Cycling Ireland and Cyclist.ie have come together to form a strategic partnership to promote and advocate for the development of cycling on the island of Ireland. With the numbers of people cycling at an all-time high, this synergy promises to be an exciting new project which will allow both bodies to advocate more effectively for cycling. Read more
Tag Archives: GeneralNews
General news about cycling
Cycle City Active City Leicester Conference
Cyclist.ie keeps a close eye on developments across the water in how British cities are changing to accommodate more cycling. As Irish campaigners we regularly travel across to cycling planning / advocacy events and enjoy meeting our cycle campaigning colleagues and swapping notes.
The latest trip was to Leicester to attend the Cycle City Active City conference. Leicester is undergoing a rapid transformation in recent years. Not only does the city boast the largest area of pedestrianised streets of any UK city (with cycle access and no record of serious collisions!), it has also been dismantling some of its gigantic flyovers – classic symbols of 1960s motorised automobility – and promoting urban regeneration. The nurturing of an everyday cycling culture is very much part of this mix. All of this has been helped along by a directly elected Mayor of the City Council (Peter Soulsby) and one of the most dynamic Local Authority Cycling Officers in the UK (Andy Salkeld).
We also heard the latest news from New York (Jon Orcutt) in which cycling is growing through a combination of high quality (protected) bike lanes and a large bike-share scheme, and from London where top notch cycle campaigning (by London Cycling Campaign and others) has prompted a series of directly elected mayors to treat the bicycle as a serious mode to alleviate congestion and help turn London into a more people friendly city. LCC’s latest success is getting a commitment from London’s new Mayor Sadiq Khan to triple the cycle superhighways, enable ‘Mini-Hollands’ in every borough and take dangerous lorries off streets.
Other excellent contributions came from Rachel Aldred, Senior Lecturer in Transport at Westminster University, who is studying how exactly reducing the volumes as well as the speeds of motorised traffic improves the environment for those not wearing a full body metal shell (her blog) and Philip Darnton, Executive Director of the Bicycle Association. Philip’s main argument is that £20M will enable every single school child in the UK to be trained in how to cycle in trafficked environments and every child deserves this training. Meanwhile, cycling journalist and author Carlton Reid recommended that we treat every outrageous / irrational anti-cyclist comment from various celebrities / notice boxes (such as ex- UK Chancellor Nigel Lawson’s as an indication that we are winning the battle: cycling is growing.
All in all, the Leicester conference was excellent. There were over 500 delegates / speakers plus another 300 cycle training instructors in attendance, and the quality of the presentations was really very good. There is an undoubted buzz generated by the more radical interventions on the streets of London to create safe cycling conditions for all – the question and feeling on everyone’s lips was: why should it just be on a handful of London’s streets that safe cycling conditions are created!? Hear hear!
Dr. Damien Ó Tuama is the National Cycling Coordinator for Cyclist.ie. He presented at the Leicester conference on “The (Slow) Progress in Implementing Ireland’s National Cycle Policy Framework”.
A BIG thanks to Trek
A sincere thanks to the distributors of Trek bicycles in Ireland for their generous donation to Cyclist.ie to support our work.
Centro are the latest of the Irish bicycle companies / importers to see the logic in supporting organised cycling advocacy so as to move cycling up the political priority list.
Trek president John Burke has long maintained that the bicycle industry should divert cash from marketing and R&D to help advocates and politicians create a bicycle friendly world . Hear hear!
Worth checking out their website and some of the progressive cycling projects in various parts of the world they are supporting. Fair play to them!
European Cyclists’ Federation grows stronger – AGM 2016 Report
Stockholm was the host city for this year’s AGM of the European Cyclists’ Federation – the annual gathering of the member groups of ECF. Colm Ryder and Damien Ó Tuama represented Cyclist.ie – the Irish Cycling Advocacy Network. Read more
Changing city priorities: Let’s do more to promote cycling
A simple reordering of priorities may make our capital city, or at least a segment of it, more attractive to cyclists and encourage more people to use this sensible, healthy and environmentally commendable form of transport. Read more
New cycling chairman gets on the saddle
The new chairperson of Cyclist.ie has warned that Ireland must utilise more environmentally friendly modes of transport if the country is to ever meet its EU greenhouse emissions targets for 2020.
Colm Ryder was appointed chair of the National Cyclist Advocacy Network of Ireland last month, and he says the country is nowhere near meeting its EU targets.
Get on your bike and feel like a newly independent kid again
Róisín Ingle: I’ve been freewheeling around Dublin town since the red letter day aged eight or nine when I inherited a thoroughly banjaxed third-hand bike that once had belonged to several older brothers or sisters. It was blue and bockety, the saddle leather battered and worn, the chain creaky and in need of a good dose of 3-in-1 oil, but it was mine, all mine. Read article
More on cycling in today’s Irish Times
Bike lanes study shows support for new routes across ages and political views
There is strong backing in Britain for more cycling infrastructure, with support firm across all ages, political backgrounds, social classes and commuter types, according to new data from British Cycling.
The findings come from a major YouGov poll carried out for British Cycling. The main results, released last month, showed 71% of Britons back building cycle lanes on main roads, against just 18% who oppose this.
However, new analysis from the poll findings show how broad this support is. There was at least 50% support for more bike lanes among all types of commuter – car, public transport, cycling or walking – even if the theoretical bike route might cause a five minute delay on their journey to work.
Getting around with the little ones has never been so easy; for Mom and Dad!
Bicycle recyle project in Kosovo
In Kosovo in general, but especially in our community people are not aware of the significance and benefits of recycling, toward the environment, economy and health. We want to introduce recycling through reparation of the bikes that we are going to collect in several communities. We are also going to spread the idea to the people who will get them and those are the most vulnerable people in our community. We think that that way of raising awareness and creativity can be done with recycling of the “trash” which is in our homes, city, schools and so on, and we hope that this project can serve as a pilot project for other projects to come. Read more