Helmet? Check. Body armour? Check. Ready for a nice bike ride to the shops.

bristol | transport | feature Wednesday July 02, 2008 12:00 by imcvol

The Economic Cycle? Comment on the £23 Million Cycle City Plan

The Economic Cycle? Comment on the £23 Million Cycle City Plan

Bristol has won £23 million to create the UK's first 'cycle city' and Steve Ward of Car Free UK writes; Something went wrong, horribly wrong with cycling in this country sometime after the 1950s... Britain, preferring to follow developments on the ther side of the Atlantic more than those on the other side of the channel, decided that the Car was King....Pedestrians needed to be banished to underground warrens such as St James Barton; on the surface cycles needed to be pushed off the road onto pavements (an act that many people seem willing to participate in) and pedestrians had to push a button merely to cross the street. Bristol duly got its ring-road, much larger than anyone in the 1970s dared to imagine, and while the car was made king, its progress through the remainder of the medieval centre was consequently slowed to the lowest in the country. Somehow, despite all this awfulness, Bristol expects to spend £23m on cycling in the next two and a half years - about a forty-fold increase on spending to date. This would match the levels spent in the famous cycling city of Amsterdam....Having marginalised cycling as an extreme sport akin to snowboarding, and having criminalised cyclists as red light-dodging, pavement-terrorising fanatics somehow cycling is to become mainstream again. How? Full article.

| The Economic Cycle? | www.carfree.org.uk | Cyclists' Special - part one (youtube.com) | Cycle Facility of the Month - Ads on the cycle path (homepage.ntlworld.com) |

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