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.

Survey results, Territories lead States

A survey conducted for the Australian Bicycle Council and Austroads finds that the Territories lead the States in bicycle participation rates. 'The survey was a telephone interview conducted with a random selection of households across Australia. The interviews were conducted during March and April 2011. A total of 9,661
households consisting of 24,858 individuals were interviewed, consisting of around 0.11% of the Australian resident population. Respondents were asked when they and other members of their household had last ridden a bicycle, and if in the past week, how often and for what purposes they had ridden.'
Overall the ACT was second to Northern Territory in terms of participation and transport:

The ACT leads the Australian average on modes of cycling transport for which recreation which is the main reason why people cycle.

Commuting comes next followed by education and shopping. If we were to compare it with the Netherlands we would find a different set of statistics:

Education is by far the highest proportion ,followed by recreational , shopping and commuter travel.

Now these are only survey responses and the ABS census data which was held last month will get a better sense of bicycle use over the last 5 years sadly it won't include education or over uses except travel to work.
There has been far too much focus on commuting rather the overall population in Canberra and the focus needs to be on infrastructure that the majority can use rather the the strong and fearless. The overwhelming statistic from this survey shows the the highest participation in bicycle use is in children an teenagers, so why aren't  we building better infrastructure for them?