Free cycles on Dublin's streets... on yer bike, mate!
Thursday January 12 2006
Roche might beat a retreat to his panic room if Labour councillor Andrew Montague gets his way, because there will be talk of little else but bicycles.
Montague is urging Dublin City Council to provide a fleet of free-to-use bicycles for the capital. By putting a couple of euro in a slot, pedestrians would be able to release a pair of wheels from one of the plentiful bicycle stations dotted around the capital. The borrowers could then reclaim their deposit, in supermarket trolley fashion, by docking the bikes at the station handiest to their destination.
Montague has studied schemes in other countries and reckons that the free bikes could be substantially proofed against thieves and vandals. For a start, they'd have solid rubber tyres making them too slow, uncomfortable and tiring for anything more than a short hop.
They'd be built to an eccentric design so that their parts couldn't be "harvested" by thieves for fitting to conventional bikes. Being so distinctive, they'd be easily spotted if taken outside their fixed boundaries (perhaps between the two canals), and the transgressor stopped and fined.
The operation would be policed by a squad of bike minders who'd man the stations, ward off gurriers, and disperse any build-ups of bikes so that there's always an even spread around the city.
The one problem with the proposal - and there is only one problem - is that it's stark bonking mad.
Where is the Council going to recruit minders with the training in scuba diving to disperse the main build-ups of bikes, which will be in the Liffey and the two canals? If the minders are stationed between the canals, who is going to stop and fine cyclists on out-of-bounds bikes?
Please don't say "the guards". I was in a Garda station recently and a seriously heavy customer arrived in for his weekly bail/probation signing on. Thumbing throught the book, the desk officer observed: "You haven't signed on for the last three weeks." The thug explained: "Last week I couldn't make it cos I was locked up for three days. Before that it was Christmas and I had a lot on."
And where is the Council going to find the millions of euro to cover the bogus compensation claims of that section of society which opens the wardrobe in the morning and ponders: "Now, which neck-brace am I going to wear today?"
Montague believes that the insurance costs could be largely met by selling advertising space on the solid wheels of the spokeless bikes. I regretfully suggest that selling ad space on the side of London's Millennium Wheel might be closer the mark.
A scheme very similar to the one proposed is working well in Copenhagen. However, as Garret FitzGerald pointed out some years back: "Whatever else we are in this country, we are not Danes." (Long story.) In Copenhagen, people will wait obediently for a green light at a pedestrian crossing, even if the street is empty because it's 4am on Christmas Day during a petrol strike.
In Ireland, if something's not nailed down, someone will try to steal it - or else nail it down. Either one is good to a certain mentality. The evidence sheet is long and shameful.
Recently, we've had life-sized cow effigies butchered on the streets of Dublin (one beheaded with a saw with great effort), a fibreglass pig and a statue of Padraic O Conaire smashed in Galway, and a civic sculpture destroyed in Newry.
Similarly, big artworks of cattle, deer and horses didn't last a wet day left unguarded in Limerick.
The life-sized cattle driven off the streets by vandals in 2003 had been exhibited unmolested in London, Sydney, Auckland and New York. "The awful thing is," said the promoter, "we were kind of expecting this in Dublin."
