City of Sydney ratepayers will foot the bill for a plan to teach Sydney office workers to ride bikes courteously — as well as another $25,000 in grants promoting cycling.

Councillor Edward Mandla said the workplace cycling program was “lame” and yesterday’s agenda showed an obsession with cycling.

“The city is proposing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a competition for the big end of town to encourage their staff to cycle,” Mr Mandla said.

“Besides being expensive, the proposal is pretty lame. It’s not about cycling to work, it’s as simple as a big end of town employee logging that they rode their bike for five minutes at home on the weekend.

“In a council where not one councillor regularly cycles, I find it discriminatory that salespeople, tradesmen and older people are demonised as ruining the planet.”