This article was published in 2019, in Magazine 144.
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‘When is a cycle route not a cycle route? When it is not safe to allow a six-year-old child to ride their own bike along it. And sadly, that is the existing cycle route to our school and there are no signs of that changing any time soon.’
Diana Farrell is a lifelong cyclist who started off with the thrill of ditching stabilisers before her older brother and is now Breeze Area Coordinator for East and Central Scotland. In between there have been road cycling and racing, children and cargo bikes. Her blog, Mummy’s Gone a Cycle, covers it all.
Earlier in the year, she published a post called When is a cycle route not a cycle route? in which she described her frustration that new plans for her area in Edinburgh focused almost entirely on routes from home to work, delivered by a patchwork of ineffective ‘quiet routes’, meandering detours and a few token segregated lanes. All she wants is a safe route to school so that her children can take part in The Big Pedal initiative and continue to cycle independently from then on. Surely that’s not too much to ask?