Cyclenation Watch

David Arditti gives Simon Geller, Cyclenation and the CTC a good kicking here.

The Cyclenation website also stands accused of misrepresentation..

This brings me to Dave Horton and last month’s Building Cycling Cultures Conference in Leicester. As I pointed out recently, this was one piece of cycling news that the CTC website completely ignored.

No one could make the same accusation against Cyclenation. This is what the website reported:

Excellent and inspiring conference in Leicester last weekend

The whole event was well planned and included a selection of different cycling related events and activities.The tours in the morning took in the pedestrainised [sic] zone with cycling allowed, an architectural tour and a visit to 2 of the city's recycling projects. The visits to the 2 projects were really interesting and inspiring one was Future Cycles the other was Bikes 4 All both were excellent projects focussing on getting bikes back out there! Karen Overton from New york [sic] held a great workshop on her work in the city inspiring young adults and children through the power and addiction of bike repair.
The subject of segregated cycle lanes was covered by another visitor from New York. Jon Orcutt works for the New York Department of Transportation who have introduced a radical programme of new cycle lanes in the city and his presentation was both amusing and information.# [sic]
The main theme was one of understanding the findings and implications of 2 pieces of academic research one by Dave Horton (Lancaster University): Key findings from the Understanding Walking & Cycling project and the other by Rachel Aldred (University of East London): Key findings from the Cycling Cultures project. More discussion of these will be available soon but in the meantime check out the Cyclenation Googlegroups for a taster.
8th June 2011

source.

Reading this, you would never know what those Key findings by Dave Horton were. Five links are supplied but none of them is to those research results, which would obviously be anathema to John Franklin, since Horton believes mass cycling requires very high quality and continuous segregated cycling infrastructure on our biggest and busiest urban roads. Like the CTC, Cyclenation News fails to link to the two relevant features on the Guardian website. Instead ‘The subject of segregated cycle lanes’ is attributed solely to another speaker, and the link supplied is all about a cycle lane in New York, not the topic of segregation.

In other words, the issue of separate cycling infrastructure is fudged and evaded. However

discussion of these [Key findings] will be available soon

I’m looking forward to reading it.