Anyone watching the nightly broadcasts of the Tour de France knows cycling takes courage.

The extraordinary distances ridden day after day, the long, tough climbs, terrifying descents, and feverish sprints are all difficult enough.

Accidents, like the spectacular high-speed crash that ended this year's campaign for Australia's Richie Porte, can make cycle racing seem an extreme sport, a marginal activity.

Competition aside, investing in cycling as a business also takes courage – especially in Australia, and especially in Sydney. In this city more than any other, a poisonous antagonism between motorists and cyclists has been cultivated to the point where it threatens the public's safety. To ride, to invest in, or to advocate cycling here all take courage.

That stand-off, which is experienced all too frequently on our roads, has been fostered by rancorous media commentators and servile politicians too eager to do their bidding.

It is not fanciful to see a link between the antisocial hysteria whipped up this way and incidents such as the 2013 death of Steve Jarvie, killed by the motorcyclist and cyclist-hater Ben Smith, sentenced this month to eight years' jail for his appalling crime. Less dramatically, it has produced the endless, shameful sledging of Lord Mayor Clover Moore for trying to make Sydney's roads safer for cyclists.

This unpromising Sydney environment makes it doubly welcome that Reddy Go, a private company, has had the courage to set up a bike hire service, like those in Melbourne and Brisbane and many overseas centres.

As we report today, users download an app to their mobile phone, and use it to find and unlock bikes. Once their ride is over, the app lets them lock the bike and pay for its hire. Unlike some schemes, bikes are not returned to bike stations, but can be left anywhere. This last point may cause problems. It remains to be seen if users leave bikes where they are an obstruction to others.

That possibility aside, the scheme is more than welcome. It may help to reverse the slight decline in cycling evident in recent surveys in Sydney, caused almost entirely by the baffling, negative attitude of the state government in removing cycleways and imposing oppressive fines on cyclists for minor transgressions of road rules.

This strange, gratuitous and irrational campaign against cycling has solved no problems worth the name, but has created many. By discouraging people from riding, it pushes them by implication back into their cars for transport where they only increase the length and severity of traffic jams. And since cycling brings benefits to health and to the environment, discouraging it harms both.

The government should come to its senses and reverse these oppressive impositions on cycling. It should reinstate its aim to double the number of trips made by bicycle in Sydney, and devote sufficient resources to well-designed cycling infrastructure to achieve it.

Until it comes to its senses however – and given its record, that may take some time – private initiatives that support cycling, like Reddy Go, deserve the community's support.