Tatyana Storm - De cross gaat door

NB: the weekly whimsy thread is a stoush-free zone

It may not get quite the attention, but to my mind his ride two days earlier, on the stage won by Andy Schleck to the summit of the Col du Galibier, was at least its equal.

Andy Schleck, the stick-thin, tall dirty blonde from Luxembourg, has two great strengths as a Tour rider – his climbing abilities and the support of the strongest team in the race, including his brother Frank; Leopard-Trek were the only team with two riders realistically capable of winning the Tour. He used both of these – and a couple of other factors – to their absolute maximum on stage 18.

Long breakaways by overall contenders are the stuff of Tour legend, for good reason. They are exceedingly hard to pull off in modern cycling, where the broader talent pools and better-organized team tactics all work against the lone rider. Even on the slopes of a Hors Categorie climb, professional cyclists ride fast enough that drafting plays a significant role. For the Galibier, and the Col du Lautaret that effectively forms the lower part of the climb, this is particularly the case; with kilometer upon kilometer of “false flat”, followed by a relatively gradual rise before the steeper summit of the Galibier itself.

On this day, those kilometers of false flat were to be made even harder by a howling head wind; the Lautaret is a straight, unsheltered drag. By rights, even the strongest lone rider should be battered back to the peloton by the unrelenting wind, while their cagier competitors share the load behind.

Andy Schleck and his team had other ideas – a huge gamble, but one not without its logic. He attacked from a group containing the leaders near the top of the day’s first climb, the Col d’Izoard. Cadel, as he later made clear, could have responded, as could a number of the other GC contenders, but they chose not to. They judged that a) Andy’s attack was not likely to succeed given the conditions, and b) that its main purpose was to force Evans and any other GC rivals to work hard chasing, leaving a rested Frank Schleck free to attack later on. It seemed a reasonable calculation.

But Andy Schleck had a not-so-secret weapon waiting up the road for him, in the shape of Maxime Monfort. In recent years, placing teammates in early breakaways on mountain stages has become increasingly common. “domestiques” will often be dropped by team leaders on early climbs if the pace is on – and thus are of no more use. However, if one or two follows the inevitable early breakaway, they can usually hang on and are conveniently placed to assist their team leader when they catch up later in the stage. Both BMC and Leopard-Trek used this tactic. Leopard-Trek’s Monfort, however, was a much stronger rider than BMC’s Brent Bookwalter. In the stage 20 Time Trial, Monfort would finish 14th, far ahead of Bookwater’s 85th placing.

So, when Andy reached the bottom of the Izozard and began the long drag to the Galibier, he spent little time fighting the wind. Instead, he had one of the strongest domestiques in the race to do it for him. By contrast, when the other overall contenders – Sanchez, Basso, Contador, Voeckler, and Evans – reached the bottom of the valley, while their helpers were more numerous, they were weaker riders. A tired Bookwalter and Chris Anker Sorenson (teammate of Alberto Contador) battled away, and then several of Sanchez’ Euskatel-Euskadi teammates. But they continued to lose time on Monfort and Schleck.

And then something else very odd happened.

Along the false flat to the Galibier, the Monfort-Schleck train gradually caught the rest of the early breakaway, including a rider from the Quick Step team, Dries Devenyns. Devenyns’ solitary professional win is a stage of the Tour of Austria in 2009. Fine rider compared to us mere mortals that he undoubtedly is, his remote chance of a stage win was over as soon as Andy Schleck passed him; either Schleck would ride to the win, or the peloton would catch them both. Neither he nor his team had anything much to gain either way. His every instinct as a cyclist would have been to try to latch on to Andy’s wheel; to get a relatively easy ride on the lower slopes of the Lautauret for as long as he possibly could. But, inexplicably, he began to work with Schleck and Monfort, taking turns battling the evil wind, and further extending Andy Schleck’s advantage over Cadel and his other rivals.

The “politics of the peloton” are complex, and would seem very odd to many Australians raised in the zero-sum games that are Aussie Rules football, league, union, and cricket. “The chop”, and variations thereof, have a very long tradition in road cycling.

Other factors were hindering the chase. Thomas Voeckler was the revelation of the Tour, going from plucky opportunist to serious contender, to the disbelief of many. On this day, it seems, the disbelievers included Voeckler himself. Fearing that he would need his teammate’s help to be paced up the climb after being dropped, he refused to let Pierre Roland (later to win on the Alpe D’Huez) assist in the chase, much to the annoyance of Evans.

With 17 kilometres to go, Monfort was done. Andy Schleck held a lead of over four minutes. Cadel tried to attack to chase alone, but was unable to get away in the vicious wind. Undeterred, he resumed the chase, dragging the rest of the peloton behind him, only briefly helped by Alberto Contador.

Andy Schleck dropped the remaining breakaway riders and climbed as only the very best can up the Galibier. Schleck rarely looks in any discomfort on a climb; while internally he must suffer as much as any rider, his face remains fixed in a half-smile.

Meanwhile, Cadel slogged away, looking far less fluent, bike swinging from side to side, his cadence slower, his face contorted. It looked ugly, as if he could falter at any stage. But he maintained his pace, and, slowly, slowly, the time gap to Schleck dropped as the two men battled the wind, climb, and altitude. Behind Evans, riders gradually tailed off. Not by an attack. Not by the wind, which Evans was largely battling for them. But by his relentless pace. Eventually, even Contador and Sanchez couldn’t hang on. Only a select few – Frank Schleck, Ivan Basso, the plucky Voeckler and the young rider of the Tour, Pierre Roland, were still there.

With one kilometer to go, Andy Schleck had a 2:38 lead on the Evans-led pack. But his style changed. He’d cracked. The superb images from France TV show him in visible pain and struggling to keep the pedals turning. He ground on, as best he could. Nothing could stop him winning the stage. He’d done what no GC rider had done for years; won a mountain stage, solo, after a long breakaway. But he’d taken an eternity to climb that last kilometre.

Frank Schleck sprinted past Cadel in the last few metres of the stage, to take second, 2 minutes and 7 seconds behind his brother. But the time gap to Andy was what really mattered. He took another 23 seconds out of Andy’s advantage in that last kilometre, leaving him 2 minutes and 15 second behind on the stage, and 57 seconds back in the overall standings.

Cadel climbed the Lautaret/Galibier sequence, unassisted, almost two minutes faster than Andy Schleck. He won the Tour by 1 minute and 34 seconds.

Route Map

From the official site:

The route

Running from Saturday July 2^nd to Sunday July 24^th 2011, the 98^th Tour de France will be made up of 21 stages and will cover a total distance of 3,430.5 kilometres.

These stages have the following profiles:

• 10 flat stages,
• 6 mountain stages and 4 summit finishes,
• 3 medium mountain stages,
• 1 individual time-trial stage (42.5 km).
• 1 team time-trial stage (23 km).

Distinctive aspects of the race

• le Galibier climbed twice,
• 2 rest days,
• 23 level 2, 1 or highest level mountain passes or summit finishes,
• no bonuses will be awarded during the intermediate sprints and stage finishes.

More details on the Tour’s “Zoom” page.
P.S. Here is a list of the stages (click on the red arrow in the final column to go to a page for that stage):

The stages

Stage	Type	Date	Start and Finish	Distance	Details
1	En ligne	Saturday 2 July	Passage du Gois La Barre-de-Monts > Mont des Alouettes Les Herbiers	191.5 km
2	Team TT	Sunday 3 July	Les Essarts > Les Essarts	23 km
3	En ligne	Monday 4 July	Olonne-sur-Mer > Redon	198 km
4	En ligne	Tuesday 5 July	Lorient > Mûr-de-Bretagne	172.5 km
5	En ligne	Wednesday 6 July	Carhaix > Cap Fréhel	164.5 km
6	En ligne	Thursday 7 July	Dinan > Lisieux	226.5 km
7	En ligne	Friday 8 July	Le Mans > Châteauroux	218 km
8	Medium mountains	Saturday 9 July	Aigurande > Super-Besse Sancy	189 km
9	Medium mountains	Sunday 10 July	Issoire > Saint-Flour	208 km
R	Rest Day	Monday 11 July	Le Lioran Cantal
10	En ligne	Tuesday 12 July	Aurillac > Carmaux	158 km
11	En ligne	Wednesday 13 July	Blaye-les-Mines > Lavaur	167.5 km
12	High Mountains	Thursday 14 July	Cugnaux > Luz-Ardiden	211 km
13	High Mountains	Friday 15 July	Pau > Lourdes	152.5 km
14	High Mountains	Saturday 16 July	Saint-Gaudens > Plateau de Beille	168.5 km
15	En ligne	Sunday 17 July	Limoux > Montpellier	192.5 km
R	Rest Day	Monday 18 July	Département de la Drôme
16	Medium mountains	Tuesday 19 July	Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux > Gap	162.5 km
17	High Mountains	Wednesday 20 July	Gap > Pinerolo	179 km
18	High Mountains	Thursday 21 July	Pinerolo > Galibier Serre-Chevalier	200.5 km
19	High Mountains	Friday 22 July	Modane Valfréjus > Alpe-d’Huez	109.5 km
20	Individual time-trial	Saturday 23 July	Grenoble > Grenoble	42.5 km
21	En ligne	Sunday 24 July	Créteil > Paris Champs-Élysées	95 km

Steve Hind at Election Blackout:

Tony Abbott announced last night at the ‘people’s forum’ at the Broncos Leagues Club that he would campaign non stop from today until the election on Saturday. It seems he literally plans not to sleep until Saturday – even campaigning on graveyard shift radio between midnight at three AM.

That. Is. Totally. Insane.

Yep.

And how does this stack up against the perception that KRudd was often in poor form because he didn’t sleep enough? I don’t know that voters are really looking for a PM who wants to jeopardise their own judgement and health. Or some sort of weird self-immolation or sacrifice in our cause.

I really get the impression with Tony Abbott that all this frenetic cycling and running around, and the desire to be constantly active, is something deeply personal. Where it comes from I don’t care to speculate.

But I do wonder how he will cope if he loses.

Again, on his own admission, he went into a funk when the Howard government was booted out. Much of the thrust of his campaign, aided and abetted by the Dear Ex-Leader himself, has been to wipe away the wound of that defeat.

I don’t think he’s going to be a good loser.

Still, there are a few things you see in person on an Alpine climb that you miss on the TV. Il Diablo, perhaps the Tour’s most famous spectator for his appearances in a devil costume, is sponsored by a biodiesel company. There’s the loot from the sponsors’ caravan; I missed out on a Caisse De Stepargne jersey, but snaffled a Carrefour polka-dot cap, a bottle opener, and a bag. The thousands of amateur cyclists of varying abilities who ride up in the morning to get a viewing spot provide a great reality check; the pros look similarly pained on the steeper parts; the difference is that they’re going at least twice as fast. And you get to see the bits of road graffiti that the TV crew edits out – my favourite was “Trek bikes for sale – call Lance” (context here). But best of all, you get to chat to a huge variety of fellow fans, from the Dutch guys in motorhomes to the hundreds of Aussies on organized tours.

As for the race itself, it’s shaping up as an interesting contest. While we still don’t know who’s going to win the Tour, the first real mountains have eliminated a few pre-race favourites. Lance Armstrong’s pissed-off expression as he passed me, minutes behind the race leaders, said it all. Bradley Wiggins’ race is also likely run (to the surprise of noone but a few over-enthusiastic British fans). But, beyond that, the last kilometres of the day’s stage have called into question the pre-race assumption that it was Alberto Contador’s tour to lose.

For the past two years, Contador has been the world’s best Grand Tour rider by a considerable margin. Grand Tours are decided in two types of stages – mountainous ones, and individual time trials. Like Armstrong at his peak, he was both the best climber in the field, and amongst the very best time trialists. But, in the last kilometer of yesterday’s Alpine stage, Andy Schleck scampered away with Samuel Sanchez (a chance for the podium, but not amongst the top favourites) to win the stage from a group containing virtually every other GC (overall) contender. The time gain was a fairly inconsequential ten seconds. But will he be able to do so again – and gain enough time on Contador and the other GC contenders? He’ll need it.

And what of the other contenders? Not least, what of the current yellow jersey holder, Australia’s own Cadel Evans? He’s made it through the lucky dip of the first week with a few bonus seconds, and stayed with the other contenders on the first mountain top finish. Will he have the climbing legs to stick with Schleck, Contador and the others on the Col de Madelaine tonight (Aussie time)? And, even if he does, will the accumulated fatigue from the Giro d’Italia (which most of Evans’ rivals did not race) catch up with him, perhaps on my favourite Tour climb, the Col du Tourmalet, next weekend?

We’ll just have to wait. Like a Test series, watching the Tour requires patience. But if you stay up for it, there’ll be ample gorgeous helicopter shots of the French countryside to fill the time.

The council is looking to change that. As Bicycle Victoria reports:

27 May 2010. Inner Sydney’s proposed $179M new bike network will pay back the community three times what it will cost to build, reducing car trips by 4.3 million a year.

The bike network would deliver faster trips, better health, and less congestion; when these benefits were calculated in dollar terms they totalled a net $506M over a 30 year period, According to a new report commissioned by the City of Sydney and undertaken by AECOM.

The report, which you can download here, does something that’s an Australian first and may be a world first – it makes a prediction of the increase in bicycle usage from the bike path network. From that, they calculate a variety of benefits, from reduced car congestion, to health benefits, and also including “improved amenity” – that zipping down a bike path can be more pleasant than crawling through bumper-to-bumper traffic, or being sardined into a peak-hour train.

A substantial proportion of the calculated benefits are in terms of improved health and improved amenity, but even taking those out of the equation, the bike network still pays for itself twice over.

I am not a transport modeler, so I am not competent to judge their traffic modeling methodology; at the very least it appears it could do with some more validation in the Australian context. But even if the modeling itself could be improved, the fact that it has even been attempted, and the outcomes are so positive, represent a landmark in cycling infrastructure advocacy in Australia.

Fingers crossed they get their money.

The really short version is that I completed 536 kilometres of the 570 promised, with the missing kilometres the result of a mechanical failure that I couldn’t repair on the road towards the end of my second day’s riding (in short, a wheel that was unsafe to ride on, and Qantas’s cruel excess baggage policy meant that the spare wheelset was at home rather than in the car where it should have been).

But in any case, I did climb the Col du Tourmalet on my third day, and did it in one hour, 34 minutes and 30 seconds. While it’s way off the pros, it’s 12 minutes better than this guy from the New York Times, who did it fresh.

The tale of the three days riding in the Pyrenees will take multiple posts, which I will do at my own revived blog over the next few days – hopefully with photos, which remain on the support crew’s computer at the moment. It was, by far, the hardest physical challenge that I’ve ever undertaken. The pain of a bout of Crohn’s disease is worse, mind you, but this was self-inflicted. The views were spectacular (you’ll have to trust me until I can get the photos, but they really, really were!), the people were mostly wonderful, even the gendarmerie when they dragged us off the freeway when we were (unknown to us) riding on it illegally, the countryside was beyond fascinating. From a cycling perspective, one of the more interesting things was just how narrow so many of the famous roads up the cols are – they’re narrower than most of the farm access tracks near my boyhood home in Victoria’s north-east. The D918, the road on the Col du Tourmalet, is a glorified cart track despite the ski resort and considerable traffic on the road. Andorran drivers were the only ones with an Australian driver’s attitude to cyclists; in Spain and France they were all exceedingly helpful.

So what did I learn? While the absolute speeds were so different as to be a ridiculous comparison, I think I’ve got some idea what it’s like to push one’s body to the absolute limit for hour upon hour, through stinking heat and sun. While talented writers can instil a great deal of romance in the process, the fact is that on the bike it just feels like hour after hour of pain and discomfort. It just bloody well hurts, ok? But I’m very glad I did it, and I love cycling even more now than I ever did. As to the Tourmalet and the other famous climbs of the Tour, they too are perhaps romanticized overly. The laws of physics and physiology apply there, just as much as they do up a hill in Australia; I was pretty much dead-on with my expectations for the time I’d take. What makes those mountains special is that they provide the battleground for some of the greatest endurance athletes on Earth; no more, no less. How Cadel, our project patron Simon Gerrans, and the other pro cyclists do what they do remains a mystery. Do they hurt in the same way I did? More? I’ll never know, but I’ve gotten enough of a glimpse that my appreciation for what they do is even deeper than it was before. And while I don’t condone it, I can understand why the temptation for artificial assistance is so strong in pro ranks.

My fellow Crusaders, Damian, Dale, and Marieke, continue their even more difficult quest to ride the whole Tour route to raise awareness and money for Crohn’s disease. The support crew, John, Nancy, Tara and Jason were incredibly helpful, not to mention tolerant of tired, cranky cyclists. I couldn’t have done it without all of them.

Anyway, here’s the nag. To remind you all, Damian and I suffer from Crohn’s disease, and we all did this (aside from the personal gratification, of course) to raise the profile and some money for research into the condition. If any of you would be prepared to donate through the website, it would be very, very much appreciated. All monies raised go to Crohn’s and Colitis Australia to support research into what I still maintain is a neglected disease.

In essence, the plan acknowledges that over the past couple of years, cycling has re-emerged in Melbourne’s inner city as a significant mode of transport, and plans a network of bicycle lanes and paths within a ten-kilometer radius of the CBD to cater for and grow that demand. And it seems that the report writers have actually listened to the cycling bodies about what such a network needs. As the report puts it:

Central to a good bicycle network plan is the idea that its sum is greater than its parts. A path is more useful when connected to key destinations. Once one network is established it can be expanded, or strategic links can be added to connect it with others. A hierarchy of interlinked networks can be developed, linking a range of different types of destination, including public transport hubs and Central Activities Districts.

Routes within networks need to be visible, safe, and complemented by cycle parking facilities at destinations. On-road routes need to be continuous at intersections.

Yay, they’ve finally got it.

There’s a lot more to the strategy, including safety issues, integration with land-use planning, a public hire bike scheme for the CBD, plans (somewhat vague) to encouraging cycling within Melbourne’s newly-planned “activity centers” in key suburbs like Ringwood and Sunshine, and encouraging a return to children riding their bikes to school. Very much worth a read.

The plan, step forward that it is, is really still chicken feed money. The entire strategy is going to cost a tiny fraction of what the government’s blown on the myki automated ticketing system. Furthermore, it still doesn’t pay enough attention to considering – in a rigorous manner – the effect of cycling on the overall transport patterns of the city. Until that changes (as discussed on this earlier LP thread) it’ll still be fighting for table scraps compared to freeways.

The segment briefly covered the crash and concluded by pointing out that the cyclists were travelling on the shoulder of the motorway (as they were legally entitled to do) but that “at this stage it’s not clear why they weren’t on the other side of the freeway where there’s a dedicated cycling track”. The reporter then announced that “other riders we spoke to said riding in the breakdown lane is a risk they wouldn’t take”…The problem with this blame-shifting approach – sometimes known as the “rape discourse” – in reporting road crashes, is that it implies that cyclists are asking for trouble by being on the road at all.

Eye-grabbing terminology aside, Mayrhofer’s analysis is worth looking in to a little.

The specifics of this incident are a little bit less clear than Mayrhofer acknowledges. The victim was perfectly well entitled to use the shoulder of the road, as she points out. But it seems to me to be a legitimate question whether urban freeways are an appropriate place for cyclists, something which is not permitted in Victoria where I live, and in this context the existence of the cycleway is relevant.

The victim was riding a triathlon bike (as you can see here), which are generally completely unsuited to riding on bicycle tracks designed for kids barely off their training wheels. However, the M7 Cycleway is apparently an exception to this general rule – it’s wide enough, straight enough, and sparsely trafficked enough that a road cyclist can get a decent workout riding on it. Looking at this discussion board thread, the view that the M7 breakdown lane is too risky for cyclists does appear to be reasonably widely held in at least some sections of the Sydney triathlon community as well.

But this kind of nitpicking about the specific incident doesn’t really deal with Mayrhofer’s broader point – that media reporting feeds a stereotype that cyclists are “asking for it” by being out on the road.

Mayrhofer attempts to establish that negative stereotypes of cyclists exist, and that these are unfair:

Cyclists, like pedestrians, are classed as “vulnerable road users”, however it is unusual when a pedestrian is killed in a road crash for the news reports to suggest that the person was taking a risk by walking, or to assume that they were in the wrong. Cyclists, on the other hand, are consistently framed as an “out group”, rather than part of normal society. Research suggests they are seen as likely to behave irrationally, unlawfully and selfishly; to have no legitimate right to be on either the road or the path; and to be more likely to be at fault if they have a crash with another road user.

One consequence of this prejudice is the stereotyping of cyclists, as if they were a homogenous group. Such stereotypes create false commonalities between everyone who cycles, as a subset of road users, in a way which would seem absurd if it was done in other ways. You don’t hear people say, “Oh, I saw a fool in a blue car driving terribly the other day. They shouldn’t let those blue cars on the road.” Yet this logic is acceptable when discussing cyclists.

Moreover, there seems to be a distinction, in terms of hostility, between cycling per se, and “cyclists”. In surveys people generally respond positively to the idea of cycling because it is healthy, fun, environmentally beneficial, and so on, yet the term “cyclist” frequently invokes a negative response based on the stereotype. With almost 1.5 million bicycles sold in Australia last year, cyclists are not a small subculture. A large proportion of households have at least one bike, so many of the people riding them must be “normal”.

Much and all as it pains me to admit it about my fellow cyclists, I think there’s far more truth to at least some of these stereotypes than Mayrhofer is prepared to admit.

Despite Mayrhofer’s claims, cyclists do represent a small minority out on the roads. Russ Degnan quite correctly describes the regularly quoted bicycle sales statistic as a “rubbish statistic” – while there may be 1.5 million bicycles sold every year, only a tiny fraction of them are taken out on public roads on a regular basis. Such a minority, I would argue, may well have rather more in common than the drivers of blue cars in terms of personality and behaviour traits, and not all of them are good. And there is considerable evidence to suggest that some of those traits have a fair bit in common with the negative stereotypes.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has a comprehensive report (PDF) about cycling mortality in Australia in the past couple of decades. And it’s not pretty reading if you’re a cyclist. Some choice highlights:

• In over 60 per cent of crashes, the cyclist was deemed to be ‘responsible’ for the action that precipitated the fatal crash. This was particularly the case in crashes at intersections where the cyclist was either riding through the intersection on the road or moving from the footway onto the intersection. Cyclists were also found to be primarily responsible in other crashes where the cyclist moved from the footway to the road.
• From 1996 to 2000, nearly one-third of all male cyclists and nearly half of male cyclists in the 10 to 19 age group killed in road crashes were not wearing a helmet. Similarly, nearly one-third of all female cyclists killed in road crashes in the period were not wearing a helmet. For 2001 to 2004, helmet usage in over half the cases was unknown, but in the 48 cases where it was known, 30 of the cyclists were wearing a helmet and 18 were not.

None of this implies that in the specific case in Sydney was the fault of the riders concerned, or that motorists couldn’t generally show more consideration towards cyclists – or, to take the original article’s point, to imply that every cycling accident is the fault of the riders. But the stereotype that too many road-using cyclists are unduly cavalier appears to have not a little substance behind it.

The media will do what the media will do. But the best way to deal with negative stereotypes of cyclists might just be to actually clean up their act (something organizations like the Amy Gillett Foundation and many cycling clubs work towards) and by doing so deprive the allegedly anti-cyclist tabloid media of oxygen.

The first, splashed on the front pages of the Herald Sun, is a new freeway, is a leak from the Victorian Goverment’s transport plan. It joins the recently built Eastlink tollway in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, to the Mornington Peninsula freeway in Melbourne’s far south-eastern fringes, bypassing the suburbs of Carrum Downs, Frankston and Mount Eliza. The government wants federal money, from infrastructure Australia, for the project to build it without charging tolls. The second, put together by the Cycling Promotion Fund, a consortium of bicycle-related businesses big and small, proposes to spend a similar amount of money over four years building cycling infrastructure across Australia’s big cities, with the goal of “a doubling of cycling trips in capital cities by 2012 and tripling cycling trips by 2029 based on the 2006 census data.”

While it’s perhaps unfair to compare a public submission by what I imagine is a relatively small lobbying organization to a state government-backed inquiry can do, it strikes me that there’s a fundamental weakness in this document, and most proposals for large investments in cycling infrastructure over the years. The result is usually a pat on the head and a dribbling of money for cyclists, with the rivers of money continuing to go to the road builders.

When the Victorian government puts together its submission to Infrastructure Australia, it will have the combined resources of Vicroads, Treasury, and any external consultants desired, to crunch the numbers on the project, and provide an estimate on the project costs and benefits, and translate the benefits to a dollar figure. The earlier Eddington Report proposals had just such documents. Infrastructure Australia will presumably be able to run a ruler over their figures, compare it to similar projects around Australia, and determine whether it offers a good return to the community on the investment. Sure, that estimate will probably not properly account for pollution costs and the like, but there’s numbers for the beancounters!

The proposal does try to place the benefits of cycling in a financial context to keep the aforementioned beancounters happy, by calculating the effects of the reduced congestion, energy usage, pollution, and the improvement in health outcomes per kilometer of cycling compared to car usage. On this basis, they calculate the effects of achieving their targets of increased patronage, compare it to the costs of the infrastructure, and come out with rather impressive-looking cost-benefit ratios. But – and here’s the large but – they don’t present a quantitative case to establish that the level of spending proposed would cause the increase in cycling that they target. Undoubtedly, the general principle that building bike paths increases cycling is sound. But there’s no particular indication of how much you need to spend, and where, to achieve the desired benefits.

So, where does that leave us? For cycling advocates, there’s clearly a need for better information about the quantitative effects of various types of bike trails on ridership levels, allowing a more solid financial case to be made. But it just might be that such data is too hard to collect. If that’s the case, however, we can probably expect years more of cyclists receiving tidbits from government rather than the large-scale investments that might just establish cycling as a mainstream option for short trips that its advocates (and anybody that’s visited Copenhagen, or even Berlin) believe that it can become.