As a new road cycling pantheon is launched, we ask who should be honoured for their efforts to promote cycling for all. Add your suggestions in the comments and we’ll select some of the best in a future post

The world of mountain biking has had a hall of fame since 1988. Road cycling has a few of them, including a UK-centric one from British Cycling – and now a new international one from Rouleur magazine launching on Thursday. But, to the best of my knowledge, transportation cycling has never had one.

Nature abhors a vacuum, so here’s our chance to start the Everyday Cycling Hall of Fame. I’ve taken the liberty of suggesting who I think ought to be the first 10 inductees. Who would you include?

Richard Ballantine

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cycling journalist and writer Richard Ballantine in 1975. Photograph: Trinity Mirror/Alamy

Sex had Dr Alex Comfort; cycling had Richard Ballantine. Richard’s Bicycle Book was a 1970s publishing sensation – it sold more than a million copies and turned many of its readers into lifetime cycle advocates. On the face of it, Ballantine’s book was about fixing bicycles and “zestful riding,” but the American author and activist also made a bold case for assertive urban cycling: “If it is unsafe for you to let [motorists] pass, don’t hesitate to take full possession of your lane so that they can’t pass.”

He also suggested readers who witnessed an attack on a cyclist from a car should “beat the assailant up black and blue” and, despite being an animal lover, he also had some sage but brutal advice for a cyclist attacked by a dog: “Ram your entire arm down his throat. He will choke and die.”

Ballantine’s book imagined a utopian future of cycleways, but he didn’t think this would be sufficient to get more people cycling. “Bikeways are not enough,” he wrote. “What is needed is the elimination of polluting transportation … the absolute elimination of internal combustion engines from urban areas is the practical solution which benefits everybody.”

Janette Sadik-Khan

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Janette Sadik-Khan speaks at the World Bicycle Forum in 2015. Photograph: Raul Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images

In 2007, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed Sadik-Khan as his commissioner of transportation. An everyday cyclist, she took the city’s existing bicycle plan and made it flesh, installing cycleways and closing Times Square to cars.

Her first success was with a semi-protected cycleway on Manhattan’s Ninth Avenue. Cyclists flocked to the route and businesses along the way saw their sales blossom. Today, the city boasts more than 120 miles of protected cycleways. Now a principal with Bloomberg Associates, a philanthropic enterprise that works with mayors around the world to improve quality of life, she’s still advocating for cycleways via her role as chair of Nacto, the US National Association of Transportation Officials.

Chris Boardman

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chris Boardman, Manchester’s first cycling and walking commissioner. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

The Scouse cycling champion made his name winning Olympic gold in the Barcelona velodrome in 1992, kickstarting the success of Britain’s racing cyclists, but his most lasting legacy may be the 1,000 miles of safe cycling and walking routes he’s helping to install in Greater Manchester. The £1.5bn network will be the largest joined-up network in the UK. “We are reclaiming streets so that they work for people first,” Boardman said at the project launch.

Many cycle advocates dream that Boardman will one day be made the UK’s “cycling tsar,” a role he could do in his sleep.

Dorothy Craw

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A growing number of bike recycling workshops benefiting the disadvantaged have been created. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

She’s no longer involved in the day-to-day running of Newcastle’s Recyke Y’Bike recycling project she founded in 2006, but Craw is still a guiding light for the charity. The workshop – like a growing number of similar ones around the UK – takes in donated bikes, which are refurbished or stripped for parts. The bikes are then sold to fund the project, or they are given away to schools, community groups, and individuals on low incomes. 500 or so are sent annually to development projects in Kenya and the Gambia. The UK bikes are often provided to refugees and asylum seekers who “get a very small amount to live on while their case is considered,” said Craw.

“Typically they have to travel quite large local distances to register with local authorities, meet their caseworkers and so on. Some days it can mean making the choice between eating or buying the bus ticket to meet these appointments: a bike solves this.”

Craw is representative of the likeminded recycling project leaders around the world who, with little fanfare, promote cycling as a viable form of transportation for otherwise disadvantaged individuals.

Joe Breeze

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joe Breeze would like to see more everyday bikes in shop windows. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Breeze is already in one hall – he was a charter member of the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame. In 1977, the Californian designed and built what is considered the first modern mountain bike, the Breezer No 1, helping create the mountain bike market. “To us the mountain bike was a lark,” Breeze said “but, by golly, it got more people on to bicycles than any machine since the 1890s.”

In 2002, way ahead of the curve, Breeze launched a line of transportation-specific bikes, and the company still has a wide range of practical, everyday bikes.

“When [bike shops] offer bikes right on the showroom floor that are designed for everyday use – bikes that put bicycling more on the order of eating and breathing – many people will opt to get healthy while they get where they are going,” he said in 2008.

Eric Claxton

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A bike route underpass in Stevenage. Photograph: Carlton Reid

When he was a junior engineer in the Ministry of Transport, Claxton helped design some of the 500 miles of protected cycleways that the UK government installed in the 1930s. The cycleways he worked on in London were sub-standard, admitted Claxton.

The engineer was determined not to make the same mistakes when, in the 1950s, he was given the task of shaping the New Town of Stevenage. The town’s Dutch-inspired cycleway network was built as an intrinsic part of the plan, and was held up as proof that the UK could build a Dutch-style network. An article in New Scientist magazine in 1973 claimed that “Stevenage cycleways and cycle underpasses [are] premiere exhibits … [in a] traffic revolution.”

Mikael Colville-Andersen

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mikael Colville-Andersen first made his name photographing the well-dressed cyclists of Copenhagen. Photograph: Michal Krakowiak/Getty Images

In 2007, Canadian-Danish urban designer Colville-Andersen spawned the “cycle chic” movement by photographing people cycling around Copenhagen in their stylish civvies. The influential Copenhagen Cycle Chic blog led to copies in cities around the world and brought many new people into cycling. “So many people in other countries have been brainwashed into believing that cycling is just a sport or a hobby and haven’t entertained the thought that it could be a daily transport activity,” he said in 2008. “So many Copenhageners ride in style, on normal bikes, and in normal clothes. Even those who are not chic, ride with an ease and elegance that borders on poetry.”

Colville-Andersen ended his early posts with the dictum “Copenhagenize the planet”, and in 2009 he founded the Copenhagenize Design Company to spread his everyday-cycling message. This grew into a large consultancy, advising cities on how to become more cycle friendly.

Anne Hidalgo

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anne Hidalgo in Paris last year. Photograph: Eric Feferberg/AFP/Getty Images

Spanish-born Hidalgo recently tweeted a graphic of a cyclist above a car – the cyclist was the “solution” while the car was the “pollution”. This is the sort of tweet you’d expect from a velorutionary, not the mayor of Paris. But then Hidalgo is an outspoken champion of utility cycling in the French capital, mainly because of her virulent opposition to the air pollution spewed out by motor vehicles.

Starting in 2016, she introduced “Paris Respire” (or Paris Breathes), a plan to ban all cars from certain areas of Paris on the first Sunday of the month. She also championed the creation of a walking and cycling route beside the River Seine, carved out of a former busy – and fume-filled – highway. The Berges de Seine park recently won a significant legal victory, and Hidalgo plans to get even more motors out of Paris.

Adonia Lugo

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cycling provision in Adonia Lugo’s hometown, Los Angeles, is notoriously poor. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Urban anthropologist Adonia Lugo of Los Angeles has been a bike advocate for 10 years, including time spent lobbying in Washington DC. She co-founded Los Angeles’s open streets car-free cycling event, CicLAvia and recently wrote Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance, a book dealing with transportation equity, mobility justice and racism.

Now living back in LA, she campaigns for sustainable transportation options for marginalised communities. She told Citylab that cycling became a “part of [the] injustice I carry around”. She added: “Being on a bicycle, that experience of marginality you get of, one, not being treated so great by your fellow road users, and two, seeing those cracks in the city – these opportunities that other people aren’t necessarily seeing – that just really mirrored the marginality I’ve had in terms of my racial background.”

Boris Johnson (or Andrew Gilligan)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Boris Johnson was largely responsible for much of London’s segregated cycling infrastructure. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

For Brexity reasons I’d rather not give Boris Johnson yet more oxygen but, from a transportation cycling point of view, he is unavoidably important.

It could be argued that Johnson was a late and, at times, reluctant champion of kerb-protected cycleways (London’s first Cycle Superhighways were daubed with not-at-all-protective blue paint) but the then mayor later developed the zeal of a convert, and it’s unlikely London would now have its short but significant mileage of world-class cycleways if Johnson hadn’t been at the helm.

That said, it could be argued that instead of Johnson it should be journalist Andrew Gilligan getting the charter status in this hall of fame. As Johnson’s cycling commissioner, it was gimlet-eyed Gilligan who thought big, planned with precision and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Johnson may have signed it off and fronted it, but the bold £1bn plan for transforming cycling in London was mostly Gilligan’s work.

• Who would you include? Leave your suggestions and your reasons below and we’ll include some of the best in a future blog