The Harry Callahan(1) approach to making cycling safer.
You’ve got a bucket of money to promote cycling. How would you spend it? Recreational events, encouraging school children to ride to school, and so on. All well and good. But in my city, Melbourne, which is mistakenly promoted as a cycling city, a recent audit(2) showed that this is not effective. More people are not substituting their car trips with bicycle trips, despite the fact that they buy bicycles in increasing numbers. How can this be? Well let’s consider this from the viewpoint of competition for road space, and dominant cultures. In Melbourne you can’t commute on bicycle paths exclusively. So sooner or later you are going to have to interact with cars, and car drivers. The road rules here are fairly good, in that they clearly state that bicycles are equivalent to cars on the road. So in theory all is fine. So how far do our new cyclists get on their new bicycles? Probably as far as the first roundabout. Here they will attempt to get cars to give way to them, and fail. As