Kieran Fagan responds to last week's anti-car rant by a cyclist
The "motorists are evil environmental hooligans with murderous intent towards the planet and cyclists are healthy saints on two wheels view" just doesn't get us anywhere. Some of the people Rose Corcoran spoke to last week (Pitfalls for Pedallers) don't just miss the plot, many have spokes missing.
Ireland once was heaven for cyclists. In the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the unemployed could cycle around all day, getting exercise, and largely, getting nowhere on our uncrowded roads. Does anyone want to go back to that?
Then came industrialisation. Traffic volumes built up and our road network could not cope. Now we are building roads and bypasses and cycle lanes as fast as we can. We are playing catch-up. Not Cowboys and Indians.
The motorist is not the cyclist's enemy. Nor even the truck driver. How are the bikes delivered to the eco-friendly cycle dealer? How does the muesli get to the health food shop? Not by pedal power. Say nothing about where Lycra comes from, or how it gets to form those revolting shorts.
Much has been done recently to provide safe areas for cyclists. But there is much to be done, and cycosnottiness is not going to help. We'll get through the reconstruction period much better with some goodwill.
Personally, I'd like to see a repeal of section 497 of the Road Traffic Act, which says, inter alia, "no cyclist worth his/her salt will ever display anything which resembles a light to the front or the rear"!
Co-existence between cyclist and motorist is not a one-way street. Just as it's upsetting for your correspondent to be forced off her bike and suffer a bruised knee by a combination of truck and pothole, the stress of inching one's way through gridlock for hours on end to get to and from work puts motorists under considerable and health threatening strain.
Senator David Norris should remember his own good fortune in living at one end of the capital's main street and working at the other end, before he next pronounces loftily on the rights and wrongs of a difficult and muddled situation in which commuters find themselves while our road planners catch up with years of under funding and neglect.
Some of the complaints quoted by your correspondent are simply incredible. "Someone is going to get killed (at the cross roads at Dundrum) and I just hope it's not me". So do I, but you have a choice. Get off the bike, cross at pedestrian crossing, remount bike.
Another luminary tells us that buses are "arguably the most dangerous vehicles on the road". Great, that's it, shut down Dublin Bus, Bus Éireann, Aircoach, and we'll all be safe as houses. Are these guys breathing in too much diesel? Or what?
The difficulties which all road users face are not being helped by the emergence of an aggressive minority in the cycling community. Like all bullies, they pick on a weaker group, and the target for the Lycra louts is the pedestrian.
There is an extensive recent cycle lane along the N11 from Foxrock to Donnybrook, put in place by Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Co Council, which deserves credit for showing a lead in tackling public and cycle transport problems. Extensions are being constructed as I write.
What is the council now forced to do? Protect passengers from cyclists playing skittles with bus queues along the N11 on the steep descent from Leopardstown to Donnybrook. Cycopaths plough through the queues, faces inflamed like gargoyles, roaring words rhyming with duck and plastered, telling the waiting bus queue to get out of the way. I've been there and I've jumped.
The council has just had to erect a chicane, or baffle, to slow down cyclists who would otherwise plough through the bus queue at the morning Stillorgan city bound bus stop. Further back, that cycle lane is about to be diverted around the rear of the bus stop at Galloping Green to protect bus passengers from marauding Stuka dive-bombers on two wheels.
Is "we're all in this together" too complicated for some cyclists to understand?