Ghostly

Spotted online last night that a few people I knew were meeting at the parliament in the morning to deposit two ghost bikes, to represent two more cyclists killed on Scotland's roads last week. It brought the total for the year to 8, just one fewer than in the whole of last year. And then news came in this morning of a female cyclist being killed near Inverness, so last year has now been matched.

Keith Brown MSP, the transport minister, recently rejected calls for various safety measures on the grounds that Scotland's roads were getting safer. Well... They are for motorised transport, which is about all Broonie is bothered about. He actually went as far as saying that continental style measures were unnecessary because the number of cyclists being killed is going down. Erm... 5 in 2009; 7 in 2010 and 2011; 9 last year; and 9 so far this year. I'm no maths genius, but even so...

The thing is, the amounts being asked for to make cycling safer in Scotland are paltry compared to large scale infrastructure projects. The new Forth crossing, for example, work on which was begun, at the SNP's insistence, before the results of latest works on the current bridge were known. The results of which state... The degradation of the cables has been halted.

The dualling of the A9 is going to cost £3Bn. One project, £3Bn. The request for cycling investment, for the whole country, amounts to £100m a year. It would take 30 years to cost as much as one single infrastructure project.

And the knock on of such investment isn't just that you might have 9 people each year still here; despite what doom-mongers think, the cities would be wonderful places to be and live in. Copenhagen is an ideal, but I don't know a single person who visits that doesn't come back realising we've got things seriously wrong here. Dublin is starting to change (HGVs not allowed into the city, for example - which contrary to popular opinion doesn't mean that shops and businesses are the devoid of items and equipment, but rather there are distribution centres outside the city where goods and taken off the lorries and put onto smaller vehicles, which are less polluting, more manoeuvrable, take up less space on the road, and cause less harm if involved in an incident - HGVs account for a ridiculously high proportion of cyclist deaths in London in particular).

Edinburgh, and Scotland, meanwhile have no courage, and no desire to change. Lothian Buses, for example, was one of the key objectors to city-wide 20mph zones, on the basis that their services would be delayed. Cue a few enterprising individuals who got onto buses with GPS to record their journey, and found that the average speeds of buses was somewhat below 20mph, and that in most instances there were only a couple of places where the buses actually got over 20mph at all. But the knee-jerk is 'change is wrong, it MUST be harmful'. Much like the traders on George Street who worry about a lack of trade every time the pedestrianisation of the street is considered. Here you've got a boulevard that could rival any in the world, but the need to park cars along it is seen as paramount. I wish, I just wish traders would ask their customers how they had travelled there, because I've no doubt they'd find the majority had come by bus or walked.

Bogota, Portland, Dublin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen - they've all changed, all improved things, not just for cyclists, but for anyone in the city. Yes really, Bogota. Even in New York, a major avenue, once clogged with traffic, had more space given over to pedestrians and cyclists, and the traders there saw sales go up by some insane percentage, because suddenly that avenue became a destination, somewhere to linger. And people who linger will spend more money. There are plans for other areas to follow suit.

It's a dream, perhaps, that Scotland might be able to have her cities follow suit. A dream that someone in power might one day wake up to.