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HG WELLS would have approved. “Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia,” he wrote. “When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.” The launch this weekend of Dublin’s bicycle hire scheme and the announcement of the plan to spend €10 million on a new cycle route linking Rathmines to Fairview Park are causes for celebration, indeed, genuine marks of civilisation.

“Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride,” John F Kennedy claimed. And, in truth, the joys of gently freewheeling along the bank of the Grand Canal on an Indian summer’s evening, or of leaning into the pedals and the breeze as one crests a Wicklow hill, are hard to beat. There is no better way to get to know the contours of a place, nor greener, healthier mode of transport, than the descendant of German civil servant Baron Karl von Drais’s 1817 invention, the Laufmaschine also known as the “draisine” (largely unchanged with the exception of pedals, added first in 1863).