Down & out in Paris and London, no it's Brisbane that's down & out for cyclists

[johnnigh]

From the BikeQLD discussion list (no relation to Bicycle Q'land, by the way - too radical for them ):

At the risk of inciting the safety nazis into action...

What a marvellous piece to camera we just saw by Phil Williams outside
Westminster Abbey. Phil was good, as always. But what about the
background action? We saw normal, congested London traffic. Private
motors, black cabs, white vans and cyclists. The cyclists were working
perfectly well with the motor traffic. We saw one fellow doing a bit of
lane-splitting, weaving around slow moving cars. Some had helmets. Some
had cloth caps. Some were bare-headed. All of them were travelling as
part of the general traffic - no segregation at all. And apart from some
yellow visibility clothing, they all looked quite normal. What a
contrast to the situation we have here! Might we ever see such
integration here? Or will we continue with the segregation championed by
both the transport authorities and the "nominated" cycling lobbyists?

Discuss...

In contrast I've been in Paris the last week and could count the number of
helmets I've seen on one hand. Thousands of bikes, though, and a huge
number of them are Vélibs - it's really impressive to see what CityCycle
could be. Unfortunately the price for short term tickets went up by 60-70%
today: the single day subscription yesterday was 1€ (AUD 1.35) but today
costs a whopping 1.70€ (AUD 2.30), as much as a single Metro ticket.
Compare that to CityCycle's $11 single day subscription...

As far as segregation goes, there's a lot of theoretical segregation here
(at least from everything but taxis and buses, with which one often shares
a bus lane), but in practice you need to mix it with the traffic pretty
heavily. On the bright side there aren't many big trucks, there are some
quite lead-footed motorists but traffic is usually fairly slow and
accustomed to (and seemingly respectful of) both cyclists and pedestrians.

My bikeqld friends put their fingers on two reasons for Brissie not being the cycling capital of the world.