I have no issue with someone making emotional points, but she needs to get her facts right and not just skate over issues trying to use them to somehow support her point while not engaging with them at all.
The main issue with just about anything in London is just London. Some of the phenomena that people criticise about cycling don't have anything to do with cycling. These are issues such as excessive competitiveness (the morning sportive from the Surrey stockbroker belt along Cycle Superhighway 7 being an example) or the excessively long commuting distances which cause people to choose functional wear, plus many other things which I could tediously list. They become more visible about cycling because cyclists are more visible, but they are actually very similar across all other vehicular modes of transport.
Amsterdam is of course a much more liveable city than London, but it is a much smaller place where the competitive stakes are not as high as here, in a less unjust country, with a much higher standard of living. The average length of trips in Amsterdam is tiny compared to London and of course that enables people to use heavy, impractical bikes and 'normal' clothes, but it is simply because people are not forced to cover such long distances for mundane journeys (the need to travel has increased tremendously in the Netherlands, too, but Amsterdam is still organised better than London). There are factors such as these (corresponding to the opposite causes in London) which influence people's perception of cycling there more than the actual symptom of cycling.
I have no issue with someone making emotional points, but she needs to get her facts right and not just skate over issues trying to use them to somehow support her point while not engaging with them at all.
The main issue with just about anything in London is just London. Some of the phenomena that people criticise about cycling don't have anything to do with cycling. These are issues such as excessive competitiveness (the morning sportive from the Surrey stockbroker belt along Cycle Superhighway 7 being an example) or the excessively long commuting distances which cause people to choose functional wear, plus many other things which I could tediously list. They become more visible about cycling because cyclists are more visible, but they are actually very similar across all other vehicular modes of transport.
Amsterdam is of course a much more liveable city than London, but it is a much smaller place where the competitive stakes are not as high as here, in a less unjust country, with a much higher standard of living. The average length of trips in Amsterdam is tiny compared to London and of course that enables people to use heavy, impractical bikes and 'normal' clothes, but it is simply because people are not forced to cover such long distances for mundane journeys (the need to travel has increased tremendously in the Netherlands, too, but Amsterdam is still organised better than London). There are factors such as these (corresponding to the opposite causes in London) which influence people's perception of cycling there more than the actual symptom of cycling.