A chara, – I am writing in support of your Editorial, “Cycling in the capital”, July 17th. However I feel you have missed the main point of the success story of the increase in cycling to St Fiachra’s National School in Beaumont and went off on a tangent with regards to the Vélib scheme and cycle lanes.
The point that should be addressed is how do we spend the minuscule amounts of money allocated for cycling in our public budgets?
If one can get a 500 per cent increase in cycling numbers to one school with inexpensive cycle training and not by spending hundreds of thousands of euro on creating dedicated cycle lanes and paths around a specific school, what does that tell us?
Should we spend millions of euro widening the cycle lanes within the canal area of Dublin for the Vélib scheme? Or should that same money be given to as many children of the nation as possible to teach them cycle skills so that success stories like at St Fiachra’s can be replicated across the country? – Is mise,