Cycling in Ireland – Ciarán Ferrie Interview IBike Dublin

Part 1 of Lara’s journey to discover if Ireland is safe to cycle in.
She meets IBIKE member Ciarán Ferrie to discuss the current cycling infrastructure and how Ireland compares to other European countries.

Karen tell us what are you actually doing out here today we’re from a group called I biked of them and we came together about 3-4 months ago and over hashtag really Freda cycle lanes and it was out of frustration really at the the state of the cycling infrastructure in

Dublin and particularly their poor enforcement of the existing obstruction is here so what we do is once or twice a week we come out we come to one of the mandatory cycle lanes like you see here and we line up alongside it to protect us to stop people parking others here

Karen is the infrastructure in Dublin dangerous how would we improve this the M structure is patchy I mean there’s some very good infrastructure in the cities and very good cycle lanes in the city and but they’re not necessarily interconnected the cycle lanes that are there are not mandatory cycle lanes so

Cars can actually legally park in them or stop on them from time to time and the ones that are mandatory it’s like lanes there isn’t a consistency as to when they’re applicable to some of them over 24 hours some of the Maroney insert knows the days and a lot of amount of

Weekends really there’s no sort of coordinated approach to it and there’s no I mean it needs to be more consistent I think the terms of the specification how can we increase the numbers how can we get more people but especially women and children older people how do we get

Them out on the road in cycle well making it safer is the symptom to do it we know that numbers have increased and we know that numbers of women cycling has increased but it wouldn’t be too difficult to make it safe to do so it is more than just handing out high-vis vest

It needs safe infrastructure and it needs enforcement of existing infrastructure to make it safe for people to travel and people will travel if it is safe to do so here on sometimes cyclists are accused of giving themselves maybe a bad name what do you say to that well there certainly it’s

Like this you don’t obey the rules of the road but there are people in all forms of transport you the same we can’t be responsible for all of those just in the same way as a motorist I can’t be responsible for the activities what the road is a safer more easily cyclable

City under country achievable it is absolutely I mean we’ve seen it you know people look at examples like Amsterdam and Copenhagen and say you know there are particular circumstances and they’ve managed to achieve this would you look at them 20 or 30 years ago and they were

Exactly the same as we are now they’re the same problems of congestion they’d same problems of too many private cars in the city center and they decided to say no there was a political will to change it we don’t yet have that political will here we’ve got some

Politicians who are very strongly in favor of it but but generally it has it isn’t happening yet the recent budget the were there wasn’t announcement is increasing and cycling and funding but it’s still we’re not sure the exact figures but it seems we had at best just

Over 2% of the entire transport budget which is ministerially they the UN recommends that 20% of transport funding should be for active travel we know the brink Archaea pushed for the 10% in Ireland which would be great it’ll be a huge step forward but we’re just not seeing that step for at the

Moment and we’re seeing people talking about us which is great but we haven’t seen the action yet I’m hopeful that it will change but it’s it’s a slow process