in my view both. In England (I'm not so sure about the rest of the UK) we use kids to pioneer things we don't want to do ourselves. That's dishonest. Bikeability is a means by which adults pass off their failure to gather political will on to children. Not nice. And, in true government style, we've made it over-complicated and expensive.
And, in the case of Milton Keynes (which, as I've said, may have coloured my judgement) the CTC has behaved so scandalously that not only has the programme gone off like a damp squib, not only has it been expensive, but we've seen the ghost of corruption undercutting people's livelyhoods. Bikeability appears to be distressingly open to abuse, and CE and their chosen helpmates don't appear to be up to the task of ensuring that it's run properly.
Who stands for cycling in this country? The truth is, Jonesy, that you do, matey. There's a solid corps of transport consultants who see stuff working and other stuff not working. What's lacking is a kind of ideological framework to put it together. There are people like Natalya B in TfL who can plot out a sustainable future for urban transport in which the car plays a small subsidiary role and, better yet, the general populace miss it no more than a reformed smoker misses his tabs. There's people like Bricycles sticking pins in their local Councillors.
There's also, potentially, the wisdom of however many thousand CTC members (and even more Sustrans supporters), presently parked in a layby by their own organisation. The problem is that the bigger cycling organisations have become lobbyists, fine in itself, but limited in potential. They've foregone their principal task which is to campaign on the basis of an ideology (by which I mean a critical intellectual framework). They spend their time shuffling around the corridors of the DfT touting for business when they should be saying 'this is what cycling can do for this country, and this is what we propose to make it happen'. I accept that being a consumer organisation imposes limits on the political rhetoric that can be employed, but the last thirteen years granted cycling organisations the most tremendous opportunity to form a theory of the city that they might promulgate. In the event we've actually stumbled along in the wake of Ken Livingstone (whose own vision of the city goes back to at least 1970) and a few city councils, as surprised by what works as anybody else, drawing dopey little maps with wiggly green lines, and asking kids to shoulder the burden.
CE is part of this failure. I can't tell you that it's all crap, but I, for one, won't miss it.
