Ancient wisdom for a nation still growing up

I didn't think I would even live to hear this kind of news in Australia.

Record numbers of bicycle riders in a major Australian city.

Record numbers of people moving around on their two wheels.

And that's in Sydney.

Sydney's Lord Mayor Clover Moore is happy and proud, as you can hear here, because she has had a direct stake in this development.

She's been pushing for it to happen for more than 20 years.

When I first came there in 2004, there were no separated cycle lanes.

I'm very proud to tell you that there are 29 kilometres of separated cycle lanes and 66 kilometres of shared paths.

This bike lane is the first one I opened in Bourke Street.

And, you know, that could have been opened in a nuclear reactor.

The response from the right-wing media and ministers of the New

South Wales Parliament was extraordinary.

We now have an average of 2,500 bike riders a day.

That's children, it's parents with children, it's people on their way to work.

It is quite fantastic.

This is a remarkable 28% increase in 12 months.

And one of our first to one of our newest, the Oxford Street Cycleway, is clocking up more than 4,500 bike trips on peak days, making it our most popular cycling connection.

So join the thousands of others who are taking up cycling today.

That's Sydney's Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, in a Facebook video she's put out where she's bragging about that there's now more than 7,000 people who ride to work on their bicycles in the city center of Sydney.

And that is, honestly, that's the lesson that I've been trying to talk about here in Geelong for more than a decade.

Something that we learned in Denmark in history and that we have seen Amsterdam and Paris learn more recently, which is that you have to build the safe infrastructure for the bicycles first and then the cyclist will come.

So, councillors here in Geelong who are looking out their car windows and saying, we can't see anyone using their bikes here in Geelong, so why should we even build a bike path for them? You know, it's the other way around.

You have to create a safe bike path network and then the cyclist will come.

That's the story that we have now learned from a major Australian city.

And that's what we need to understand here in Geelong as well.