Sir, – I was delighted to see your Editorial celebrating Ireland’s new cycling culture (May 23rd). I would have been even more delighted if you had also suggested a revival of Ireland’s old cycling culture: the one we had during the Emergency, when cycling journeys started from people’s doorsteps and ended at their destinations. The men who cycled their tandem from Killarney to Dublin to see the All-Ireland football final between Kerry and Galway in 1941 are a case in point. Dedicated cycling infrastructure in rural areas such as the Great Western Greenway is welcome, of course, but facilitating cycling requires more than a narrow focus on building cycle facilities.
I live in Bavaria. My most recent day-long cycle tour started from my doorstep and featured an estimated 35km of purpose-built cycle tracks.
However, it also featured 15km of tracks closed to motorised vehicles with the exception of forestry and agricultural traffic, 10km of roads closed to motorised traffic with the exception of local residents, and 65km of major and minor roads. When I grew tired, I located the nearest train station and hopped on a train with my bike.
At home in Sligo, such a tour would not have been possible, and not just because of a lack of dedicated cycle facilities. Coillte denies cyclists access to many forestry routes. Residents-only roads which allow cyclists but not cars to “rat-run” in residential streets instead of using major roads do not exist. I would have been more nervous about sharing roads with motor vehicles, as speeding and dangerous overtaking on rural roads are, at least in my experience, more common in Ireland than in Germany. Getting the train home could have been a problem, too; Iarnród Éireann’s facilities for carrying bicycles are woeful.
By all means let us build greenways. But let us also grasp cycling as an ordinary mode of transport which can be practised safely pretty much anywhere; motorways and footpaths in urban areas perhaps excepted. – Yours, etc,