Cycling on footpaths is so much the norm, people think it’s legal!

IT’S about time we joined forces and bit the bullet here. It’s time we kicked up a really proper stink about what’s going on across our footpaths and roads.

Something has to be done about the entitled thugs who rampage along our pavements on bicycles and e-scooters and who drive cars, vans and lorries at high speed through villages and towns across the county.

Let’s do the footpaths first. Bully-boys and bully-girls are cycling at speed on bikes and e-scooters right down the middle of even busy footpaths, utterly careless of the safety or welfare of others.

They use wheelchair ramps to mount footpaths at speed, ignoring those passers-by who have the bottle to protest, and forcing everyone else to get out of their way.

A friend of mine who lives near Cork city centre says she’s given up protesting and has silently joined the great majority of embattled pedestrians who just step aside.

Another friend who lives in Bishopstown said a young cyclist rode up beside an elderly woman hobbling along on a stick - snatched her stick and threw it away.

A friend, who lives near the West Cork town of Skibbereen reports that young cyclists, mostly in their late teens, are flying along the pavements endangering pedestrians and ignoring repeated requests to cycle on the road.

A businessman in Clonakilty told me that customers have reported they’re increasingly cautious about walking out the doors of shops on main street for fear they’ll be hit by a bicycle or an e-scooter.

Local residents are fearful of walking in some areas because of the tsunami of young people cycling at them at speed along the pavements.

I could tell you about the time around a year ago when I politely asked a cyclist to cycle on the road, not the pavement. The man actually followed me – on his bike - to inform me, in the most righteous of tones, that, in fact, what he was doing was perfectly legal.

Did I feel intimidated? Did I what !This is what it’s come to. They. Think. It’s. Legal! Let me emphasise: It’s not!

I’m calling on our local authorities to install huge ‘No Cycling on the Pavement’ signs with big red X’d circles around images of cyclists/e-scooter.

The signs are needed on all footpaths in residential and commercial areas across the city and county.

Because it’s not just the children and teenagers who are doing it. It’s their parents! It’s their aunties, their uncles, their cousins, friends and neighbours!

Cycling along footpaths has become so much the norm that people think it’s legal. And one of these days someone will be very badly hurt.

Organisations like the city and county councils, the GAA, Tidy Towns, community action groups, schools and universities need to join with politicians, the government, the Road Safety Authority and the Garda Siochana to run a really determined and effective campaign, which is supported by the public, on this issue.

Secondly, we need speed bumps on our roads. Everywhere. Some lucky places like Ballincollig already have them. But speed bumps, like No Cycling pavement signs, are now urgently needed in every kind of residential and commercial setting, large and small, across the county.

Let me give an example. It’s a particularly good one because I know it so well.

There are so-called electronic traffic-calming signs outside the two small sister villages of Enniskeane and Ballineen in West Cork, exhorting motorists to slow down. Are these signs working? My eye they’re working.

Motorists are screaming through the villages and up and down the network of approach roads at all hours of the day and night. I should know. I live in the area.

I hear them cannonballing along the approach roads to these villages. I see the way motorists just barrel through the villages. And then, later still, the boy-racers come out, shattering the quiet night with the high pitched screams of their engines…

My God, you’d swear these narrow, winding country roads were state-of-the-art motorways the way these drivers – and not just the young boy racers, it should be said - behave.

I can testify to it. I see them. I encounter these lunatics every day.Even though the main road through Enniskeane and Ballineen is not a particularly wide one, and even though there are often cars parked alongside the local shop or post office, drivers will not wait behind a parked vehicle on their side of the road for an oncoming vehicle to pass by across the road. They come right out around parked vehicles straight at you – and at speed.

The tiny village of Shannonvale, outside Clonakilty, is another place being battered by high-speed traffic. Residents were relieved a few years ago when temporary speed bumps were installed for the duration of roadworks on the nearby N71. They thought they’d be replaced by permanent speed bumps.

To their horror, on completion of the roadworks, the temporary speed bumps were simply removed.

Speed bumps and other effective road calming measures are urgently required at regular intervals on the approach to and throughout these villages. There are road doughnuts at many junctions throughout West Cork, a sure sign that lunatics are rampaging, unimpeded, through the countryside at all hours of the day and night – and take it as a given that they don’t slow down just because they’re entering a small village. Those three villages are only an example of how Cork communities are being abused by speeding motorists – ironically at a time when increasing concern is being voiced at the increase in road deaths.

Speed bumps need to be installed throughout all villages and towns in county Cork, and signs need to go up on all our pavements forbidding people to cycle on them. Can’t we all do something about these lunatics? They are ruining our lives.