prestavalve wrote: ↑14 Oct 2021, 1:59pm
I am as green as the guy on the sweetcorn tin: lived car free my whole life. Currently do a 50km daily commute, most often using a busy A road over an NCR because the latter is indirect and slow, making it impractical for transport.
I am not disabled, but, I do cart my daughter around in a Burly and appreciate
some of the issues experienced by people with mobility problems - when she's hooked up, my options of where I can go and how fast I can get there shrink massively.
And do you think that any of that cycling is a good situation? (well, maybe except the part of the reduction in how fast which isn't due to bad design or implementation) Is that really how cycling should be in a country trying to get to grips with pollution, climate change and a multifaceted health crisis?
Why do you think anyone else would switch to cycling in that situation?
Neither of these things cause me to agree with the prevailing attitude, which seems to be gathering weight, that bespoke cycling infrastructure is somehow a necessary precondition for cycling to occur.
I think that is a false impression. Of course it's not a necessary precondition, else no-one would be cycling now. You wouldn't be riding the old A74. I wouldn't have grown up riding along the A5. And so on. There will always be a few die-hards who keep riding in even very hostile roadscapes. Probably even if we were legally prohibited from them and there was no reasonable alternative.
The problem is that we are a minority. We are not sufficient.
The argument (as I understand it) is that some accommodations in road design and network management are required to enable majority cycling, and there are also some which would encourage more cycling. Who says that any of it is a prerequisite for any cycling, except as hyperbole?
Neither do they stop me from poking fun at the moist vision of the "ideal new cyclist" which saturates campaigns to the point where it has become a parody of itself.
I don't recognise that vision, so it just looks like an attack on the characteristics mentioned, some of which seems discriminatory.