November 2019

Hmm, it needs to be catchier than this.

During the current Irish government’s term, 40 cyclists have been killed. #StopKillingCyclists is a direct-action campaign in Dublin by people who cycle, seemingly mobilised by the death of a man cycling on 1st November 2019. It’s run by IBIKEDublin volunteers. The campaign’s current wording might be self-limiting.

The objective of the campaign would seem to be the demand to shift of facilitating motor traffic to a more inclusive use of our public space. The costs of the current approach are very real, with people dying. The implementation of a paradigm shift could look like the Dutch sustainable safety principles.

Such a campaign exists to convince people of an alternative future. These people already have an “us versus them” bias in them: “I’m not a cyclist”. The call to “stop killing cyclists” may fail to resonate with them.

The birth of the Dutch organisation and campaign “Stop de Kindermoord” (stop the child murder) in 1972 caught on:

But that emerged only in September 1972 and in a very different region of the country. But newspaper clippings reveal that the protests of December 1972 in this very neighbourhood [de Pijp, Amsterdam] did take place under the umbrella of “Stop de Kindermoord”. That that organisation grew so quickly makes clear that they were an answer to how a lot of people felt about (child) traffic deaths at that time in the Netherlands.

Blog: Amsterdam children fighting cars in 1972

In conclusion:

Could “Stop the Murder on Our Streets” be such an inclusive plea? How would you succinctly phrase an inclusive plea, that seeks to change current Irish culture?