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
Monthly Archives: March 2016
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