IMAGINE if the Government announced it would pay people to commute by bike – as Lennon famously sang, referring of course to world peace not to cycling, “it’s easy if you try”.

Now imagine the expletive-ridden uproar from the bike-hating brigade if the Government started actually paying you to ride to work. Paying cyclists? Out of the public purse? To ride their death-trap machines like lunatics on highways I the motorist pay for? (Etc.) Political suicide? Apparently not.

The French government is trialling a scheme which pays cycle commuters 25c/km (just shy of 15p/mile). The six-month trial has 10,000 participants employed by 20 businesses and the hope is to roll the scheme out nationally if it is a success. How they got that past lobbyists from Peugeot, Citroen and Renault is a mystery – but hats off to Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier.

We shouldn’t be that surprised, perhaps. European governments are all struggling the stranglehold of mass car ownership with rising vehicle-related pollution and chronic congestion. Getting drivers onto bikes produces cleaner air, healthier populations, and savings from reduced congestion.

In fact, not subsidising cycling is anomalous. All governments already prop up driving and public transport with money paid in taxes by everyone. That is, taxes paid by everyone except certain multi-national coffee giants.

The trains in the UK are subsidised to the tune of £4 billion annually. That’s roughly 40 per cent of every journey, probably enough to build a ten-lane cycle superhighway to China. Bus passengers are subsidised 8p per journey by the taxpayer.

And the poor, downtrodden UK motorist is given £9.6 billion every year – not including car tax (VED) receipts of £5.4 billion and fuel duty of £25 billion which also go towards road building. Annual cycling spend nationally is in the realms of millions rather than billions, of course.

What direct incentives to cycle do we have? There used to be a fairly decent Bike to Work scheme offering tax incentives that made buying commuter bikes around 40 per cent cheaper. The scheme was diluted recently and it is regarded now as a waste of time.

There is also the trend for subsidised public hire bikes. These are almost always co-funded by corporations – Barclays, famously, in the case of London’s Boris Bikes.

Oxford’s first public hire bike system Oxonbike was aimed at commuters in the Headington area. With 500 registered users, it was doing really well and I guess could have been rolled out to the rest of the city if the suppliers hadn’t gone bust. Well, perhaps we’ll get a second bite at that apple.

Oxonbike is rising from the ashes to ride once more. A new operator has agreed to run the £150,000 Headington scheme with 30 bikes and seven hire locations until March 2015, at which time let’s pray Oxford joins the 21st century and implements a city-wide Oxonbike it can be proud of.