Cycle Infrastructure

My first car was a white 1962 Morris Minor. Actually, that’s not strictly true - before that I drove my mum’s 1966 one, and her 1972 van, which we took to the Reading Festival one year. All had ‘A Series’ engines, and I could strip them down to the con-rods & rebuild them with...
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Every now and then the local or national papers here will go off on a rant about cyclists with no respect for the law riding on the pavement (sidewalk), terrorising innocent pedestrians. I’m troubled by this, because I think they’ve got a point. No, I have no problem with considerate, just-above-a-walking-pace cycling (which is actually illegal...
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It’s been a long time since I’ve ridden my road bike, Christine - last July in fact. So on Friday last week, I gave her a good spring clean and lubing. Along the way, I used the handy chain wear checking tool I bought to check her chain. Good thing too - it’d done...
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. . . like a fish needs a bicycle . . . Get a bike instead:
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No - not that early ’80s thing with Hazel O’Connor, but the type that gets left all over the road. Actually it’s generally not left all over the road, and if it is, passing cars soon sweep it aside / grind it down to a harmless dust. No. I’m talking about the kind that gets...
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There are actually some great facilities for cycling around here. They connect up useful places that people would want to travel to or from. They have great smooth surfaces, and they’re wide enough for two-way traffic. Almost universally though, they have the stop-start problem: These two examples are from National Cycle Route 72 as it crosses...
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This image comes from the Crap Cycling & Walking in Waltham Forest blog, and is pretty astonishing. Looking at the white zig-zags on the road, it’s near to a pedestrian crossing, but what’s it for? If you were riding on the road, you’d have to give way to pedestrians, though by the time you...
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So there’s this case of Daniel Rosier that went to court in Oxford last week. He cycled past a line of cars at a pedestrian crossing, but didn’t stop, and hit a pedestrian. THEN he stopped, and helped the child he’d hit, and looked after them ’till the boy’s parents arrived. Anyway, he broke the law,...
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I had to nip into Whitley Bay at lunchtime today to get a new strap for my watch. The old one had come unglued (for the second time), and the watch had fallen off my wrist and into the road a few days ago. Miraculously, it was undamaged! Anyway, while I was in the jewellers,...
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As I said before, today was a trip up to Ashington to visit a prospective new client. I rode Siegfried, and it took about 65 minutes each way - that’s about 30 minutes more than the driving time. But if I’d driven, I would have followed some dull-as-dishwater route along boring motorway-grade roads, and arrived...
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