'A'-List Blogs

Over on IPayRoadTax.com , one of the comments raises an interesting philosophical point to justify why drivers of cars have a greater moral right to use the roads than people riding bikes: "How much extra tax do you think you would have to pay if cars didn’t exist?" This got me thinking, so I did some...
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It never ceases to amaze me the number of people I see riding around town on crazily shoddy mountain bike wannabe BSOs. Or probably even worse, the real deal - £2,000 worth of carbon, knobbly tyres and suspension travel to deal with roads that are for the most part smooth as Liv Tyler’s complexion....
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I was out the other weekend filming how cars pass traffic islands - how much of the road they take up, what their position was, and how fast they were travelling. The strange thing was that while I was stood next to the road filming, all the driving seemed to absolutely exemplary. For some reason,...
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… of The Netherlands! No, really. Well, sort of - have a look at this video that came via EcoVelo and Amsterdamize : Compare the main interviewee’s attitude to the typical person where you live: "Perhaps you’ll need a cargo bike yourself one day" "No! Never! No, really. No, no, no. I’ll have two children at most and they...
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This video comes via Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic Blog - always worth a visit. This vision of the future is portrayed as some sort of Promised Land, but it looks more like a vision of hell to me. And I can only assume that with all this extra "leeesure" time that people will have, they’re spending...
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There’s a definite link between bikes and power stations. First of all there was that programme on BBC with its bicycle power station and an unwitting bloke undressing on national TV. Then there are these pictures from the Maslauf blog (a Slovenian fixed gear site) , that I found via Urban Velo . Basically these...
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Yes indeed, green IS the new black. Whether you’re painting your nails with Chanel (or fake Chanel - the real stuff is rumoured to be going for around £80 a bottle), trying to put some clear green water between your political party and the next, or just trying to ease your conscience after a career...
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I’m seeing more and more of these strange little cartoon video things from Xtranormal . For me (seeing as I work in a Kafka novel set on the fringes of local government), the TV series The Office was just too painful - too full of the sort of power-deranged, delusional madness that I saw every...
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I remember in The Good Old Days, when you could see the strings and the tell-tale focusing errors of stop-motion animation. But not any more. Just take a look at this, which I found on Velorution this evening: I really don’t know if this is CGI or not. I bet he’s a complete nightmare in...
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For some time now, I’ve hankered after building bikes from scratch. I mean, building the whole frame from lengths of steel tubing, and hand-cast lugs. Actually, not from lengths of steel tubing, but from iron ore that I smelted myself, and then converted to steel in a Bessemer converter in my shed, and then...
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