Madam, - The recent international bicycle planning conference and mass cycle through the streets of Dublin demonstrated the enormous public demand to recreate our capital's cycling culture.
We were reminded that everyone benefits when a city is bicycle-friendly, not just cyclists. Businesses profit as we make more efficient use of the city's road space and help ease traffic congestion; employers benefit as employees arrive alert and on time and take less sick leave; taxpayers gain because a healthier cycling population makes fewer demands on our health service; parents benefit as they feel content letting their children cycle to school, thus giving more independence to children and freeing parents from daily chauffeuring duties.
"It is,", as Mayor Enrique Penelosa of Bogota stated, "not just nice to provide for cyclists, but an obligation". Many other inspiring ideas and initiatives to make Dublin a truly bicycle-friendly city emerged during the proceedings. These included the simple idea of introducing 30kph zones in the city centre as has been done on a city-by-city basis in Belgium and elsewhere, and then providing two-way access for cyclists on calmed one-way streets. We also heard about imaginative cycling training initiatives from Tilburg in the Netherlands and a plethora of other successful schemes from around the world.
There is a huge appetite among Dubliners for physical exercise in a safer environment - as we saw at both the mass cycle, which attracted more than 2,500 riders and at the women's mini-marathon, in which about 40,000 took part. What better way to satisfy our need for regular physical exercise and improved mobility than to capture all of the good ideas that emerged from the recent cycling conference and commit ourselves, very seriously, to putting them into practice here. It would be far too easy to let these ideas float away. - Yours, etc,
DAMIEN Ó TUAMA, Cycling Planning Consultant, Colin Buchanan Transportation Consultants, Windsor Place, Dublin 2.