bikes to get to school and end the school run by car.
The local authority is just not getting the bigger picture.
This is why it is crucial that we continue to monitor all planing application having anything to do with transport and that fail to address the urgent decarbonisation of our transport system from its present unsustainable growth path.
Mortality figures, UK
Highlights
- Top two: Cancer / Circulatory diseases (inc. heart)
- All accidents: 12,000 per year
- Transport from 2,968 in 2007 to 2,284 in 2009, 25% down
- Cycling mortality: 2007 – 2011: 177, 154, 140, 123, 132
- Male / Female ratio: average 8:1