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Our View: Roads must be made safer before promoting cycling

In the sixties and seventies bicycle use was widespread. All boys, from a young age until they joined the army would get around on a bicycle. They would go to school on their bike, to the cinema, to football matches and ride around the neighbourhood with their friends. It was every teenage boy’s mode of transport (very few girls rode bicycles, for reasons only sociologists could explain), giving them complete independence and not having to rely on a parent to drive them from one place to the next as is the practice nowadays.

It was a poorer society back then and few families had a spare car to drive boys to their friends or the cinema outside of which at weekends there were hundreds of bicycles stacked against walls. The streets were also much less busy as any statistical comparison of cars in circulation, then and now, would make evident. It was much safer to ride a bicycle in those days than it has been in the last 20 years when every family has two or three cars, town roads are super-busy, and host to an abundance of reckless drivers.

It is against this background that transport minister Yiannis Karousos on Tuesday unveiled the scheme to promote bicycle use as a green mode of transport. It promoted quality of life, improved health, reduced carbon emissions and noise, saved energy and contributed to decongesting traffic, he said. And Cyprus was ideal for cycling thanks to the short distances and good weather (although it cannot be fun cycling at midday in the summer months) said Karousos.

His objective to make the bicycle part of people’s daily lives as a “safe and reliable means of transport,” will not be as easy as it sounds. The reality is that the bicycle is not a safe means of transport because city streets are not bicycle-friendly by any stretch of the imagination. Bicycle lanes are non-existent on the main roads of the towns and the only places one can safely ride a bike are on special cycle paths that have no cars.

The €4 million the government will spend as part of its plan to encourage cycling will not make streets safe for cyclists as Karousos seems to think. Much more would need to be spent to make city streets bicycle-friendly and to encourage people to ride their bike to work. Having showers and changing rooms at workplaces as well as bicycle racks – part of the government scheme – will not persuade anyone to ride a bike to work if there are no bicycle lanes on the street to make cycling safe. This is the issue that must be dealt with, before any campaign to encourage bicycle use.

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