When Bill Clinton visited Copenhagen in 1997, he left with an unusual gift. Instead of the tasteful, culturally appropriate piece of local craftsmanship usually handed out by city officials, the then American president was given a bicycle. In a city where one third of commuters go to work on two wheels, City Bike One, as Clinton’s gift was called, was the perfect symbol.

Dignitaries visiting Dublin are unlikely to leave with a similar gift. Although the city council has put the wheels in motion on its own “free bike” scheme, the fledgling project is already having a bumpy ride.

Instead of following Copenhagen’s model and funding the programme by allowing sponsors to attach their logo to the bicycles, the council chose to clamber onto a financial tandem with JC Decaux, a French advertising company.

In exchange for 450 bicycles, Decaux has been given 72 lucrative advertising billboards, which have begun to sprout up around the city centre and inner suburbs. But the bicycles will not arrive until next spring, at the earliest. Critics say that on this tandem, one of the cyclists is getting an easy ride. Stuart Fogarty, of AFA O’Meara, Ireland’s largest advertising agency, believes Dubliners have been saddled with a bad deal. “They will be the most expensive bicycles in the world. Those advertising sites are worth at least ¤100m and we are swapping them for a few hundred bicycles, a few advertising panels and some signage for tourists,” he said. “There are too few bicycles to make any real impact on traffic, so what’s in it for Dublin?”

Fogarty’s reservations have been echoed by An Taisce, the Dublin City Business Association, the National Council for the Blind in Ireland, a popular architectural website, and several city councillors. Ciaran Cuffe, a Green party TD, has described the scheme as “a dodgy deal”. Questions are being raised about how the Dublin scheme measures up to others around the world. Are Dubliners being taken for a ride?

IN 2004, officials from Dublin city council’s architectural and planning departments visited Lyon in France and the City of Westminster in London to investigate their outdoor-advertising strategies. The Velov scheme in Lyon, where JC Decaux has provided 3,000 bikes in exchange for exclusive advertising opportunities in the city centre, must have had a greater impact on the visiting officials than the sedate streetscapes of Westminster.

“We get lots of visits from overseas officials but I can’t imagine why they came here in relation to outdoor advertising,” a spokesman for Westminster said. “We have no similar bicycle scheme and tough restrictions on advertising within the eight square miles of the city. Westminster is a Unesco World Heritage site with several thousand listed buildings. We wouldn’t see it as our business to swamp the area with advertising.”

The scheme that Dublin city council is now peddling has much more in common with Lyon, a city similar in terms of population and scale. Andrew Montague, a Labour councillor and chairman of the Dublin Cycling Committee, said the scheme had a positive impact on traffic in Lyon. “Their scheme started with 2,000 bikes and there are now 3,000, which is testament to its success. It’s disappointing that we will begin with just 450,” he said.

“To have a real impact, it’s important to have a high density of bikes in the city but at least it’s a start. Once people get out of their cars and see how convenient and enjoyable it is to cycle, who knows where it will lead?”

Montague believes that Dublin is ideally suited to cycling. “The city centre is relatively flat, the trucks are gone since the Port Tunnel opened, and a recent study by the cycling committee found that it only rains on about a dozen days a year during the 8am to 8.30am peak time when most people go to work,” he said.

Proponents of the scheme say that if it can work in Paris, it can work anywhere. In the French capital, the Velib scheme run by JC Decaux has caused a “velorution”, as one city newspaper put it. Parisians can cycle around the city on one of 20,000 bicycles, and often smoke or talk on mobile phones while negotiating the notoriously treacherous streets.

Although nearly 249 miles of cycle lanes were laid in the seven years preceding the scheme in Paris, three Velib users have been killed so far — hardly surprising when 71% of Parisian cyclists admit jumping red lights, more than one third regularly cycle the wrong way up one-way streets, and helmets are not à la mode.

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