CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
"EB - what did they say? would be very helpful to know!"
Those that I asked it seemed to have been word of mouth, flyers and posters mainly, somebody mentioned facebook. A couple of people had heard at the last minute from Maureen Child's email that she sends to her constituents.
Actually cycling isn't that dangerous. It has the perception of danger though, which is very intimidating for many.
I'm quite thick skinned having learned my trade on the streets of Kingston in the 1980's, but many of my colleagues find the roads very intimidating, and the behaviour of a minority of 'lycra louts' and 'brakeless BMXers' does us no help in the general public perception.
Its the avoidance of the negative message, to concentrate on the health benefits of cycling, for fear of putting people off taking it up.
The idea that we shouldn't discourage people from cycling by saying it's a hazardous activity in a dangerous environment.
There's a place for a strictly pro-cycling message after the infrastructure is actually dealt with properly.
Meantime, I don't care about avoidance of reinforcing the image of cycling as being hazardous. I don't care about all the people who already don't cycle for that reason.
Its a nightmare out there. Let's shout loudly for the people who cycle in fear today, the people who have lost their lives already, and worry about not further upsetting others who don't yet cycle, later.
As a mass mobilisation, it worked. Hopefully lots of people were out on bikes who would otherwise not have been. Hopefully they'll use their bikes more often. Hopefully some of the people who turned up who usually use bikes but weren't into activism will be inspired to be more activistic. Hopefully some people who had hardly cycled before will go straight to the activism stage as they'll have a valuable insight into what was stopping them from cycling, if there was something stopping them from cycling other than just getting-round-to-it. Not-getting-round-to-it applies as much to writing-to-people-with-influence as it does to getting-out-on-the-bike, but POP's pepping-effect also applies to both. It was an unignorable event - even if relatively few councillors and members turned up their acknowledgement and participation will be extremely valuable when seeking to gain further acknowledgement and greater participation in the future. If it does happen in the future, hopefully some people will turn up to it on the grounds that they were annoyed at themselves for not turning up to it this time.
I never got round to finishing a placardy-thing to wave around outside Holyrood but it was originally going to be the outline of a head, with the brain in cycling-permitted-sign blue, with a white bicycle-sign-style-bicycle in the middle. Had I had the time, it would have been accompanied by a box beneath (in a font as close to that used on road-signs as I could find) saying something along the lines of "some consideration, please" in the hope that 'consideration' would be considered in all its senses: we want drivers to consider us when driving, cyclists to cycle considerately, politicians to consider us when budgeting and (for some, most of all) planners to consider us when designing things for drivers (and pedestrians, and cyclists) to use with the budgets administered by the politicians. We want to be kept in mind, not hastily after-thunk or dismissively waved away towards a path which, whilst segregated from motor traffic, is not segregated from hazards and danger, or which simply concentrates all the mixing-with-traffic-related-risk previously stretched all the way along a busy road into the single point where the cyclist is abandoned when the facility ends without a though of how cyclists might safely re-join the road off which they were ushered/lured.
We're lucky to have the parliament in Edinburgh and that #POP28 happened so close to our local council elections, but it was a countrywide thing, initiated by a resident of Glasgow, and anything happening in the future beneath the POP auspice deserves some Scotland-wide-ness. Whatever happens next under the banner is for the core group to decide, but in the meantime the attention attracted needs to be held and the enthusiasm harnessed needs to be directed wherever the owner of the enthusiasm feels most enthusiastic about directing it. I might have a closer look at what Spokes are up to, shall write to my local MSPs on the back of the event to ensure that they did notice it and shall be writing to whoever gets councillated on Thursday to check that active travel is on their agenda. I've been trying to devote as much runtime as possible to looking properly at the facilities we have versus the facilities we lack, as one thought I return to fairly frequently is how much stuff gets built seemingly without recourse to anyone who actually uses the roads, sometimes even in terms of motor vehicles as well as by cycle. Infrastructure-planning seems to be unaware of crowdsourcing; by the time consultations appear it's often too late to change the basic premise of a plan. Tweaks or polish can help a bit, but when you find yourself riding along the result and finding something mis-aligned by the odd metre or degree it suggests that more thought at the planning stage was required. When dealing with cycles and pedestrians a few decimetres here and there matter as humans operate at human scale.
The human-scale thing (even though cycles easily enable almost anyone to effortlessly triple their speed) seems to be what's missing from a lot of things these days. Human speeds, human distances, human timescales (also encompassing the (often-forgetten?) idea that physically getting from one place to another place takes time) and even human budgets, at least at some levels of government. I don't doubt that some people with influence/money/road-planning skillz don't walk around enough or have otherwise recalibrated their brains to consider a forty-minute drive along a motorway to Glasgow or a fifty-minute flight to London more 'normal' than a five-minute walk to a shop, a half-hour walk into work or a two-hour saunter round some hills. Morningsider said something on one of the post-POP threads about getting councillors/politicians out and about on bikes or feet. +1. There's nothing like getting someone to experience something first-hand than getting them to experience something first-hand. Concerted action can be a powerful thing, but in the first few days post-PoP even just the concerted use of buzz and enthusiasm is not to be sniffed at.
Well that's a well considered and thoughtful piece.
Evidence from the last couple of days on here is that people who normally think (and write) about 'cycling' are thinking/writing more - in more depth too!
If some of the 3,000 who didn't think much about cycling until very recently start...
OK, this is really just a placeholder while we figure out what we want to do - http://pedalonparliament.org/now-what/
much discussion going on at POP Towers, not that there is such a thing.
Thanks to everyone involved in organising the event. It was great to be part of it. It certainly felt as though a big change was happening - I hope so.
Cheers
Colin
Anth/SRD/Sally/Kaps etc - while I know nothing about website design, graphic design, social media and all the other stuff that made PoP a success, I think I can help with political strategy/public affairs type stuff. Let me know if you want to chat about this.
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