beardy wrote:As you say we can not all agree but I dont think it is irrelevant to peoples' views on cycling attitudes.
Maybe not quite irrelevant but it only shows up on some surveys - dare I say, from places where fewer people cycle and those that do are predominantly spandexed? - and it's not really something we're looking to change by legislation, funding or other things under MPs' control, is it? Access to bikes, busy roads and lack of knowledge (dealing with the weather, routes, parking) were reported as the biggest problems for cycling near me.
Tangled Metal wrote:Does anyone have a link to post showing the european government spend on cycling infrastructure per head? I've seen figures of less than 35 down to £1 per head for the UK and as high as £10 to 20 oer head in Netherlands with Denmark being just behind that. I know a Danish citizen over here who cycles everywhere here. That was how she lived in Denmark it is the way of doing those short journeys. She has just got on with it here but has said the attitude is totally different from the bikes to the way drivers behave. Personally I could not even understand how different it is if I had not cycled in the Netherlands decades ago and even back then there was a huge difference between UK and Netherlands. The way I cycled with hired dutch bikes 3 miles to the nearby town by a direct cycleway separate from traffic. I had made the same journey by bus the other day and while the cycleway was on straight route between village and town the road was the other three sides of a rectangle. Let me explain, the cyclists had the quickest, easiest and most direct way to travel and the motor vehicle had to go the long way around. How polar opposite our countries were 20 plus years ago?!!
And you think, that's how good it was not very long after they started... we could get from here to "the Netherlands decades ago" very quickly indeed if we elect some politicians willing to learn from them, instead of fools who keep telling the public the same old lies that we must choke our towns with cars, let them park and crash all over the place and not try to make public transport as pervasive as London because London is communism or capitalism gone mad or whatever their current boo-boy is.
There are a few places in England like that, where cars still have to take the longer way round - in King's Lynn, even without picking obvious special cases, it's easy for a 1.5mile bike commute to be nearly three times that by car. I think this happens mostly in historic walled towns/cities maybe with rivers and railways, where cars are constrained to a few gates and bridges, but people walking or cycling can use more frequent smaller bridges or gaps. Some of them are pretty nice, but not even all of those places embrace walking and cycling, while government continues with follies like building more and wider roads to make ever bigger jams at their old gates, as in King's Lynn, with some even arguing that the historic walls, buildings and landscapes should be removed. Norwich fascinates me: its walls have mostly gone, the rivers have loads of bridges and it's rare for cycling to save much distance on typical journeys and not unusual to travel further, yet loads of people still ride bikes. Mix of parking charges and congestion, perhaps?
Anyway, I agree in general. We've a long way to go, even if we could get there quickly.
And finally, I spent a few minutes looking and didn't find the government spends on cycling infrastructure by European country. Can you?
