Mayor Boris Johnson wants to see a ‘cycling revolution’ that will result in a 5% a mode share for bikes by 2026. This would bring London in line with the current European average and is well below Berlin (current mode share 13%, target 18% by 2025). Let’s not even mention Amsterdam or Copenhagen.

What needs to be done to create a genuine cycling revolution and turn London into a great cycling city? Is segregated cycle infrastructure essential? What lessons can we learn from our European neighbours and from further afield? Join us and Jim Davis, founder of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain at the next Street Talk to debate these issues and explore the role that cycling can play in helping to make London a more liveable city.

Jim Davis, Cycling Embassy of Great Britain: I want what they’re having – how the rest of the world is achieving a real cycling revolution. Upstairs at The Yorkshire Grey, 2 Theobalds Road, WC1X 8PN at 7pm (bar open 6pm) on 12th April 2011.

The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain acts as a conduit for best practice from around the World and aims to get standards, as opposed to guidelines, implemented to create cycle infrastructure that we can all be proud of and that people will actually want to use – as opposed to the largely circuitous, dangerous and unfit for purpose rubbish we currently have to put up with. They promote the bicycle as a mode of transport and are hoping to reach the approximately 97% of people that don’t ride a bicycle regularly as opposed to the 3% who do. The Embassy seeks to create links with other cycling organisations in the UK and around the World and are talking to various organisations who are working in a similar way.

Jim Davis is an occasional stand-up comic, founder of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain and a former CTC Information Officer. In 2007 he raced his Brompton to 5th in the Smithfield Nocturne Folding Bike Races. He blogs as The Lo Fidelity Bicycle Club and tweets as thecyclingjim.

Speakers are now lined up for the first four Street Talks:

March

Tom Barry, Boris Watch: State of the city – the highs and lows of London transport policy 2000 – 2011

Upstairs at The Yorkshire Grey, 2 Theobalds Road, WC1X 8PN at 7pm (bar open 6pm) on 8th March 2011.

April

Jim Davis, Cycling Embassy of Great Britain: I want what they’re having – how the rest of the world is achieving a real cycling revolution

May

Dr Harry Rutter, Director of the National Obesity Observatory: Moving towards a healthier city – active travel and health

June

Andrew Cameron, Director of Urban Design, WSP: How to make great streets

Full details here. Watch this space for details of July’s speaker.

Street Talks are an opportunity for anyone with an interest in the way people move around London and use its streets and public spaces to come together and discuss what can be done to create a more liveable city.

We hope you’ll be able to join us on the evening of 8^th March for our first Street Talk, when Tom Barry from Boris Watch will give his thoughts on ‘the state of the city’ and ask ‘what have Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson ever done for us?’

Tom Barry has lived in London for the last eleven years and currently mooches about somewhere under the Heathrow flightpath. A semi-regular writer at Blairwatch since 2006, he has never been a member of a political party but, if pressed, would define himself as a liberal, further defined as ‘not suffering from the disease of ideology’. An engineer by training and inclination his main blogging interests are transport issues and the law. In October 2008 he was described by Andrew Gilligan in the Evening Standard as ‘one tireless Johnson-basher’. He is currently considering whether to have this framed or inscribed.

Tom Barry, Boris Watch: State of the city – the highs and lows of London transport policy 2000 – 2011. Upstairs at The Yorkshire Grey, 2 Theobalds Road, WC1X 8PN at 7pm (bar open 6pm) on 8th March 2011.