Bits and Pieces

It’s been a while since we saw any innovative bike parking solutions, so you can imagine my excitement when I saw this idea, where bikes are hung on the side of a building on a gigantic belt – all run by an operator pedalling a bike to move the belt.

Closer to home it’s interesting to see that the National Trust are going all-out to encourage cycling on their land, both for people who like a pleasant potter on the tarmac, and for mountain bikers. This might mean even more places to ride, and hopefully another organisation making the most of it as the Forestry Commission has.

Finally today we normally steer clear of road-riding films, but this one on the Paris-Roubaix is pretty cool:



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Stock Photo

I am thoroughly in favour of resurfaced roads. Not just do they mean a smooth section of riding into work, which makes a change from the usual mountain biking session that cycling on London roads often becomes, but also it throws up interesting insights into the workings of line painters.

How often have you wondered how they put the right lines back after re-asphalting the road? I know I have spent literally a few moments considering the problem and was slightly pleased to find out the answer the other day. It would appear that the lines are marked up on the pavement to give a guide as to what to put back – which makes sense if you think about it. The markings on the particular road I was looking at included this cryptic symbol:

Clearly this wasn’t a stock-cube related marking and I was interested to see, once the lines were repainted on the road, that it actually meant a bicycle symbol. Perhaps this is a code that cyclists can adopt in the manner of romantic American Hobos and early Christians to identify each other in the future?

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Information Superhighway

While news in general grinds to a halt in the summer, like the drive chain of a bike from Argos that’s been left in the garden all winter, people can take the opportunity to send out press releases with less exciting developments.

In this world it seems terribly exciting that the Cycle Superhighways have been opened in London. Let’s face it, it’s not all that exciting. They’re glorified bike lanes and, as many other people have pointed out, they are broken in places and not a magic carpet that will transport you smoothly to work without even getting wet. I’ve even heard rumours that you still actually have to pedal your bike along them and that you have to pay attention to traffic and not rely on the blue paint of invincibility.

While they’re not going to change the world, and they’re perhaps more of a publicity stunt than a really practical solution to the dangers of riding a bike into London they do actually mean that cycling gets noticed in the press.

For once there is a highly visible cycling presence on the roads concerned, especially with the new signposts and corporate imagery. Let’s face it, if something at least gets drivers to think about the fact that there are cyclists around then that’s a good thing (although clearly we need to avoid a feeling that cyclists should only be on the blue bits and have no right to be anywhere else).

So the FMFT view of the superhighways? They’re a nice image of cycling being more accepted in London, even if they don’t actually make it any safer.

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Danger - Roadworks

If you needed reminding that cycling can be dangerous then you don’t really need to look much beyond the first-week carnage of the Tour de France, or, indeed at good, but not as good as his siblings, downhill mountain biker, Dan Atherton. Whether you’re breaking your neck or your elbow it’s clear that competitive and extreme cycling can be hazardous.

What shouldn’t be quite so risky is riding along a highway in America. But yet another county there are considering banning bikes on major roads for the safety of the cyclists. It seems to me that it’s precisely the drivers who rush to comment on these stories that make the roads at all dangerous and a better move would be to ban anyone who makes the kind of comments that suggest they might want to deliberately hurt cyclist from driving. Once again feel free to play FMFT red-light bingo and the person who correctly guesses how many comments pass before someone mentions cyclists running red lights can be considered for (but will not actually receive) a significant prize.

At least in this country cyclist are allowed on all road except motorways and can rely on well marked and clear road painting with very few unscheduled breaks for dead badgers. Bear in mind when using the roads that a broken dead badger line on the middle of the road, means you probably may, or perhaps may not, overtake, as long as there’s a squirrel watching.

Talking of courses, which we weren’t really, the Olympic mountain bike course is now being built at Hadleigh Castle. This will offer a stunningly technical and exceptionally hilly course on a flood plain in Essex. Let’s hope the designers can make the most of what’s there and create something worthwhile out of what might appear to be a uninspiring landscape. If it remains open after the Olympics as well it might just be an interesting place to ride, accessible from North London, which, entirely selfishly, would be great.

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Drugs, Yobbos and Lanes

Yesterday I’m sure the world was shocked about tales of doping in professional cycling. Who would have thought that such a traditionally clean sport would have finally succumbed to drug taking? Still, if he’s to believed, then Floyd Landis did, indeed, artificially enhance his performance around the time that he was found guilty of just that. More wide-reachingly he’s accusing other members of his teams of doing the same including the eternally suspected but so far always testing clean, Lance Armstrong.

While no-one will perhaps be all that surprised if Armstrong does turn out to have doped, simply due to the nature of the sport and the number of enhanced cyclists he has beaten in his career, I still hope that he is clean. I’m no big fan of him, but the thought that there can be magnificent clean athletes in cycling gives hope for the sport as a whole.

In the less stimulated world of commuting to work in London, where adrenaline form being nearly killed and perhaps the remnants of last night’s drinking are the aids most cyclists will test positive for (unless there’s been a growth in the underground clubbing and EPO scene that I’m unaware of) the Guardian has jumped onto the Superhighway bandwagon and come up with a survey. On the bike blog there you can answer a series of questions about your local bike lane and help to build a national picture of the best and worst. Someone’s put in a lot of work on Google Docs so make it worth their while by contributing here.

Also in London Boris Johnson has not lost an opportunity to mention the bike hire scheme that’s going to hit the roads in a month or so, as he also promotes a scheme to get blanket Wi-Fi across the capital. He was talking about a new iPhone App (it must be a week since we mentioned one) that will show you the location of the hire points, as well as the number of bikes at each one. Admittedly it doesn’t give a huge feeling of confidence when even the figurehead of the scheme is worried about how many will be stolen by “local yobbos”, but at least it might save you a wasted trip. Personally I’m more excited about the Wi-Fi which might open up all sorts of opportunities for watching streaming videos to brighten up your ride to work if you’re finding the steady roll of tarmac and the constant risk of other vehicles not entertaining enough.

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New Routes

It’s easy to become stuck in a routine for your ride to work. Not just the process you go through and the time you know it takes you to ride the route, lock the bike up and whatever else you need to do, but the route itself can become a habit.

Moving offices recently meant that I realised just how much I was riding on auto-pilot. I’ve only moved a short distance away but I found myself almost totally lost on my first attempt to ride in. I had assumed, somehow, that I would just find the way, as I used to every day, but now am facing weeks, or possibly months of working out the ideal route.

The perfect route I am looking for will be quick but not on busy roads, and avoiding obstacles like traffic lights and speed ramps, while still being interesting enough to keep me from being too bored. The trouble with London is that there are so many possibilities to try out before I can settle on the perfect commute. At least that means an interesting time as I never know exactly if I will end up at work, somewhere else entirely, or just horrendously late.

Talking of commuting in London, you may have noticed that the cycle superhighways are starting to appear. All this really seems to involve is painting sections of road and existing cyclepaths a “super” blue colour, and there are already people moaning about them, or praising them in almost equal measure. I have to say I’m, not convinced that they will make cycling a better or safer experience, but it’s always nice to have a new colour added to the rainbow of paint on the roads. One interesting objection seems to, at least partly, revolve around the choice of colour, as an East London assembly member sees it as too “Tory”. Either way it’s certainly a political issue, literally on the streets of the city.

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Diversionary Tactics

Cyclists seem to have achieved a true equality on the roads of one bit of North London. It’s not just cars that have to suffer the yellow diversion signs as some utility company or council digs up another bit of road, but there was our very own cycle diversion in place.

Cars weren’t even being sent along the alternative route, but were expected to work out their own way around when confronted with a closed and fenced-off road, whereas cyclists were provided with a series of signs helping them to get back onto the route they hoped to follow.

I’m not entirely sure what warranted such an effort to keep cyclists on the correct route, or even entirely where they were going. The diversion seemed to take them along the same way as I was going anyway for a while, so perhaps there’s some secret back way that everyone but me knows about normally (I’ve a sneaking suspicion it might be a London Cycle Network route, so probably pretty secret anyway and better signed for with the diversion than it’s ever been).

Maybe it’s a response to the huge extra numbers of cyclists on the roads this week as the weather suddenly got a little better. It’s good to see, obviously, although I do prefer it when the roads are full of people who can ride well enough to avoid just ploughing into my back wheel, even if it is just at a slow roll. Still, I guess with so many extra bikes then companies doing roadworks probably want to keep them in line and make absolutely sure that they don’t have a big hole in the road filled with inexperienced two-wheel commuters.

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Finding Your Way

There’s finally just the merest hint of the end of winter in the air this week. There’s just a possibility of a ride home in the evening without lights, and short sleeves and sunglasses instead of layers and waterproofs. It’s starting to suggest days to look forward to being on the bike, instead of dreading the battle through the weather.

It’ll also mean less space in the bike racks and more people in the way on the way to work, but I’m deciding not to dwell on that. I’ll probably hardly notice what with all the roadworks that are currently filling the route and adding an extra two or three traffic lights to every trip.

With the better weather I’m sure there’ll be more people deciding to get out on the roads on their bikes and looking for safe ways to do it. The London Cycling Network will continue to provide a role in this that I don’t entirely understand. I appreciate that people need a way to feel safe while they get around, and advice on which roads are best to ride along, but the entire network seems to just make things more complicated. There’s even been a suggestion to extend the network with a “bike grid”. None of the routes and their elusive signs seem to do much more than a decent look at a map and a bit of thinking about the quieter routes that you could take to get somewhere would. The idea that you should stick to a specific route also seems quite limiting, and almost enforces an idea that cyclists shouldn’t have as much right to the roads as anyone else.

Sure, the TFL cycling route planner can be handy, but it shouldn’t take away from people using a bit of intelligence to find their own way somewhere, perhaps on a map. Having said that there is a trend towards allowing computer programmes to work out your every move in life, so perhaps we just need a general return to map-reading. Before the world of sat-nav and Google Maps people still seemed to find their way places, and had a better idea when they got there of where they actually were.

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