Michael Moynihan: On your bike — what kind of city do we want Cork to be?

We need to sidestep some of the sausage-making that seems to form part of every debate in City Hall about infrastructure

A cycle lane in South Mall, Cork. Picture Denis Minihane.

IT’S been ascribed to several authors, but Mark Twain is generally accepted as its most likely creator. Anyone who respects the law and enjoys eating sausages should watch neither being made.

You’ve heard that one, right? Either in its original format, as above, or in something like the offhand reference to be found in Hamilton (“No one really knows how the game is played/The art of the trade/How the sausage gets made”).

It’s pithy and irresistible, a pungent, tasty comparison that clicks with those who hear it because it spirals out beyond the immediate recognition by your senses. And neither keeping the law nor eating sausages is compromised by an understanding of their origins if you believe strongly enough in both.

Why so philosophical this early, you ask?

Because there was an interesting meeting in Cork City Council earlier on this week, reported faithfully as always by Eoin English from this parish.

The temptation is to say that Eoin is likely to have his hours of attendance in the council chambers set against any possible future stay in purgatory such are the horrors involved, but that’s an unfair comparison. There is no live streaming from purgatory, for instance, whereas last Monday’s council meeting was broadcast to the world.

For all the criticism of councillors for their decisions, it has to be recognised that these are people who are giving up their time to try to improve the city and doing their best. They may be wrong at times — who among us, etc — but the basic demands of fairness mean their efforts should be acknowledged as more constructive than those who merely — and furiously — thumb their smartphones’ social media apps. That is not activism by proxy.

(And more constructive, even, than those hammering out newspaper columns, eh?)

In recent years, doctors and medics launched a petition for a bike lane linking Cork's major teaching hospitals. Picture: Dan Linehan

Anyway, my aim here isn’t to take potshots at elected representatives because of comments made at a council meeting earlier this week, but to try to work out what the debate really means.

For instance, Eoin reported that a 120m section of bike lane has been dropped from a large safe cycling scheme in Cork City to facilitate on-street parking for several healthcare premises.

“City councillors voted 19-8 in favour of proceeding with an amended version of the Curraheen Rd pedestrian and cycle safety improvement scheme," he wrote.

The issue which complicated matters here was access to a pharmacy, doctor’s surgery and physiotherapy practice — and whether that access, particularly for elderly patients, would be compromised if on-street parking was removed.

On one hand, this is the kind of bread-and-butter debate and decision that keeps city councils all over the world ticking over; it’s the kind of small-D democracy in
action to gladden the heart.

But because it’s an implicit conflict between what cyclists want and what motorists want, it’s war to the knife within seconds.

By this I mean a rapidly escalating series of questions and rebuttals, the kind of exchange that soon becomes a high-pitched wordless whine audible only to the neighbour’s dog.

Why should particular private businesses be facilitated with such serious amendments to the city’s infrastructure plans? Why can’t parking be found elsewhere for all of the customers of these businesses? Why were the elderly specified as the people needing access — don’t they cycle?

Why can’t cyclists be happy with all of this cycling scheme apart from this little snippet out of it? Why are you saying I can’t drive my car? What about my rights? Why should I accommodate you? Why? Why? WHY?

Enjoyable though this might be for the masochists among us, for most people these are narrowly focused queries. A debate like this exists at two different levels — the first, which I have transcribed faithfully above, but also on a broader level.

As in, what kind of city do you want Cork to be?

The reason I leap to the global view is that in the debate at the council about this and allied matters, the question was asked about Cork’s suitability for cycling.

The smart-aleck response is to point to the city streets at rush hour every morning and afternoon and ask whether Cork is suited to cars, because the visible evidence suggests it is not.

The more considered retort, however, would be to ask whether the city is suited to people, and not whether it’s accommodating to one particular mode of transport over another.

Viking era streets

What’s interesting about applying this to Cork is that in discussions of ways to get around the city, people lose sight of the fact that the place is centred on a small network of Viking-era streets right in the middle. These are streets and spaces — laneways, sharp corners, narrow bridges — that were built to suit people who were stomping into town with a prize goat or an enemy’s head. 

When Snorri Sturluson or whoever it was sailed down from Denmark and meandered up the Lee to create a settlement, his first thoughts weren’t ‘better make sure the thoroughfares will be wide enough for the metal people-transporters they’ll be riding here in 13 centuries’ time’.

The same goes for the merchants who received Cork’s royal charter in 1185: the small print hardly stretched to ‘and shall make allowances for drivers’ conveyances large and small on ye highways, from the fury of the Norsemen may God deliver us, were there ever worse urban planners, etc.’

The war between cyclists and motorists is not the issue here. Picture Dan Linehan

As a consequence, there are parts of its centre that aren’t amenable to anything more intricate or mechanical than your own two feet, and nothing short of large-scale razing of the inner core of Cork will change that. The sooner people realise that the better.

There were other interesting developments at last Monday’s council meeting. For instance, councillor Fiona Ryan stated on Twitter that the matter of illegal dumping in Blackpool came up: “1,185 letters issued by Cork City Council implementing litter by-laws resulted in 6 fines in 2021. Dumping continues. Illegal dumping comes from an extreme minority but creates catastrophic damage. Surveillance doesn’t work. By-laws don’t work”. (Back to this at a later date.)

If there’s something to extrapolate from that cycle lane imbroglio, though, it’s surely that questions about a stretch of roadway in one part of the city should open out a bigger discussion about Cork as a whole. Instead of throwing the toys out of the pram — whether that pram is towed behind a bike or in the back seat of a car, ho ho — about this or that particular issue, shouldn’t the framing question be: how does this make the city better for the people living in it?

Reverse engineering a debate from that point, with the greater good of all the intended destination, wouldn’t necessarily solve all our problems. Far from it.

But if it sidestepped some of the sausage-making that seems to form part of every debate in City Hall about infrastructure, wouldn’t it be worthwhile on that basis alone?