Italians put on their helmets, checked the brakes and yesterday joined the pack trying to improve the safety of urban cyclists.
Taking direct inspiration from the Times cycle safety campaign, word of which is being spread around the world by the #cyclesafe tag on Twitter, Italian bloggers have teamed up with the national newspapers La Gazzetta dello Sport and II Corriere della Sera to launch Salva i ciclisti, an Italian take on the “Save our cyclists” headline that launched the Times campaign on February 2.
Already 63 members of the Italian Parliament in Rome have pledged their support.
The first demand of the Italian manifesto calls on the Government to “guarantee the application at a local level of the eight points of the Times manifesto in municipal areas”, and has already received official backing from the mayors of Milan, Florence, Rome, Bologna and other cities around the country.
Just as the Cities Fit For Cycling campaign was launched after Mary Bowers, the Times reporter, was seriously injured when she was hit by a lorry as she cycled to work on November 4 last year, the Gazzetta dello Sport is anxious to act after one of its journalists, Pier Luigi Todisco, was killed cycling to work.
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His widow, Frances, was at the launch of Salva i ciclisti yesterday and said: “I would sincerely like to thank The Times for launching this campaign. I only hope we can make a small difference.”
Giangiacomo Schiavi, the deputy editor of II Corriere della Sera, told the press conference: “We have written about cycle accidents and cycle safety in the past, but we were too sweet about it. We should have been more angry in criticising the state of the roads for cyclists in Italy. We should have done what The Times did for Britain. Now we will do that.”
In 2010, 263 cyclists were killed on Italy’s roads. The total for the decade from 2000 to 2010 was more than 3,500 , double the number of cycling deaths on British roads.
According to research by the Federazione Italiana Amici della Bicicletta into cycling in 24 European countries, 17 have a better record for cyclist deaths than Britain.
Research conducted in 2007 found that Britain had the fourth worst record for the proportion of fatal road accidents that take place in urban areas — 39 per cent — behind Greece, Italy and Portugal.
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Pierfrancesco Maran, a city councillor representing the Mayor of Milan, Giuliano Pisapia, said: “We have done a lot to bring down the number of fatalities for car drivers in Milan, but have not done the same for cyclists. We have a bike hire scheme and are trialling a congestion zone in the centre of the city to reduce traffic, but we really need to address the issue of drivers who park in cycle lanes.”
Touring around Milan yesterday, bicycles were everywhere; leaning against the parasols outside streetside cafés, circling around the central park and dodging the yellow buses and trams that weave through the city centre.
The stereotype of fast and frantic traffic on the Continent seemed to hold true as groups of cyclists jostled for space along roads where erratic herring-bone and double parking provides an obstacle course at every turn.
As in Britain, the sentiment is that cycling in Italy is treated either as a hobby or a professional sport, but is overlooked as a healthy, convenient, enjoyable and sustainable means of transportation around busy cities; cities that, much like London, Edinburgh, Liverpool or London, are far older than the introduction of cars that now choke their streets.
Paolo Pinzuti, the blogger who took up the Times campaign in Italy six days after its launch in Britain, said: “Cycle lanes, in London or in Milan, are all very well, but cycle lanes can often be to cyclists what zoos are to animals. We need to be able to share the road space. We can’t look at Amsterdam or Copenhagen and say that their cycling culture is not possible in our countries because their roads are different. That just isn’t true.”
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Today, Mark Cavendish, the British world champion, will be competing in the classic Milan-to-San Remo sprinters’ road race. Each of the bikes in the race will bear the Times Cities Fit for Cycling logo, alongside the Italian Salva i ciclisti logo, in support of growing protests across Europe to highlight the right of cyclists to co-exist safely with pedestrians, cars and lorries on the roads.