Ms Louise Williams:

It is very important to highlight leadership. Leadership is essential to ensure that change happens. The plans are there.

We need to challenge our assumptions about how people are cycling. We should not assume that because many people commute by bicycle that they are the only type of cyclists for whom we should cater. We should be thinking about people dropping their children to school, caregivers and a range of others who wish to cycle. It is very important that we begin to challenge and examine those assumptions. If we fail to so do, there is a risk we will only cater for people who wear Lycra and go as fast as they can on urban streets. The city centre is not really an appropriate place for sport cycling because that would exclude some people who may wish to cycle. Approximately 26% of those who cycle in Dublin are women. Some people who study cycling and know far more about it than we do have stated that women are an indicator species in the sense that having a greater proportion of women cyclists indicates there are good routes that are segregated and well maintained. Clearly, that is not the case in Dublin. Leadership is important. It is also important that we do not design assuming that we are catering for everybody. Doing so involves a strong risk that it would, by default, be a design for men who tend to cycle in a certain way. The Dublin City Cycling Campaign believes that would be problematic further down the line.

On how we design our city, Dublin City Council has a list of priorities, with pedestrians first, followed by cyclists, public transport users and drivers. We must acknowledge, as has been done quite comprehensively at this meeting, that those methods of transport are sometimes put in conflict. That is what the Chairman witnessed in the case of a cyclist coming at him out of the blue. I understand that he experienced and saw the cyclist's vulnerability. When considering a design context such as that, we may have a tendency to blame the person who is most vulnerable. What we need to do is recognise that the lighting is appropriate for cars but not for people who are cycling.