Next week’s planned London tube strike may never happen, but if it does, droves of Londoners will get on their bikes.
London Cycling Campaign has been quick off the mark with a Bike the Strike website and campaign, called BikeTube.org.uk. To help promote this site I’ve partnered with LCC to produce this special edition of the Bike to Work Book sampler.
It’s also my first attempt at making the links and ads all clicky. Later on I’ll also play with embedding movie files.
Over on Bikeforall.net I answer a load of queries sent in to the site. Most are either too banal or too localised to be worth broadcasting. Everybody gets a personal reply but some of the questions are of general interest. These get posted to the FAQ section – with an answer – for all to see.
Generally, the questions are from new cyclists, worried parents or returnees to the fold. Sometimes the questions are from non-cyclists and these tend to be more strident. One came in earlier today. I answered it at length. J Clift of Colchester (who I assumed is a Mr.) really doesn’t like people cycling on pavements [US=sidewalks]. I don’t either. It bugs me when I see adults riding on what are clearly footpaths. But I know why those adults are not riding on the road.
See if you agree with what I wrote to Mr Clift.
Q: “I am somewhat angered these days by the amount of people who ride on pavements, young and old, and no-one in authority seems to care or be about to stop this. The public just seem to think they can do this because there are no effective actions to stop them. I just grow angrier and madder by the day. Sometimes I have suggested to the riders they are illegally riding but I fear for my safety! What can I do before I explode?!”
A: Cycling on the pavement is illegal and cyclists can be fined £30 on the spot (and often are).
But, just as motorists routinely break traffic laws (running red lights, driving in bus lanes, habitually speeding, driving while talking on mobile phones), sadly, some cyclists also break the law and cycle on pavements (i.e. footways).
Sometimes this is ignorance of the law. Other times it’s laziness. Often it’s due to confusing local authority cycle facilities: many pavements have been designated as cycle paths and yet, just a little further on, the very same stretch of ‘cycle path’ reverts to being pedestrian only.
Mostly, however, it’s out of fear of motorised traffic. Not that cycling on the pavement is necessarily safer than being on the road. Sometimes motorists mount footways and kill people. For instance, on Friday, a pregnant woman in Carlisle was killed by a dangerous driver who hit the woman while she was walking on a footway.
Rest assured, all the official advice from cycle organisations is for cyclists not to ride on footways. Bikeforall.net has a page all about ‘cycling and the law’, where cyclists’ rights and responsibilities are spelled out in no uncertain terms.
This article leads with the ‘cycling on pavements’ issue. A bike shop in York also has a Stop At Red campaign aimed at cyclists who run lights. I don’t know of any motoring organisation that has a similar single-issue campaign aimed at stopping motorists committing the same offence.
Many , a dangerous practice for passing pedestrians, wheelchair users and pushchair pushers. It’s also very damaging to pavement slabs; costly for councils to repair.
In an ideal world, no cyclists, drivers or pedestrians would break the law: but we don’t live in an ideal world. By all means campaign against cyclists using footpaths but perhaps there are mitigating circumstances on some of the footpaths in your local area (speeding motorists, poor signage of where cycle paths start and finish etc)?
If the majority of those you see cycling on footways are youths in hoodies, ask your local police to take some action. Maybe they’ll send out some bike bobbies to nab the worst offenders? A few FPNs (fixed penalty notices of £30) might reduce the problem.
Looking on the positive side, it’s probably better to meet a hooded youth cycling on a pavement than meeting the same youth acting illegally in a car. Cyclists riding on footways are wrong and irritating; they’re very rarely life-threatening.
Don’t explode. Take up the footway cycling issue with your local council. Consider widening your campaign to include complaints against all forms of anti-social transport behaviour. In fact, if your local streets were made safer for cycling, there would likely be less need for cyclists to ride on footways.
Cars are heavy, fast and potentially lethal to flesh-and-blood cyclists and pedestrians. If your area saw dramatic reductions in car speeds, I’d warrant you’d see a dramatic reduction in traffic violations by cyclists.
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May 06, 2009
Bikes are not welcome on Dutch trains
That’s because there are so many bikes in the Netherlands. If Dutch people tried to bring their bikes on their train journeys, the trains would be as long as the whole Dutch rail network…
That was one of the surprising findings on a parliamentatry study tour to the Netherlands I accompanied last month. Click to watch a short movie on the trip.
PS
Count the helmets.
from on .
MPs and Lords from the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group visited the Netherlands in April 2009 with officials from British cycling organisations.
This 12-minute video is a record of that study trip.
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Apr 15, 2009
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:
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Mar 26, 2009
Gary Fisher Q&A
The other weekend Gary Fisher was in London buying yet more snazzy duds but he also appeared at a screening of Klunkerz, the mountain bike history documentary. The next day I interviewed him for his views on transport bikes - audio and story here - but at the screening I recorded his answers from a detailed and entertaining Q&A session.
This is the original trailer for the Klunkerz move:
And this is the brand new trailer:
Here are some keyword highlights from the audio above:
George Lucas. Grateful Dead. BMX cruiser class. 29er bikes. Panasonic 32lb bikes. Gearboxes. Girls looking good on bikes. Copenhagen Cycle Chic. Steel v alumunim v carbon. New tech: 10 years of failures. Dashing Tweeds. Living in the same shack as W.C. Fields. Carved tokers. Avenue of the Giants trail, California.
Gary Fisher: “I could have been a frame builder, I know how to braze but I didn’t want to get into metal therapy, I wanted to build a company that covered the earth with bikes.”
launched in 25 UK cities today, including Newcastle on Tyne. Type in your postcode, zoom in to a favourite street and then drag the yellow stick-man to the location you want to take a virtual bike ride along.
I’m so glad I was captured on a bike and not my car. It’s also a town bike, with a basket on the front. Thing is, Google Streetview is a car-conspiracy. It’s images taken on roads only. We need a Google Streetview Bike! This could capture the beauty of car-free rides.
Come on, Google, get your arse into gear!
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You know how to correctly fit and wear a bike helmet. You know it’s best to pedal with the ball of your foot not the arch. But beginners tend not to.
That’s why I’ve made some video shorts. There are two online right now, more are in the pipeline. Future shorts will focus on why it’s important to look behind before signalling and to watch out for motorists opening doors in your face. All are branded as ‘60 Second Bike Tips’.
The videos are to promote the Bike to Work Book. I could have placed them on a high-quality video sharing site such as Vimeo but I want the vids to get lodged in all sorts of digital nooks and crannies, and only YouTube can do this. The full catalogue of have been watched 1,188,401 times on YouTube.
The two videos above - and the three to be edited soon - feature the following:
1 Karl McCracken
1 Cannondale Bad Boy singlespeed stealth commuter
1 sensible jumper
2 Doc Martens
1 borrowed helmet
1 beta testing waterproof rucksack
I’m keen to produce more video shorts, none of them lasting more than a minute. The shorts will be collected on this . What mistakes do you see newbies making?
