Simon Delaney on a bike: He says cycling was a scary experience when he got himself into Dublin traffic. RTE has also released the first brief look at the new series.
The actor and TV presenter Simon Delaney said cycling in Dublin "scared the bejaysus" out of him when he took to a bike in the Irish capital for a new TV series.
Delaney will co-host the new four-part RTE series on cycling, Now You See Me, with TV presenter Bláthnaid Treacy. It gets underway next Monday at 7.30pm.
The four-parter seeks to explore conditions on the roads for cyclists, and some other vulnerable road users, and asks "what is it so hard for us to share the roads".
The TV cameras and presenters also go off to Copenhagen and Seville to see how the Europeans do cycling compared to the Irish.
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Delaney, who says his main mode of transport is by car, has told The Times Ireland edition that getting up on a bike in Dublin was an eye-opener.
It gave him a fresh perspective. While before he would notice the things some cyclists did wrong, on the bike he noticed very poor driving more.
“I cycled into Dublin city centre one day and it scared the bejaysus out of me," he said in an honest appraisal. "There isn’t enough room for everybody.
“As a driver you sit at a traffic light and see cyclists coming through the lights and you’re thinking, ‘God, what a gobshite, why do they do that?’
“Then when you’re a cyclist you see things car drivers do and you think, ‘Why did he do that, the gobshite?’
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"We need to realise we’re all road users. The drivers don’t own the roads, cyclists don’t own the roads. We’re shared road users.”
It seems like a promising initial message; though Delaney wearing an RSA hi-vis vest in the middle of the day may not be welcomed by many cyclists.
It should be very interesting to see the reaction to the series and the public conversation it might start.
The Road Safety Authority is involved in the series and is an agency that has a lot of work to do to repair its damaged relationship with cyclists in Ireland.
One of its "experts" wrote an anonymous column recently in the Irish Independent in which cyclists were described as "busy bees".
The author, who works for the RSA but whose identity remains secret, outlined a number of incidents they had seen involving poor cycling.
These were then mapped onto all cyclists, with very little balance by way of setting out examples of substandard and dangerous driving, or responsible cycling.
It also emerged the author of the article had written it much more critically of cyclists initially.
They wanted to refer to cycle lanes and "psycho lanes" but the column was edited before publication.
The final article, which was clearly examined and approved by others in the RSA, was poor enough. Furthermore, the agency has proved reluctant since its publication to discuss it publicly.
RTE One: Now You See Me
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