Road Safety

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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I’ve never taken part in a critical mass event. Heck, I’ve never even seen one first hand, so what I’m about to say could just be me talking out of my backside. I have a bit of a problem with the idea of critical mass. The anarchist within me says, “Yeah! Right on! Let’s really...
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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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Today was Day 3 of the BikeAbility instructors’ course I’m on. We did lots of practical stuff, planning lessons, role-playing teaching of the various road manoeuvres for level 2, etc on some quiet roads near North Shields. Then for the last half hour of the day, we headed out for a group ride, with everyone...
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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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I was working in Wallsend this morning, and then had to pop into Newcastle for a couple of things, finishing up with dropping something off with Carlton Reid. Whenever he’s come to my house he’s come along the Coast Road - it’s arrow-straight, and runs from the edge of Newcastle to, uh, the coast...
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You can’t say that we don’t ask the big questions here! So. Here’s my problem. I have this image in my mind of a point in the future, where there’ll be integrated networks for people on bikes in all British towns and cities. It will be possible to get pretty much from your front door...
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Like John The Monkey said in a recent comment, people need better writers for this stuff - that’s such a lame headline! So anyway, I’d thought that winter was over, that as a wise politician once said, the green shoots of recovery are just around the corner. To prove it, I rode in to my...
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