As the New Year looms, my only real resolution for 2023 is to try and cycle more than ever. I don't want to make any journeys of less than a couple of miles by anything other than public transport or by bike.
I hope lots of other people are feeling the same. I gave five people a copy of David Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth for Christmas, so I am trying to spread the message as best I can to those I hope will be receptive. But there are still plenty of things we need to be lobbying our local and national governments about to make this an easier choice.
The number one priority for encouraging active travel, has to be making cycling safer. For me, that would include wearing a helmet, although CyclingMikey has a point when he says he sees a helmet as insignificant to the wider problem:
After all, it's never too late to change things:
As always, it is the Dutch who can show the UK the way:
But our response in the UK doesn't even need to be that complicated; we know we can't reproduce overnight a cycling network that has taken a small, flattish country decades to build (and we also all know that immediate and significant investment at a time of industrial unrest and a floundering health service, is very unlikely).
Instead, we should look at raising funds for such a scheme through exorbitant vehicle taxation that will hopefully drive SUVs off the road completely if targeted at a vehicle's capacity to pollute. We should also ban them and their ilk from our town centres in order to encourage people to reclaim our urban spaces.
And please don't think that bad weather should be any kind of excuse for maintaining car use. If Copenhagen's cyclists can manage in -5°C, then so can we:
(Incidentally, an average of 5.7 million kilometres are cycled between each serious accident in Copenhagen, but there were 989 serious cyclist injuries in London last year.)
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