Bike Culture

Some people say that riding a brakeless, 4m tall bike, in a crowd, along busy streets, amongst other motorised traffic isn’t the sort of thing we should be encouraging. What’s worse, there’s no helmet and no hi-viz. This is an accident waiting to happen! Well I say to these Health And Safety Pen Pushers that...
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That’s what people will tell you. And in some places it might be true. The trouble is that a flat country next to the sea will also tend to be windy: Give me hills instead of a headwind any day - at least with hills, you get a respite as you ride down the other...
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I’m always puzzled whenever I see someone riding a so-called “mountain bike” along the street. These things are frequently supermarket models, with frames made from girders, useless & heavy suspension, brakes & gear components made from Kraft cheese, and they all seem to be fitted with super-knobbly tyres. You can usually hear these bikes coming...
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Choose life. Choose driving. Choose congestion. Choose no fresh air and an ever-expanding waistline. Choose a f**king long commute, inhaling the exhaust from the car in front. Choose massive fuel bills that get bigger every year, HP, depreciation, and pointless bitching about road tax. Choose stress and swearing at other drivers. Choose enviously watching...
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1. Think about your route. This applies if you’re a complete novice, or a rider with tens of thousands of road miles on your pedals. I regularly ride into the centre of Newcastle, and part of the route is on a fast, three lane road with the national speed limit of 60mph. Yet just...
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My mate Tom has been working on a Project. Basically he had a Very Sensible Dutch Bike (VSDB), but was frustrated at its lack of agility & the Grand Canyon-esque spacing of its three gears. So he hatched a plan to take a modern Reynolds 531 bike equipped with a Shimano 11 speed hub, disc brakes...
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In the early 1930s, there were over 7,000 road deaths a year. Yet this was an era which we now look back on as some sort of rural idyl when compared with today’s roads - they had just two and a half million cars (WARNING: Links to a Daily Mail article. But it’s actually...
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… when this is right there? Most people live within a 25 minute ride of where they work. Yet even on days like this, they believe the big lie that they *have* to drive. Maybe it’s a trick of the glass they have to look through to see the world outside. Or maybe they’ve just spent...
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I’m working a bit in Blyth at the moment, and ended up back at the Sustrans office yesterday afternoon. Looking at the setup, I decided that it was time to put the tools onto a shadow board, and after laying them out, realised that I needed some longer screws for the job. So I hopped...
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My behaviour after you’d passed me this morning was not what I’d have hoped. I let the school down, I let other cyclists down, but most of all, I let myself down. I realise now that when you drove your Big Silver Audi past me as close as you could get, with the window down,...
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