Here’s how to get a signed, personalised copy of the brand new ‘Family Cycling’
I do weddings, christenings, bar mitzvahs…and now, book signings.
If you want a plain vanilla version of ‘Family Cycling’, it’s cheaper over on , but if you’d like a signed, personalised copy I’ll do you one. I’ll throw in the postage, too.
For American readers, paying me direct, via PayPal, is very probably the quickest way to get hold of the book because it’s not yet available on Amazon.com (although it’s available for pre-order - in October…). Delivery to the UK or to the US, or to anywhere, really, is in with the list price of the book. It’s £11.99 in real world book shops so that’s how much I’ll charge.
If you want me to sign the book to a person, and with a specific message, let me know.
Send me your requested text in the wee box below, or via an email to
, and pay the £11.99 here:
Thanks! The book can be previewed in page-flippy mode on Issuu.com, including the intro and, embedded below, a chapter on teaching a child to ride a bike:
On the pre-Christmas Spokesmen podcast I gave some Christmas gift ideas for cyclists. My selection joined those from Richard Kelly of Interbike; Donna Tocci, social media manager for Ingersoll Rand; of Masi; and Guitar Ted of Twenty Nine Inches.
My prezzie ideas included solar-powered ankle and rucksack LEDs from Pedalite; waterproof iPod and iPhone holders from Aquapac; cards from Skeese Greets; recycled ex-bike gifts from Resource Revival; and Action Wipes, the oversize moist towellettes for sports use.
I didn’t recommend any books, not even the Bike to Work Book. I’d like to recommend some now.
Rob Ainsley Eye Books (2008)
This is a gem of a book, written by the author of some of the Bluffer’s Guides. It contains ride ideas in England and Wales, all based on features which are the ‘best’, the ‘longest’, the ’strangest’ or the ’steepest’. Some are obvious, such as rattling down Shaftsbury’s Gold Hill, setting of the by Ridley Scott.
Others are less obvious, such riding on the extremely short road leading into London’s Savoy Hotel, the only place in Britain where you can use the right hand side of the road in both directions. Even the traffic lights are on the ‘wrong’ side of the road.
My favourite routes in the book are those suggesting rides on evocative - and sometimes bumpy - Roman roads. Some of these rides require long-distance sorties in wild uplands. Just my kind of trips.
If distance riding is your thing, how about the world’s longest cycle path? How long is long? Six billion kilometres. In reality, it’s just 24kms but the York Planets cycle path, adorned with a model of the solar system, is correctly scaled. Pluto is mounted to a post just outside Riccall. Ride for 2.5kms to reach Neptune. Ride another 3kms to see Uranus. After Bishopthorpe, the planets come thick and fast, just metres apart.
This Sustrans sculpture trail is mirrored by another stellar route, between Taunton and Bridgwater. And this is one of the beauties of : it gives the main ride idea and then follows it up with ‘other places like this’. So, 50 rides is the minimum, there are plenty more ride ideas in the book, if you dig.
The book also has a companion website, www.bizarrebiking.com, with links to Google maps of the rides, and two sample chapters.
Richard Ballantine Snow Books (2007)
Ballantine, author of the million-selling Richard’s Bicycle Book, is urban bicycling’s most strident sage. His advice on staying alive in city traffic is brilliant (he’s big into bail-outs for when you or a motorist fluff a manouevre) yet his roots as an anarchic rider in 1970s New York are still evident in this book. He advocates ‘early greens’, shorthand for busting through red lights in certain situations, for instance when it’s dangerous not to, or there’s no-one around to tut-tut.
Ballantine is always entertaining, always thought-provoking and nearly always controversial. In this book he advocates free public transport for all as a way out of city gridlock. Sounds positively Maoist but, let the idea sink in, and it soon makes a lot of sense, especially in an age when the concept of free market economics has been shown to be a sham. When the auto industry is threatened with collapse, world governments don’t let market forces hold sway, they jump in to ‘protect jobs’. There’s no premonition of this in but Ballantine wistfully looks forward to the day when bikes rule in city centres.
Watch out for more bike titles from Snow Books. There’s going to be a revised reprint of the Bicycle Design book by Mike Burrows and a book on family cycling by yours truly.
Joe Parkin VeloPress (2008)
The subhead tells you precisely what to expect to find in this warts-and-all biography. Riding for a living in the cycling hotbed of Belgium is not glamorous, it’s a life of grind. The grit’s for real. But it’s a life atmospherically given wings by Parkin, a former US pro. Parkin was advised by Bob ‘Bobke’ Roll to ride in Belgium if he wanted to get on in the world of cycling.
Love to pore over the grainy, black and white images of cobble racing in Rouleur? You’ll relish - and re-read - this book.
Ben McFarland & Tom Sandham Campaign for Real Ale (2008)
OK, this isn’t strictly a bike book. In fact, it isn’t even a lax bike book. It’s very much a beer book. But, there’s some bike content and it’s well worth wading through the beer to get to it. The chapter on Portland, Oregon, for instance, is a mouth-watering eye-opener. Not only is the city fantastic for bicycling, it’s also tops for beer, too.
The Portland chapter says Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, chose some character names from Portland streets (Quimby, Flanders and Montgomery). It also has half a page on bike routes. Mmm, bikes.
Read the rest of "Spend your Christmas gift tokens on bike books"...
On Friday I was cycling along Gosforth High Street when I saw a canvas-coloured VW nudging out of a side road. This is normal rudeness and I wasn’t too fussed, even though I had to swing over a few inches to safely clear the nudger. As I passed I could see the woman driver was on a cellphone. She was inching out into the road. She might not have seen me. Instead of simply riding on, as I would do usually, I braked hard, hopped backwards and asked the driver to - please - get off the phone.
What happened next surprised me.
She said sorry. In fact, she was apology central.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” she said, and looked it. Her phone conversation hadn’t been suspended pending a rant to the idiot asking her to obey the law, she had immediately hung up the call. Amazing.
I explained how, next time, she might inch out and kill somebody. She agreed, and promised not to do it again.
This compliance threw me. This isn’t how it’s meant to work. We’re meant to shout at each other.
Surprised, albeit still a wee bit shaken by my brazenness, I started to ride off. A car pulled to the side of the first car. The woman inside said ‘What’s up? She was wasn’t on the phone was she?”
Upon my nod, she tutted and shook her head at the VW woman.
Apparently, this sort of real-person peer pressure has a big impact on drivers. In Bogata, Colombia, mime artists were once paid to mock bad drivers and jaywalkers. Behaviour improved.
Next time I see a motorist on a mobile phone I won’t be silent, I’ll ask, politely, for more concentration, less yakking. I don’t expect I’ll get the same sort of profuse apology as above but perhaps if lots of people shamed wrong-doers, such behaviour could be curtailed?
I was inspired to take direct action because of the book I’ve just read. is published by Alfred A. Knopf in the US, and Penguin in the UK. It’s written by tech journalist Tom Vanderbilt.
Pleasingly, is racing up the best-seller lists. This is good because the readers of the book will be mostly mainstream motorists, not just road radicals, pedestrianisers, transport behaviourialists and bicycle advocates.
The message in is that motorists can kill and that a society designed to placate the car is not a healthy society. Controversially, Vanderbilt ends his book with the belief that cars will eventually have to be GPS and computer controlled, packing more of the motorists that want to drive on to the increasingly congested roads of the world.
is a detailed, funny and endlessly surprising book. Vanderbilt explains why traffic problems around the world are really people problems. Vanderbilt delves into the psychology of driving, walking, and cycling. He visits , the cycling academic who strapped a camera on his bike and filmed motorists passing him. Walker found that drivers often drive further away from those cyclists without helmets because they appear less anonymous, and when Walker donned a long blonde wig motorists gave him/her even more room because women are perceived to be wobblers.
Some of the research won’t be new to many cyclists. For instance, it’s reasonably well known that Hans Monderman’s idea of removing street signs improves road safety. When 95 percent of the signs on Kensington High Street in London were removed, pedestrian KSIs (‘killed or seriously injured’) dropped by 60 percent.
However, the book is rich in data that doesn’t normally make it out of academia, and Vanderbilt turns even the dullest of studies into interesting examples of how driving can make sinners out of angels.
Though we all may think we are better than average drivers, Vanderbilt examines why we all behave differently when we get behind the steering wheel. He examines what causes road rage – he prefers the term ‘traffic tantrums’ - and why we think that being inside a metal box absolves us from any obligation to anyone else. He compares the driving of men and women, young and old, and has travelled around the world to study traffic jams near and far. Why is it that some countries drive on the left and others on the right? (It’s to do with horses and swords). Why do New Yorkers jaywalk more than people living in Copenhagen? (No, it’s not just cultural, design plays the biggest factor).
But don’t think bad driving and traffic congestion is a modern phenonomen. starts with a eye-popping section on the history of vehicular congestion, from the cart ruts in Pompeii which show use of detours and one-way streets, through to the terrible congestion in 19th century London and New York. At least our congestion isn’t accompanied by mountains of horse dung.
Vanderbilt comes at the controversial topic of risk compensation from many angles. “Most crashes,” he writes, “happen on dry roads, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers.”
Wide, clear, smooth roads are statistically more ‘dangerous’ than narrow, singletrack roads with hairpins and steep drop-aways. Drivers are lulled into a false sense of security on the first, but fret for their skin on the second, taking more care.
He will make you think again about mundane street furniture. Traffic lights, for instance. They are bad. Roundabouts, which require care and attention, are good.
It’s Vanderbilt’s book which alerted me to this fantastic 1950 Goofy cartoon about pedestrian/driver split personalities:
NO MORE DISTRACTIONS
There’s some related good news to report in the UK. From today there are some new, tougher penalties for motorists who kill because they were “avoidably distracted.”
The new offences will, for the first time, allow courts to imprison drivers who cause deaths by not paying due care to the road, or to other road users.
The new offences will carry custodial sentences of up to five years.
Justice Minister Maria Eagle said: “Drivers who kill through carelessness will no longer be able to walk away from court with just a fine. Driving requires full concentration at all times. A moment’s distraction can make the difference between life and death.”
What sort of distractions? Driving while talking on a phone or texting. Driving while drinking or eating, adjusting a GPS or car stereo, applying make-up or reading a map.
The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted, little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many people from different walks of life — different ages, races, classes, religions, genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological stability — mingle so freely.
The more you think about it — or, rather, the more time you spend in traffic with time to think about it — the more…puzzling questions swim to the surface. Why can one sit in traffic jams that seem to have no source? Why does a ten-minute “incident” create one hundred minutes of gridlock? Do people really take longer to vacate a parking spot when someone else is waiting, or does it just seem so? Do the carpool lanes on highways help fight congestion or cause more of it? Just how dangerous are large trucks? How does what we drive, where we drive, and with whom we drive affect the way we drive? Why do so many New Yorkers jaywalk, while hardly anyone in Copenhagen does? Is New Delhi’s traffic as chaotic as it seems, or does a beautiful order lurk beneath the frenzied surface?
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Just when it seemed as if things could not get more complicated on the road, along came a novel and controversial machine, the first new form of personal transportation since the days of Caesar’s Rome, a new-fangled contrivance that upset the fragile balance of traffic. I am talking, of course, about the bicycle.
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When I walk, I view cars as loud polluting annoyances…When I drive, I find that pedestrians are suddenly the menance, whacked-out iPod drones blithely meandering across the street without looking. When I ride a bike, I get the worst of both worlds, buffeted by speeding cars whose drivers resent my superior health and fuel economy, and hounded by oblivious pedestrians who seem to think it’s safe to cross against the light of ‘only a bike’ is coming but are then startled and indignant as I whisk past at twenty-five miles per hour.
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When bicyclists violate a traffic law, research has showed it is because, in the eyes of drivers, they are reckless anarchists; drivers, meanwhile, are more likely to view the violation of a traffic law by another driver as somehow being required by the circumstances.
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Max Hall, a physics teacher in Massachusetts: “The poetic and beautiful result is that four-wheelers behave like fixed objects, by moving very little relative to each other, even at significant speeds, while two-wheeler traffic moves ‘through’ the relatively static field of larger vehicles.”
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Perhaps….we will turn the highways into blissfully cooperative, ultraefficient streams of movement with no merging or tailgating or finger flipping. Long before that happens, however, a sooner future seems likely: cars driving themselves, at smoothly synchronized speeds to ensure maximum traffic flow and safe following distances, equipped with merging algorithms set for highest throughput, all overseen by network routers that guide cars down the most efficient paths on these information superhighways.
It’s this last point that fascinates me. It makes total sense. Congestion is set to increase, a huge cost to the economy. The only way to get vehicular traffic moving is to allow computers to take over. What’s the most dangerous component on a car? The nut behind the wheel. Take away the nut and the streets will be safer.
Motorists face a future of restricted movement (think of the current Beijing experience, with half of the city’s cars forced off the road, every other day). Cyclists, on the other hand, will be able to reclaim city streets, free to go as they please, when they please, protected from cars and trucks because vehicles will be forced to carry on-board speed restrictors, acceleration monitors, and vulnerable road user avoidance devices.
Such freedom to move will create even more cyclists, something that’s already happening. Catering for cyclists - like catering for pedestrians - is the quickest, cheapest and most effective way to civilise a city. And now that message - thanks to Tom Vanderbilt’s - is going mainstream. Thanks, Tom.
