Monday, September 19, 2011

Australia's Best Cycling City Award!

Now wouldn't that be a good idea. Australia has awards for tidy towns but as I'm aware nothing that recognises a city or town on its cycle friendliness. The CPF has annual awards that does recognise towns though it is more of a local government award. But a national award and title that gives a city or town recognition on the work and funding a city provides to promote cycling would create competition and a willingness by some local governments to invest more in cycle facilities.

Maybe the CPF and the Australian bicycle council could consider this and look to the example of Fietsbond in the Netherlands on the annual Fietsstad with this years feature on cycling to schools in each of the five cities nominated.

Here a couple of those lesser known cities (to Australians).

         

         

In the latest Pedestrian and Cycle review for Canberra, the study was only looking at commuting and not cycling routes to schools. Maybe awards like this can help to improve the overall thinking in Australia on what makes a cycle friendly city, one that includes all aspects of cycling not just commuting or cycle racing.

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3 comments:

  1. Freedom CyclistSeptember 19, 2011 at 11:03 AM

    ...really looking forward to coming to Canberra this Wednesday - will we get to meet you?

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  2. Paul JacksonSeptember 19, 2011 at 1:31 PM

    Hey, Princess Mary of Denmark is coming to town in November...think we can get her to opine on the relative merits of Copenhagenization for Canberra? Surely her words would carry a lot of weight?

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  3. UnknownFebruary 10, 2013 at 3:47 PM

    I'm living in Shanghai now but the family and I are moving to Canberra later this year. We've started cycling while in Shanghai, and it has its pluses and some minuses cycling wise.

    I think the award is a great awareness raising idea. We shouldn't wish there was one though, lets start one! I'd be happy to help out from a great distance. Why not? Get a small committee together, pick a handful of locations for the first award, and just do it. It would be under resourced and pretty basic first year around, but it would generate interest and could possibly attract funding.

    ReplyDelete