The Green Party’s cycle to work scheme came in for an unwarranted media kneecapping over the weekend, with an article picked up first the Sunday Times being subsequently ‘cogged’ by the Independent on Monday. Both took shots at the scheme, suggesting that interest in the scheme has been minimal, with the Indo saying that only one single query has been fielded so far.

Hogwash.

Last week I spoke to three large bike retailers about the scheme for a feature that will appear in the next Outsider magazine. While all three said that the scheme had received a muted response in sales terms so far, all credited a large portion of that to the weather. No-one wants to bike to work in the winter, and the weeks after it came into effect were the coldest Ireland had seen in more than a decade.

However, both Dublin retailers (Cycle Superstore and Cycleways) said they had already made sales through the programme, with a large proportion of sales so far going to existing commuters looking to upgrade their bikes, and several large employers, who already have discount schemes in place, looking to take the Gvernment-backed scheme on wholesale in the near future. They were expecting uptake to increase considerably as things get warmer and people start cycling more.

The bike scheme is going to make most sense in a dense, heavily urbanised area, where the gains over traffic will be greater for cyclists, rather than in Ballinrobe, Co Mayo, the sprawling metropolis where the ST did its research. And people will ask bike shops about the scheme more often than they will approach the monolith of incompetence that is the Department of Finance, with HR departments asking their accountants. One thing the papers got right, however, is that government employees have not yet got on their bikes.

The reason behind this was explained to me by Ray Fearon of the Cycle Superstore, who said that their procurement policies are so complex that it makes it a nightmare for employees. In SMEs, employees can more or less go buy a bike and hand the receipt to their HR departments. Government employees, on the other hand, have to submit three separate quotes/tenders from different suppliers, and state bodies have yet to figure out how to streamline the process.

The scheme is a good one, a simple one to implement for the private sector (having been in place for years in the UK) and deserves promotion. Driving the last knee-jerk nail in the bike scheme’s coffin was a comment from Labour’s environmental spokesperson (excuse the pun) Joanna Tuffy:

“Things like the bike scheme are tokenistic and the fact that there’s only been one query shows there’s no race to it.”

Tuffy was clearly asked by a journalist what she thought of the ‘fact’ that there had only been one query, and was more than happy to shoot off at the mouth purely to get a cheap dig in, rather than checking out her facts first, rendering her contribution to the debate completely useless.

Note: Cian Ginty has a few words to say on the matter, and Ciaran Cuffe went on the Last Word to defend the scheme.