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talk about never assuming a driver has seen them,
avoiding certain routes after dark, or simply getting off and walking through a tricky junction. Access to cycling’s supposed benefits is uneven. Several riders stress that good locks, secure indoor parking, and decent bikes all cost money, leaving lower-income cyclists more exposed to theft and to the risk of buying second-hand bikes of uncertain origin. Rental schemes blunt some of that by shifting responsibility to operators, but they’re concentrated in the inner city and, in practice, serve people already moving through those areas. Many outer estates still lack reliable lanes or safe junctions, so workers and students there continue to navigate hostile roads with fewer resources and far less visibility in official campaigns. Bikes don’t replace buses and trains, they fill in the gaps. People use DublinBikes for short trips during the day while leaving their own bikes at home. Many only cycle in summer, going back to buses when the weather turns bad. Bikes, buses, and Luas work together in a practical system that changes with the seasons. “Dublin’s current bike moment isn’t only about kilometres of lanes or the number of helmets in a reel. It’s about whose journeys are made easier and whose remain precarious.” Not all of the city’s cycling life is defined by risk and marketing. Parallel to the influencer campaigns, a quieter network of community workshops has grown up around maintenance, skill-sharing, and access. The Bike Hub, a social-enterprise project with community shops in Dun Laoghaire and Crumlin, runs “fix-your-own-bike” sessions, low-cost repairs, accessible bike fleets, and volunteer programmes that pair cycling with social inclusion work for people in direct provision, those experiencing homelessness, and children in DEIS schools. Other initiatives run short repair camps and bike-building projects that teach teenagers and young adults how to strip, rebuild, and customize bikes, sometimes combining this with art or restorative-justice work. These spaces lack the polish of an influencer reel but offer something the official campaigns only hint at: a sense of cycling as collective infrastructure, rooted in specific communities rather than a generic urban lifestyle. They’re built on shared labour and practical know-how, not aesthetics and aspiration. Placed alongside this messy reality, the new influencer-led campaigns make more sense as cultural signalling than transport advice. The typical reel foregrounds a young, able-bodied rider using a rental bike for short hops in areas with visible lanes and neat racks, often in decent weather and within the inner city. It’s an image tailored to people who can choose whether to cycle on a given day, not to those for whom the bike is the only viable way to work a late shift or cross the city on a low income. At the same time, the council’s campaigns about school routes, gender gaps, and community schemes aren’t superficial. They’re genuine attempts to frame cycling as inclusive and normal, to broaden who sees themselves in the saddle. Yet the absences are telling. Delivery riders appear mostly in news reports when attacked, not in glossy videos. People whose routes run through outer estates, poorly lit suburban roads, or industrial fringes look little like the citycentre stories of docklands promenades and canal-side sunsets. Style reveals everything. Influencer campaigns feature coordinated jackets, spotless helmets, and bikes that look like fashion props. Community repair shops show patched-up hybrids, cargo bikes loaded with kids, and second-hand frames kept running through shared work. These contrasting images quietly signal who cycling is imagined for in different parts of the city. Cycling in Dublin is many different things at once. A climate-conscious commute, a precarious job, a stolen asset, a community repair project, a damp daily grind. Class threads through all of these. Those with stable incomes can live closer to work, buy better locks, store bikes indoors, or choose when not to ride. Others travel longer, riskier routes at awkward hours because they have fewer options. The recent influencer-led campaigns aren’t necessarily at odds with this reality, but they touch it only lightly. Their job is to smooth over the gaps, to sell an idea of Dublin as a cycling city even as riders negotiate potholes, narrow lanes, winter rain, and the possibility that the bike locked outside might be gone by evening. Dublin’s current bike moment isn’t only about kilometres of lanes or the number of helmets in a reel. It’s about whose journeys are made easier and whose remain precarious. The same city that throws Bike Discos and celebrates 40 million rental trips also hosts a thriving black market in stolen bikes and leans on migrant riders working risky shifts to keep food moving. The carefully curated campaigns present cycling as accessible and joyful, but they skip over the structural barriers that determine who actually gets to ride. Until the everyday experience of delivery riders counts as much as a well-lit campaign, until outer estates get the same infrastructure as the city centre, until theft and enforcement are taken seriously, Dublin’s cycling culture will stay split between the version that appears online and the one people quietly pedal through in the rain. The Instagram feed shows one angle. The roads tell a more complicated story. And the distance between them reveals exactly who this transformation is designed to include and who it’s content to leave behind. 17