General news about cycling
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
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.
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
How did the Dutch get their cycling infrastructure? This question keeps coming back because it is of course relevant to people who want what the Dutch have.
Read more, including video
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
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
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
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
