I was in Dublin over the weekend and was intrigued and slightly horrified by the approach to cycling... There were a lot of cyclists out and about on the streets so that is great, but I was quite amazed by how many of them were cycling without lights after dark, heading through red lights at junctions, cycling the wrong way along one way streets (in some cases in the middle of several opposing lanes of traffic), or popping up and down from pavements as they saw fit.
A good number of people were making use of the city hire bikes, and I kind of regret not doing so myself because it was only 5 Euros to sign up for three days and trips up to half an hour in length are free. The vehicular traffic is extremely heavy in places in the city centre though, which was rather offputting, yet everyone just seemed to be getting on with it; there were hardly any cases of motorists sounding their horns at the mad cyclists.
The infrastructure was remarkably varied, with really nice sections of cycle-specific path in places leading to absolutely nothing along some of the busiest roads.
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