According to the Queensland Cycle Strategy 2011-2021, one of the state government’s four priorities regarding cycling is to make Queensland “a place where cycling is widely supported, encouraged and celebrated”.
As part of a revamp in August, Brisbane’s CityCycle scheme launched a marketing campaign called CityCycle Stories, the premise of which being that “[e]veryone has a different CityCycle story to tell”. The campaign presents five such stories, and cyclists are invited to add their own (only via facebook, but that’s another story).
Whatever the actual effect advertising has on community perceptions of cycling, this sounds like a good opportunity for the council to support, encourage and celebrate cycling. In the same way, though, a poor campaign has the power to ridicule, discourage and denigrate cycling. That’s my concern.
For this panel, why is someone cycling? Only because they can’t drive their car. Indeed, the logic of this situation is that only the most ridiculous circumstance could stop someone from driving their car—under normal circumstances there is no excuse (not to drive).
Here the campaign comes closest to endorsing a sensible reason for riding a bike, namely that relative to other forms of transport, it’s less polluting (again, taking driving as normality is problematic, I’m unsure of how the environmental comparison between cycling and public transport works out, walking is the ideal). But even here, the campaign displaces a concern for the environment to someone else (how quirky!). We should ride bikes, not because we give a shit about the environment, but because it gives us a chance to get some jollies out of some other that does.
The rest are similarly dumb, see them here. It’s interesting to compare the tone of the CityCycle campaign with one from the SA Motor Accident Commission that’s been widely condemned for beating up on cycling. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were produced by the same agency.
Of course, council doesn’t have to play by the state’s rules vis-à-vis cycling culture, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. On a purely pragmatic point, promoting a bike hire scheme by making fun of its users is just foolish.