Cycle Infrastructure

Today was a ride up the coast to visit a prospective new client in Ashington. About 15 miles each way, and in the past I’d have driven this, to arrive looking smart & business-like. But now that I’ve got Siegfried - an Eminently Sensible Sturdy Commuting Bike (ESSCB), I can ride that kind of...
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So today was my first real trip on Siegfried - into Newcastle, then out to Walker and home. Somewhere around a 20 mile round trip. And I was presenting a workshop in the afternoon, so I had my laptop, projector, lunch, and a set of waterproofs with me (the weather forecast was for RAIN...
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I killed Wilf. Through neglect, lack of understanding, and over-use. But mainly through not knowing how to use a steel ruler to measure the chain. OK, I’m exaggerating a little. But the cost of the components to restore Wilf to health would have been about 75% of the cost of buying an identical brand new...
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OK, so say we’d set out to make it safe for every child of nine years and older to cycle to school unaccompanied. What sort of measures could we put in place to ensure that the public money spent on this project was being well spent? Ian Walker points out that the easy measure apparently...
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By and large, cycle infrastructure in the UK is a mess. It’s not joined-up, doesn’t go where you need to get to, and always, always seems to play second fiddle to roads for motor vehicles or footpaths for pedestrians. Many local authorities do things that could only charitably be seen as making any effort, yet...
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Yesterday I asked my fellow would-be BikeAbility instructors if they used cycle paths or roads. Not surprisingly (as we’re going to be teaching others how to ride on roads), all eight of them said they rode on the road. So then I asked them which they would prefer to ride on. Every single one of them...
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There was an interesting question raised on the Commute By bike blog yesterday, as to why the world at large seems to view cyclists as “Kooks, Freaks and Weirdos”. Basically in societies where the car has usurped the bicycle as the mode of transport of choice about town, people riding bikes are very much...
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They’re somewhere to park and lock your bike, aren’t they? You can buy them pretty much off the shelf from a bunch of companies that bang them out by the thousand to a range of standard designs. And when things are produced in volumes like that, they tend to be pretty inexpensive. Trust me, I know...
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OK - it’s fantasy shopping time. No, not that kind of fantasy shopping. Here’s the scene - you’re a senior manager of a medium-sized private company employing 60 people across three offices that are spread across a town, each office being no more than 4 miles apart. You’ve generated £9,000 of savings from green initiatives,...
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After yesterday’s post about how nice and straight the path alonside the Coast Road is, I got thinking about nice direct routes, and traffic-free routes in general. It’s just so much quicker to get to the centre of Newcastle by going direct, rather than the routes I usually take, that I struggle to understand why...
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