Some mornings small things can brighten up your ride. For example I followed a driving school car this morning that warned me, in professionally applied lettering across the bumper that it might be liable to “sudden breaking”. This might well be true, I guess, depending on the skill of the learner-driver, but I’m not sure it’s entirely what they intended. It’s that sort of close attention to detail from those teaching new drivers that inspires confidence when you’re riding with them on the London streets.
Spelling and grammar is something that’s also seemingly less important on the ubiquitous cycling and social networking accessory of the moment. Twitter gives everyone the opportunity to keep all their acquaintances up to date with the minutia of their lives. When it comes to cycling this means that every journey takes five times as long as you have to take frequent breaks to dig out your phone and update everyone with the exciting corner you just went round, but it does seem to be finding some semi-useful applications.
If you’re planning on going to the East Festival you can stay up-to-date by following a tweeting bike, either on the Internet, or in reality, as it cruises around the East London venues involved. Twitter has also been useful to one courier in New York who managed to orchestrate the recovery of his stolen bike within hours by tweeting about it and posting pictures. It just shows that anything that allows information to be spread quickly, and received on mobile devices, can have a highly positive influence. Perhaps what we need is a group on Twitter, or somewhere similar, to post stolen bikes and allow people to keep an eye out for them within the short amount of time where the bikes won’t have been sold on, sprayed or broken down.
Maybe that could have helped the Dutch Railway Company to recover the 12 Dutch bikes that have gone missing following their loan to staff members during the recent Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver.
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