Plans were set in motion yesterday on an imaginative scheme that could bring real benefit to Ireland on an international stage and to the streets of Dublin in a real and meaningful fashion.
Good ideas can often be sparked by luck and the right coming together of events. Over the past two days Dublin City Council has hosted a conference on The Cities of the Isles bringing together officials from Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales to share thinking on what makes a city great.
Sport has featured prominently with Ruby Walsh an entertaining and informative guest at Wednesday’s dinner in City Hall, and Kevin Kilbane, Packie Bonner and Kieran Shannon delivering a session on Thursday on the value of sport as a driver of better cities.
In the session before this yesterday, in the rooms of Dublin Castle once taken over by various tribunals into ‘certain planning matters’, Liam Reid of Diageo was asked if there was one thing he could think of to improve the city.
He replied that since moving back into living in the city with his family he found that cycling was a real challenge and he would love to see one big idea around cycle lanes.
We heard the call and within one minute had linked together the arrival next May of the Giro d’Italia with a simple but ambitious plan to paint Dublin’s cycle lanes pink for next summer. If nothing else it would raise awareness of where and what they are, and get people thinking about them.
Within five minutes we had researched that the three stages the Grand Tour event will complete between Belfast and Dublin total 427KM. We have put out the challenge now as to whether, as a legacy from the visit of the Giro, we can identify 427 metres or even 4.27 KM of additional cycle lanes around Dublin that could be completed within a year from next May.
Next Thursday we will meet with an enthusiastic group drawn from Dublin City Council, Dublin Innovation, Guinness, Ulster Bank, the organisers behind the Giro d’Italia, and the Cycling world to see what might be possible, to implement that and to make a difference to our city and possibly to saving a life.
We will keep you posted on what emerges…
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