Bike Culture

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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As Daughter and I were riding along the Coast Road cycle path last week, one of the many people who use it as their commuting route overtook us. I’d seen him coming up behind, and were were in single file on the left to let him pass. For some reason, he took the far...
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Last autumn Daughter and I were talking. One of her friends is now a regular at our local Park Run with her dad. Daughter wanted to do something similar, but really doesn’t fancy running. So we hatched a plan to ride the C2C - from Whitehaven on the Irish Sea coast in Cumbria to Whitley...
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For the last five years I’ve done the Dunwich Dynamo, and I wondered if YOU would like to take part this year. This is a 120-ish mile overnight bike ride from London to Dunwich on the Suffolk coast, just shy of Lowestoft. That might sound like a hugely long way, but it’s pretty flat and...
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