After decades of trial and error, the ingredients for robust urban cycling cultures are becoming clear.by Gary Gardner Early this decade, Parisian city planners grappling with traffic congestion, air pollution, and other challenges ventured outside the box. They were well aware that traditional transportation remedies such as widened roads and expanded parking typically relieve congestion in the short term but seed even greater longterm crowding while worsening pollution and carbon emissions. So they decided to use bicycles—some 20,000 of them, scattered across the city at metro stops and other convenient locations—to extend the reach of the Paris public transport system and to provide inexpensive, healthy transportation for short trips. Not your father’s transit plan, to be sure, but Paris’s public bike initiative symbolizes the new respect bicycles are getting in a growing number of municipal governments worldwide. Worldwatch Institute – vision for a sustainable world

NEARLY nine out of 10 accidents involving cyclists and cars in Australia are the fault of the motorist, new research has found.

The research also recommends introducing new road rules enforcing safe passing distances for cars.

Drivers were at fault in 87 per cent of incidents with cyclists and most did not realise they had behaved in a reckless or unsafe manner, according to the Monash University Accident Research Centre and The Amy Gillett Foundation. Full article – The Australian