Gateshead

I have a love/hate relationship with bike lanes and cycle tracks. Too often, they’re like the little girl from the nursery rhyme. She rode down the street on a bike that she’d borrowed, When bike lanes were good, they were very, very good, But when they were bad, they were horrid. OK, so I’ll probably wait a long...
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Coming to probably quite small screens on a desk top near you: *UPDATE* The full version of this video is now featured on this blog post, along with details of how I feel Nick Clennett, Gateshead Council’s Head of Transportation and Highways has let us down with the sub-standard bike facilities around Gateshead College’s Baltic...
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Andy over at Carbon Trace is a big fan of the One Mile Solution. An astonishing proportion of the journeys most people make by car are within less than a mile of where they live, so the solution is to replace a few / some / all of these by walking or riding a...
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So. Yesterday, Amsterdamize put up some charts about the Dutch population’s ways of getting around. Great stuff, showing how far people travel, and what mode of transport they use depending on journey length, and how far people cycle. As an engineer, I like numbers,  so I thought it would be fun to compare our part...
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Meh! Driving. It’s just now how I expected it to be - certainly not the way it was portrayed in all those adverts. I mean, I already have the foxy Wife, and lovely Daughter, but where were the wide open roads so I can pretend to be a Formula one driver: . . . where’s my...
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Some of you may remember the video I made last year about The World’s Shortest Cycle Lane. This was in Gateshead, next to their shiny new college, and a mere ten metres long. At the time, several commenters, and Gateshead Council’s extremely friendly and approachable* Team Leader for Traffic Projects and Rights of Way said...
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So I used to think that I was maybe a little paranoid about the way people drive around bikes. Or more specifically, about how people drive around my bike, when I’m riding it. But after today, I’ve realised that it isn’t paranoia - they really are all out to get me. Today I had FIVE assassination...
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So after yesterday’s post about how happy people on bikes are, here’s the flip side. Sometimes - often, it seems - something happens when you’re out cycling that just presses all the wrong buttons. These things can range to the irritating and inconsiderate, to the downright scary and dangerous. If you ride...
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I went to visit a prospective new client on the Team Valley on Friday. While there, the conversation got around to cycling (funny how that happens), even though I’d taken a change of clothes, and was looking almost sharp. The woman I was talking to lives within a few miles of me, and said...
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The training schedule had me down for a 45/10 brick this morning, so last night I was early to bed and raring to go when the alarm went off at just after six. My ride earlier in the week had left me a little sore in the . . . um . . . undercarriage...
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