I’m just a middle aged man who decided a few years ago that he would start doing some exercise, lose a bit of weight and have some fun riding his bike. I’m not out to force anyone to get on a bike if they don’t want to. However, after ‘walking a mile in the shoes of a cyclist’ for a while now, it’s apparent that we’re doing such a poor job in the UK at providing safe, convenient, direct and accessible cycling provision, and with a bit of vision, and appropriate funding, we could transform our environment, enabling cycling and active transport. Yes there are costs associated with this, but we’re currently paying the costs of not doing this, in terms of all of the diseases associated with lack of physical activity.

I used the word ‘enabling’ deliberately, not ‘encouraging’. I’m sick to death of being encouraged to cycle, encouraging someone to cycle is just hot air and a waste of money. If you enable people to cycle they just might. Especially if they find that it is to their advantage.

My vision is not to see lots of cyclists, but rather to see lots of people being enabled to choose cycling as a means of doing whatever they want to do. For many people at present that’s not an option. Why? Well despite encouragement – who in their right mind would want to be on a bike here?

I’ve become hardened to it. I will stand waiting in a queue with an HGV ahead of me, and bus behind me. I have to trust my existence to the goodwill and capabilities of total strangers, and hope that they’re up to that responsibility, and aren’t distracted. I put up with the abuse I sometimes get for using the ASL (Advanced Stop Line aka Bike Box) by someone who doesn’t want a cyclist ‘in the way’ of them. I put up with the intimidatory engine revving, or simply the driving of vehicles towards me as the motorist is too impatient to behave properly.

But let’s get this clear. Somebody planned and made this environment, US! We’re not stuck with it, and it doesn’t have to be horrible at all – we have to go around and look with fresh eyes at what’s been made, realise what it’s really like, imagine changes, and implement them. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel either, modern European cities have been doing it for years – our politicians, planners, engineers and engineering guidelines are often lacking in vision, unnecessarily restrictive/restricted or simply haven’t even thought about how things could be better.

So instead of the images above, we could choose to have cities for people and see scenes like those shown at bicycledutch

The problem we have is love of the motor vehicle and making everything else subservient to it. Glasgow is particularly bad for this, there’s a motorway right through the middle of it (just like in the ‘Jetsons’ only not as colourful, pristine, quiet or hi-tech looking). While the architecture of Glasgow often amazes, the street furniture for the most part is typical of the UK. It’s as if someone held a competition to find the most clinical, brutal, soulless street furniture, then installed the winning entry everywhere. Pedestrians are penned in by grey industrial fencing, footways are littered with signage for road users, and all the hard surfaces reverberate with the sound of motor traffic.

This is not a new issue for humanity, we’re always shooting ourselves in the foot with our own short term solutions, eventually realising they’re a problem, and solving them with a better solution. In medieval times the streets were sewers, effluent flowed through them. Eventually the streets became so polluted and caused so many health problems that new solutions were tried. We still generate sewage and waste to this day, we don’t throw it into the streets and let it work its way through them, no we’ve implemented infrastructure that separates us from the sewage, keeping its harmful properties away from us.

Some workers spend their working lives in sewers, get used to the conditions and just get on with it (I thank you for your efforts). Many others would never entertain that possibility.

I’m not attempting to get everyone to play in the sewer. But I think we could do as we’ve done many times before, come up with a better solution and implement it.

Currently the roads are in terrible condition, the bike infrastructure is mostly of a shoddy quality, disjointed and comprises largely of painted lines on the road, and is often more hazardous to use than to avoid. The task seems enormous, just like a network of tunnels, pipes, and treatment works would be to a society that didn’t have them.

If we accept the status quo then we will continue to be medieval in our outlook, and fall further and further behind our more advance neighbours, for whom navigating a city by it’s sewers by a brave few is a thing of the past, instead their public realm is there to be navigated and enjoyed by all, free from the fear of death and disease.

It’s time to enable, there is the odd glimmer of hope in this direction but more needs to be done.

People make Glasgow, not cars