Little changes we can make to normalise cycling and encourage its uptake

As well as that, it’s very difficult to even get a crèche nearby these days.

we really need to bring back school cycling lessons, I was meant to do mine “next year” when I was in fifth class but the recession came and they were all cancelled.

Better infrastructure, proper separated cycle lanes all the way from the suburbs to city centers.

There's a functional difference between roads for cars and streets for bikes and pedestrians, and this should be reflected in their design. Shared infrastructure should be avoided and where it exists it should be pedestrian focused, not car or bike focused

It works out better for cars as well since they don't have to be as aware of pedestrians and cyclists

Secure bicycle parks in the city, you'll probably have to pay for them but that's the cost of proper security

Change planning laws to ensure offices and businesses provide showers and changing rooms, as well as drying facilities for cycling gear

Proper cleaning of cycle lanes, I was walking down grand canal recently and the cycle path was a swamp of fallen leaves which made it an ice rink for bikes

But.... there's also got to be some more responsibility for cyclists

Helmet laws, I know there was some study in Australia that showed bike use went down with helmet laws, but I would propose that people who don't wear helmets shouldn't be on bikes. I think it's something that needs to be normalised from a young age so people just automatically wear helmets

And on the spot fines for cyclists behaving badly. I know it's a minority of cyclists, but it happens. I've seen cyclists skipping lights, zipping in and out of moving cars without any signalling and whizzing along crowded footpaths

Cyclists who do that are a danger to others as well as themselves, and there needs to be a deterrent for that behaviour

I think that cycling in towns/cities can be very dangerous. Everyone seems to be rushing somewhere. If there were proper routes that were safe i'd go back to cycling myself even at senior citizen age because i used to enjoy it. Now I find that the roads are full of people trying to prove that either the cyclist or the motorist is in the wrong and I don't want to get into that so i'll continue walking.

Plastic bollards aren’t for cyclists. They’re for the drivers that won’t obey traffic markings.

I’m biting my lip to not respond to the helmet suggestions, which are well covered on the megathread.

I hadn't cycled in the better part of two decades until moving back to Dublin from London at the start of this year. I can safely say the plastic bollard "pollution" was fairly key in allowing me to feel I could take it back up and sustain it to the level I've been able to. Can't imagine I'm the only one.

More often than not I'd reckon the problem many drivers have with the "pollution" is that it forces them to slow down, mind their lane and deters them from abruptly swinging in front of cyclists at junctions as they otherwise see fit to do. The city has been aggressively aligned for the past 70 or more years towards facilitating as many cars as possible travelling as fast as possible through it, to the detriment of basically everyone else. Tough sh*t that approach is being reversed somewhat.

Okay, first off Santry and Swords aren't on the DART line 😉

And there's still a swarm of cars leaving Swords every morning to get to various destinations because the majority of people who live in Swords seem to work somewhere else

There's good bus connections into the city, but cycling to the city from Swords wouldn't be much fun because there's no decent cycle lanes that I know of

So I don't really get what you were going for with using Swords as an example

One would assume the ugly plastic bollards will be in place until Irish motorists mature and learn there should be a fair and equitable sharing of road space with more efficient but also more vulnerable forms of traffic. So hopefully they will be gone some time this century.

Far more cyclists don’t obey traffic markings or the road traffic act in general. Traffic lights and their adherence to stopping for them when legally necessary is pathetic.

you won’t normalise and encourage cycling in this climate..The average number of wet days (days with more than 1mm of rain) ranges from about 150 days a year along the east and south-east coasts, to about 225 days a year in parts of the west.

We don’t live in a Mediterranean climate… if we did this debate would have some credibility but when you don’t have appropriate weather most of the year, enough safe cycling infrastructure and or the ability in many cases to add it to existing roadways…..

So an uptake in cycling ? Not on any major scale and the cost of procuring cars is about to drop by 2.5-3.0 %

What percentage of drivers break speed limits? How often do you break the speed limit yourself?

What percentage? 100% break them at some point.

But the interesting thing is, that it only makes a difference some of the time.

(20 mph = 32.2 km/h)