So... cleanshaven LoB volunteer & 80% vehicular cyclist here. 80% because I use the cycle bypass at E&C instead of riding the roundabout like True Vehicularists are apparently supposed to.
Regarding #2. Hyperbole perhaps, but the only other area he/she has significant clout in is policing.
3700 signups of 300k regular cyclists is not a huge amount, true; even less so when you consider there's another 1.5M Londoners out there who'd like to ride a bike regularly but say they are put off by road danger. Having said that, our budget to date has been less than what some of your bikes are probably worth (and mine, before some half-awake cretin in a Clio drove in to the back of it). We're not part of LCC & have no outside funding. With Boris & Ken being neck-and-neck in the election (which could well be won or lost by a margin less than 10k, as it goes), with a few more supporters we'll be at a size where they're prepared to put something on the table in return for those votes.
Anyhow. LoB doesn't take sides in the infrastructure debate. Nor helmets, nor facial hair. The volunteer group has everyone from round-the-world riders & people who've been commuting longer than I've been alive, to Pashley princesses & Hoxton hipsters. What we do ask is that the politicians take notice of not just the 300k people who ride bikes now, but the 1.5m who'd like to (and the millions more who'd probably take it up if it even seemed like something they could consider). I know that as a fast-ish, vehicular cyclist myself, many are suspicious of spending & infrastructure... frankly I couldn't care less. Getting cars off the roads, making the city's air cleaner, putting more travelers out in the open & being part of their communities instead of caged up in metal boxes, making the streets more liveable.. all those are more important to me than whether my average commute speed is 12mph or 17mph. As a solo rider, I can go almost anywhere in London on a bike right now, mostly without a sense of intolerable danger. But I can't take my kids to the museums on a Nihola; my parents, aunts, in-laws etc. would never dream of making a ten-mile journey across London by bike; and I believe it's only right that we should try to change this. As far as the implementation goes - Dutch, Danish or anything else - is of secondary importance.
