Sir, – We abhor the failure of Dublin City Council (DCC) to find funding to continue the contract of the cycling officer (Frank McDonald, Home News, December 17th). We understand the Cycling Officer’s position has been funded up to now by the Department of the Environment, but this contract ceases on January 5th.
A cycling officer is needed not only to represent the interests of the increasing number of Dubliners who already cycle, but to rapidly increase modal share, by: 1. Co-ordinating guiding DCC policy towards increasing cycling, 2. As an engineer, counteracting the mindset of roads engineers who have been trained in outmoded, car-based transport principles. 3. Publicly promoting cycling, as done very successfully with the recent family-oriented Sky Ride, when 10,000 Dubliners took to their bikes in the city.
Due to bigger cycling numbers, Dublin’s streets are now quieter, less congested and, most importantly, safer for all road users.
The background to this issue is the mystifying way transport has developed in Ireland: 1. How is it that our roads have been made unsafe for kids to cycle to school, when more than 300,000 of our children are overweight or obese? 2. How is it that, with car ownership now costing more than €10,000 per year, and a crazy 40 per cent of short trips being made by car, we’re not energetically pushing this low-cost transport mode? 3. Why is our Department of the Environment apparently reducing funding, when research published last week showed that high cycling numbers could make a huge dent in Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions? 4. Are we really content to continue sitting in traffic jams?
A Dublin underground is not going to materialise any time soon. Cycling is a quick, easy, very cheap answer to congestion.
It’s clear (and it’s in the Government’s own Cycle Policy Framework) that there should be not only a Dublin cycling officer, but a cycling tsar or team at government level, and one in every local authority. Departments of Health and Children, Transport, Tourism and Sport, and Environment all bear responsibility here. Yes, budgets are tight, but with a 20 to 1 return on investment in cycling (the huge health benefits to the population allow immense savings), it’s crazy to penny-pinch one key professional’s salary.
Indeed, we would be interested to see DCC’s cost/benefit analysis of the decision to end this contract, given that its transportation division expenditure was €73 million for 2010, and the Dublin Bikes scheme alone brings in €400,000. Funding is not the problem here, it’s ill-informed and regressive thinking. – Yours, etc,