Today sees the roll-out of Google Streetview to rural locations in the UK. Previously it was just an urban thing (here’s me on a bike from March last year). Now countryfolk can get all hot and bothered about being given the Streetview treatment.
Naturally, being able to use Streetview for pre-trip cycle-tour route-planning is going to be a huge boon, but for first day titillation how about taking a virtual tour of Titlington? This is a village near Alnwick in Northumberland. Titlington Training, sadly, is a horse-riding school.
The UK is stuffed with rude town names. And, with 238,000 miles of public road now available in Streetview, it’s easier than ever before to see if there really is a place called Upper Dicker. There is, and here’s a cyclist riding into town from, er, Lower Dicker.
Penistone is only rude if your mind works that way. Spell it out. Pen. P. E. N. Pause. Iz. I. S. Pause. Stone. S. T. O. N. E.
The Dog and Duck pub in Plucks Gutter, near Margate is not rhyming slang. And check out this Y-shaped cyclepath in Pratts Bottom, near Orpington in Kent (hat-tip to Jeremy Jacobs).
Heading to the Highlands and Islands this summer? Take a sneak peek at Twatt, a hamlet near Stromness in Orkney. Apparently, it’s a twitcher’s delight: the RSPB reserve of Loons is just 3/4 of a mile down the road.
If you’re planning a bike tour of Devon, you might not want to have a cream tea in Crapstone.
Sticking to the scatalogical theme, Shitterton is a lovely little thatched-cottage village near Bere Regis in Dorset. Unlike other ’shit’ names in the UK, this place really is named after ordure. According to a crap website which specialises in this topic, Shitterton is named for the river Shiter, a “…brook used as a privy.”
Not on Google Streetview, but plain to see on the 25,000 OS map of the town is a sweetly-named bridleway half a mile from Shitterton: Butt Lane Hollow.
Lumbutts in Lancs, is just half a mile from Mankinholes. “If you’re in Mankinholes, you’ve gone too far,” chuckles town-name contributor Shaun Murray.
In Attleborough, Norfolk, there’s a Sluts Hole Lane so named for the Dutch word for sluice, not a nefarious Medieval resident. But, if it’s lady-of-the-night references you’re after, many Grape Lanes in the UK were once something far, far cruder. You have been warned…)
OK, it’s not rude but it’s funny. I came across this village sign on a ride the other day. Snods Edge no doubt has a perfectly acceptable Norse origin.
There are loads of other funny and rude placenames out there. Get digging and send ‘em in via the comments, below.
Last month I trained two Janus-style helmet-cams and a handheld camera at bike advocates, MPs and Lords on a study tour of Cambridge. This was for the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group.
The resulting video had its first showing yesterday; in Parliament.
At a meeting afterwards, one of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign advocates said that while Cambridge is by no means bike-perfect, it’s English. UK town planners (and MPs - I shot a video of the APPCG study in the Netherlands last year) are often taken on excellent study tours to the Netherlands but, it was suggested, they ought to visit Cambridge instead.
The Netherlands has exemplary cycling infrastructure but it’s so good, it’s oh-so-easy to fall into the trap that it’s peculiar to the Netherlands, and therefore not transferable.
It’s a step down, but Cambridge shows that a UK town can be made an awful lot more cycle friendly, given the political will. It’s a cycling town for many more reasons than it’s flat and has lots of students.
Now, this isn’t to say that we shouldn’t aim for the stars but trying to recreate the Netherlands bike infrastructure in one fell swoop just ain’t going to happen. Rome might have been built in a day, but Amsterdam wasn’t.
In the Netherlands, there’s too much interlocking infrastructure, built over many years. UK towns and cities need to take baby steps.
If Cambridge can do it, we can do it. That’s the thinking. Attainability, not pipe-dreams.
Via Twitter, Marc van Woudenberg over on Amsterdamize.com said the excellent bicycle infrastructure in the Netherlands was build through trial and error and that the UK’s “baby steps now could be bigger/wiser than [ours].”
MORE…
If UK town planners want to get their teeth into some home-grown bike info, Cambridgeshire County Council and the Cambridge Cycle Campaign have some wonderful appetisers, such as the Cambridgeshire Design Guide and the superlative Cycle Parking Standards. Of course, Cambridge is also home to CycleStreets.net, the national cycle journey planner.
Cyclists may want to pop along to a whole bunch of normalising cycling events being organised by Cambridge Cycling Campaign, including Ride for Joy, a Cambridge Cycle Chic, non-Lycra fashion ride for women.
SMIDSY is clearly nothing new. Drivers have been saying ’sorry, mate, I didn’t see you,’ from the earliest days of motoring. Although as the first drivers were all toffs, they probably never said sorry when they ran over the rural poor.
In September, 1902, the Chief Constable of Huntingdonshire wrote to the Home Office:
“It is a significant fact that two gentlemen of education and position…when exceededing 20mph passed horses and carts…which they subsequently declared they never saw. It being impossible to doubt their word, the question arises as to whether great mischief may not de done, by want of attention on the part of drivers, or their inability to see what is on the road.”
EXTRACTS FROM ‘WIND IN THE WILLOWS’:
Glancing back, they saw a small cloud of dust, with a dark centre of energy, advancing on them at incredible speed, while from out the dust a faint ‘Poop-poop!’ wailed like an uneasy animal in pain…they had a moment’s glimpse of…the magnificent motor-car, immense, breath-snatching, passionate, with its pilot tense and hugging his wheel, possessed all earth and air for the fraction of a second, flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped them utterly, and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance, changed back into a droning bee once more.
‘Glorious, stirring sight!’ murmured Toad, never offering to move. ‘The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here to-day— in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped— always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!’
‘O what a flowery track lies spread before me, henceforth! What dust-clouds shall spring up behind me as I speed on my reckless way! What carts I shall fling carelessly into the ditch in the wake of my magnificent onset!”
….
[Mr Toad] increased his pace, and as the car devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was…Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night.
Mr Toad later got 20 years in the clink. Not for his reckless driving, but for stealing a car.
“Once allow us to be put on separate roads and there will be an increasing outcry to keep us to those roads and to forbid us access to the ordinary roads of the country.”
Who said that? When did he say it and what was he referring to?
Opposition from a president of the CTC in 1878 to compulsory cycle paths, perhaps? Wrong.
A complaint from the Self Propelled Traffic Association of 1895? Nope.
Mind-blowingly, it’s by William Joynson-Hicks, writing in the Motor Union’s Journal in 1909. Joynson-Hicks, a Conservative MP petrolhead was Minister for Health, 1923-4 and Home Secretary, 1924-29.
It’s amazing to realise that motorists once had the same fears as cyclists today; that they’d be shunted off to a hinterland, segregated from other road users.
The Joynson-Hicks quote - and many other little nuggets of history - has come from my researches for iPayRoadTax.com. I’m working on a timeline of road funding, starting with the Roads Improvement Association, an organisation founded in 1886 by the Cyclists’ Touring Club and the National Cyclists’ Union.
The RIA wanted Britain’s dusty roads to be sealed with tarmac. The organisation pamphleted MPs and presented a strong case from “cads on casters” (the Lycra Lout equivalent of the late 19 Century, a reference to cyclists coined by uppercrust horse-riders) but the issue wasn’t taken seriously until adopted by the nascent ‘automobilism’ lobby.
Part of this lobby was the Self Propelled Traffic Association. It wasn’t self propelled in the sense we know today, it was in the sense of propelled by an engine, not a horse. A prominent cyclist sat on the SPTA’s council: E. R Shipton, secretary of the Cyclists’ Touring Club.
The SPTA was one of the organisations later to merge into the Automobile Association (AA), founded in 1905.
Cycling also shares some history with the AA. In effect, the organisation was helped into existence by cyclists. In March 1905 a fellow called Walter Gibbons wrote to Autocar magazine suggesting a Motorists’ Protection Association for the Prevention of Police Traps. Two other motorists replied saying arrangements had been made to patrol the Brighton road to warn motorists of said police traps. The first patrols went out in April 1905. Guess what they used as patrol vehicles? Yep, bicycles.
Within months, this informal arrangement of a “special staff of cyclists” was formalised into an organisation and it appointed a full-time secretary: it was called the Automobile Association.
Recently I’ve given a couple of presentations. One was to a friendly crowd; the other was to sea of morose faces, not exactly hostile, but there were a few in the audience who gave me a hard time in the Q&A session.
The friendly crowd was a cycle campaign group. 16 turned up on a wet, dreary Friday night to listen to my bikey bon mots. It was like talking to friends, a fireside chat rather than a formal presentation; real-life ‘social media’, a to-and-fro conversation. I had got the ball rolling by talking about how, to promote cycling, we need to stress the warm and fuzzy stuff, not dwell on safety stats, helmets, Lycra, city streets clogged with two ton vehicles out to kill.
I was gently chided for this by a couple members of the group. They argued my happy-clappy image wasn’t reality. I was able to counter – loud murmurs from everybody else in the room helped – with the point that the car industry has sold its wares for ever and a day with just such jiggery-pokery. Empty roads. Sunshine. Beautiful people. (‘Nicole?’ ‘Papa?’).
In effect, this is how the whole of marketing works. Sell the positives, ignore the negatives.
The second group I presented to was a bunch of travel planners. These folks are charged with getting people out of cars and on to buses, bikes and shanks’ ponies, but an awful lot of them, unwittingly, focus on the downsides of the alternatives to the car.
I stressed a similar, warm-and-fuzzy message about cycling to this audience. On travel planning literature, I suggested, don’t picture cyclists wearing fluoro jackets, helmets and Lycra. That’s stressing that cycling is a niche transport option; tribal, wacky, open to ridicule. [Disclaimer:I wear this stuff].
Don’t suggest companies spend a small fortune on installing showers for cyclists. Keenies, commuting in from miles and miles away in bike clothing, might benefit from work-place sprucing-up facilities, but the every-day, short-hop commuter cyclist needs no such facilities. Such amenities are not provided to workers in Amsterdam or Copenhagen: it’s simply not necessary.
Boy, did I get some stick. Partly for dissing on showers, mostly for daring to suggest cycling is not overtly dangerous and should be normalised. Some of the travel planners told me afterwards they’d enjoyed my talk, and they would modify how they promoted cycling; stressing the positives rather than the barriers. The majority, I fear, will continue to promote cycling as a hair-shirt option, something for the brave, something for fine weather.
Incidentally, none wanted to wear my motoring helmet. I wore it for the first part of my talk, not mentioning why I was making myself look even more twattish than normal. When I revealed it was a genuine product, produced in Australia in the 1980s for everyday driving not motorsport, there were giggles.
Best thing travel planners could do to get people out of their cars might actually be to promote car helmet use. And motoring mouth-guards. And just-popping-to-the-shops flame-proof clothing.
A version of this article was published in the February edition of BikeBiz.com:
It’s bonn ligthe. Thanks to the Bicycle Lexicon I could also tell you how to say it in 22 other languages. Or, if the non-Roman script was a problem, I could point to a pretty picture.
The Bicycle Lexicon was the work of the European Economic and Social Committee and has 23 language terms not just for mudguards, rims and suspension forks, but also cycling infrastructure, and terms useful for bicycle tours.
Fietscompartiment is Dutch for a train bicycle carriage, for instance. And, fret not, should you shred your skin-shorts in Finland you merely have to ask for pyöräilyhousut.
The Bicycle Lexicon is a free download and has been placed on Issuu.com. Got an Android phone? Download the Issuu Mobile app and you could have the Bicycle Lexicon on your person for your next world tour. Issuu Mobile is also coming to an iPhone and iPad touch soon.
On January 15th, Transport for London invited members of the UK bike industry to what it billed as the first Cycling Revolution Forum. What, no London Cycling Campaign bods?
A couple of days after the event, Cait of the Moolies blog wrote on iBikeLondon.Blogspot.com that the event wasn’t a real meeting of minds, it was a chance to butter up the bike trade in order to flog them stuff.
“Politicians tend to do this. They’ll invite the manufacturers and (in classic US terms) the lobbyists with the money in order that they can massage their egos enough to tap them for a bit of sponsorship money later.
“If they were to invite the LCC, then unfortunately real solutions costing tax payer money would be voiced and on the table. Then they’d have to publicly and visibly ignore those proposals, which had been aired in a London Assembly sponsored event. Oh dear. Better to ignore them altogether.”
Cait was bang on the money. In an email to attendees sent earlier this evening, Chris Mather of Transport for London’s SmarterTravel team issued what he said were the findings from the meeting, but closed with a giveaway statement:
“Finally, there are immediate opportunities to partner with TfL to support programmes within the Mayor’s Cycling Revolution. We are in the process of sharing these opportunities with you so if you haven’t had a call and a presentation sent to you detailing these opportunities, then expect one in the next few days.”
So there you have it: being soft-soaped by biking Boris is just the warm-up to a sales pitch. Neat.
Of course, the meeting with the bike trade came up with some good ideas - listed below - but will they be actioned?
Safety
1 Enhanced enforcement of cycle & superhighway lanes (making sure they’re car free)
2 Encouraging respect between the different types of road user
3 Aggressive cyclist behaviour. New York parks were cited as an example of where signs have been used to clearly warn cyclists they will be penalised for cycling aggressively
4 New laws to give cyclists priority over motor vehicles in appropriate situations
5 Maintaining infrastructure, (including repairing pot holes and removing broken glass)
6 Assess drivers’ behaviour towards cyclists in the driving test
7 Create a cycling manual to help educate cyclists on how to ride safely and respectfully
8 Target 15-25 year olds with education and training to improve knowledge of next generation
9 Led rides and buddy schemes to increase confidence and competence on the road. Noted confidence can be a gradual process often requiring 3-4 assisted rides
10 Peer-to-peer advocacy within workplaces to encourage people to have a go at cycling and communicate safety messages
11 Retailers could play a role at the point of sale in encouraging new cyclists to take up products and services to help improve safety
12 Cycle training is key. More information on this should be made available to retailers to give to their customers. Web links were requested to direct customers to find out more
There was also a request for the provision of cycle training to be simplified so that the process for potential customers more straight forward. (There are a currently a number of service providers and provision varies across London).
13 Twenty mile per hour speed limits to help to change the culture for all road users in residential areas and reduce accidents
14 Regular cycle maintenance will reduce accidents
15 Redress the ‘danger everywhere’ perception among many non cyclists
16 One cohesive voice to represent the cycling industry, the Mayor and TfL.
Security
1 A centralised database for recording bike serial numbers at point of sale, to improve recovery rates for stolen bikes, and make it more difficult for thieves to sell them on
(There are currently several privately owned competing databases and it would be beneficial to establish one standard central database)
2 Chipping or data tagging to deter thieves, currently it’s often too easy to remove the micro-chips from stolen bikes. One suggestion offered was printing barcodes on the frame of a bike (beneath the lacquer) so that they can’t be removed without damaging the paintwork
3 Online stores such as e-bay were a significant marketplace for stolen bikes. Brompton, in particular, were aware a large percentage of bikes stolen would be sold on via e-bay
It was suggested more could be done by these online market places to combat bike theft and pressure should be put on them to do so. For example, e-bay could be required to list the serial numbers of the bikes being sold on their site
4 GPS tracking systems – are they an affordable solution for the industry
5 Creating a pen or fence with additional lighting and CCTV would help reduce theft of cycles
Cycle Hire and Cycle Superhighways
1 Retailers display information from TfL within their stores and provide information to customers. Web links could also be set up on retailer websites to point people to further information on the TfL website
2 Improving the reach and effectiveness of home origin travel planning to influence peoples’ travel choices in residential areas in outer London
3 Pressure developers to consider the needs of cyclists and plan accordingly
4 Partner with supermarkets to encourage online shopping reducing the need to travel
5 Address the practicality of bringing bikes into central London with the rail providers
6 Outer London has relatively few cyclists compared to inner London. Educate outer London residents on the benefits of cycling
7 Public housing needs to be addressed to improve facilities for cyclists
The winter of 2009/10 has been cold, icy and packed with snow. OK, it hasn’t exactly been Iditabike conditions but plenty of hardcore Brit cyclists spent much of late December and early January on indoor trainers.
I don’t blame them. Without my spike tyres, I wouldn’t have ventured out much either. I have other winter product favourites but, first, the tyres that have kept me riding, and upright.
STUD U LIKE When the first few days of snow hit just after Christmas I wondered whether I should fit my spike tyres. They’ve been in storage for years. And for good reason: they’re a faff to fit and make a startling clattering noise on ice-free tarmac.
I studied the weather forecast and was convinced there would be enough black-ice around - about three day’s worth, predicted the Met Office - to make the switch. As it turns out they’re still fitted to the Xtracycle and it’s been my winter workhorse. There’s been a thaw, but black-ice is still an issue and, at the weekend, we got another dump of snow. The spikes stay.
My history with Nokian carbide-studded tyres goes back a long way. I first encountered them in the mid-1980s. Geoff Apps - the ‘father of English mountain biking’ - had been using Nokia 2-inch 650B snow tyres on his early mountain bikes, including the Range Rider. Geoff invited me to stay with him for one of his ‘Wendover Bashes’, some of the very first MTB events in the UK.
This was 1986. I’d spent the previous year touring some of the deserts of the Middle East on a Dawes Ranger. Geoff Apps’ Range Rider - fitted with gripshifts long before SRAM came along - was a much better climber than the Dawes Ranger, partly because of its tyres. By using thick Nokia inner tubes, Geoff was able to run at stupidly low pressures and could climb through mud with a sure footedness I knew I had to have too.
I’ve had Nokia tyres ever since (known as Nokian tyres since the 1990s). They’ve proved strong, and trust-worthy. Heavy, of course, and so the rolling resistance is a severe drawback but, on hard-packed snow, this is a minor consideration.
Over the last few weeks I’ve gone out of my way to find stretches of unsalted road and have confused motorists who’ve assumed as they’re stuck, I should be too. I’ve amused pedestrians who’ve been descending slopes holding on to hand-rails: it shouldn’t be possible to ascend slopes covered with sheet-ice but, taken carefully with no silly sudden moves, it’s been my spiked bike party trick.
According to the latest CTC magazine, UK suppliers of studded tyres have seen sales go through the roof (I shan’t say there was a spike in demand), with Schwalbe and Continental shipping in extra supplies from Germany. If you want to get spiked up, Peter White Cycles of the US has the definitive advice page on ice tyres, including blowing away all the myths about stud ejections and tarmac shredding.
OIL HAVE SOME OF THAT An awful lot of bike lubes can’t hack winter crud; Chain L can. It’s super gloopy. So sticky, in fact, that when applying, it strings out in a most pleasing fashion.
Technically, it’s a mixture of extreme pressure lubricants in a high film-strength mineral oil base. It also contains rust inhibitors and other additives to improve its longevity and wet-weather performance.
In use, it’s simply amazing. I picked up a sample at Interbike last year and started using it this winter when normal lubes weren’t coping with the extreme weather (extreme for the UK, that is).
There’s a time and a place for dry lubes: winter ain’t the time and NE England ain’t the place. If you ride through foul weather, I can recommend Chain L.
WASHED OUT I’m a huge fan of Nikwax products. They’re green and keep me dry.
My breathable shell layers get washed with Techwash, a non-detergent cleanser, and then re-activated with TX.10. I also waterproof my fleece garments with another Nikwax product and, when I’ve got a (stinky) full load of base-layers, wash them in Basewash.
Synthetic shell-, mid- and base-layers work partly because of textile tech but also because of a variety of treatments. Shell garments, for instance, often have Durable Water Repellent (DWR) coatings. These chemical enhancements wear off with every wash because detergents, being surfactants, pull the treatments away from the fabrics. Surfactants do the same job with dirt, loosening bonds and pulling it away from the fabric.
If you don’t re-treat your tech garments, they lose their effectiveness. Washing waterproof jackets in standard detergent is a great way to make them not waterproof. Detergent residue starts pulling water through the fabric.
Nikwax stuff appears expensive, but it’s worth it.
BUZZED UP OK, so I’m now stable on black-ice, well-lubed, and cossetted from the vagaries of the British weather but I’m going nowhere if I’m not caffeinated to the eyeballs. I have to start the day with an espresso. Just have to.
A mid-morning long black tastes great in a handlebar-mounted Soma Fabrications’ Morning Rush insulated coffee mug, available in the UK from Fine-Adc (the same guys who now do Action Wipes). Rather conveniently, the Morning Rush mount is the H-27 from CatEye, so you can switch over to an LED at night.
I may have taken the pic outside a snowy Starbucks, but I’m not fuelled by the Great Coffee Satan, my espresso bean of choice is Daterra’s Bruzzi of Brazil, roasted by Pumphrey’s Coffee, a Newcastle fixture since 1750.
[iTunes link for getting Chitty road tax video on iPods and iPhones].
‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ is one of the world’s most loved movies and is a lead-in to the video below. There’s then a critique of the DVLA’s 2002 TV advert for ‘road tax’, which used the original GEN11-registered car from the movie. Earlier DVLA TV ads for ‘road tax’ (grrrrr!) said ‘pay your road tax’. However, pre-1973 cars merely have to display a tax disc, they don’t pay for it. Ditto, today, for low CO2 Band A cars. So, the 2002 advert said ‘get your road tax’, perhaps a nod to the fact that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang didn’t have to pay car tax.
The car was built in 1967 and modelled to look like a 1920s car.
Nowadays, the DVLA’s TV adverts call VED by its most descriptive name: car tax. Hopefully there will be no backsliding to the days when Parker from the Thunderbirds could have his strings cut for “not paying road tax.”
Dr Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, winner of 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry lives in Cambridge, doesn’t own a car and rides his bike everywhere.
Dr Venki - as he prefers to be called - was recently interviewed by members of Rideacycle and the Bangalore Bikers’ Club. This is an edited version of that interview.
Why do you prefer to cycle?
“I cycle for a variety of reasons, the first being that I enjoy cycling. It’s a much nicer mode of transport. It doesn’t pollute! Also, though I do run and lift weights, but I know that even if I don’t get any other exercise, I have had it in the form of cycling each day. By the time you get to work, you are wide awake, alert, and ready to start work. And at the end of the day, it works in reverse. It lessens the stress and relaxes you, and I think that makes for a great lifestyle.”
What do you say to those who say cycling is slow and a time-sink?
“That reason is bogus! The very same people who don’t want to cycle, do get the time for whatever other activities they really want to do. In Cambridge, when I go out to dinner with my friends, I am usually there before the other dinner guests at the restaurant! Up to 5 km or so…it’s actually faster by cycle.”
How important is to be a cycling parent?
“Adult role models are very important for children. A child who grows up watching his/her parents cycling, will want to emulate them; if they see only aspirations towards motorized transport, that’s what they will also aspire to.”
If you don’t have a car, how do you carry your shopping?
“We [Dr Venki's wife is Vera Rosenberry, an author and illustrator of children's books] have panniers fitting on either side of the cycles, where we can store our shopping. Actually, going cycling to the shops is very good for you financially. With a car, one would buy up lots of stuff and fill the car with it. With the cycle, one is forced to buy just what one needs; it limits your shopping.”
