The Mayor of London's plan for two cycleways to criss-cross the capital were unveiled last September. However, BBC News got round to showing a video report on it only yesterday. The reason appears to be that reporter John Maguire spent some time shooting a sequence in New York City which had installed a few cycle-ways under mayor Bloomberg. However, there is separation of cycles from road vehicles closer to home, in most of the new towns - Crawley, Cumbernauld, Redditch and Runcorn come to mind. It could be, of course, that Maguire felt that a fair comparison would be with a city rather than a town, in which case there are numerous examples in Netherlands, Denmark and Germany (which was presumably the inspiration for our new town architects in the 1950s).
Cynics will point to the mass migration of BBC personnel across the Atlantic whenever there is a big story over there, as if the well-staffed American office of the corporation was not capable of handling it, most marked in presidential election years. They would suggest that Maguire's trip was of a piece with that. Conspiracy theorists like myself suspect that the BBC shrinks from anything that shows the rest of the EU in a good light, especially on a matter where some of our partners anticipated us by sixty years.
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