Art and Culture of Cycling

Spotted yesterday in Next’s home ware department, this...

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 04:11:04 -0500

Spotted yesterday in Next’s home ware department, this delightful Penny Farthing cushion. The imprint of Middle England’s bottom is the ultimate acceptance of cycling in the respectable cultural mainstream. We’re getting there, folks!

Racism, or the Ravings of a Drunk Driver?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:00:51 -0500

I’ve been arguing for some time that the challenge facing cycling campaigners is less a practical one of explaining the technical features of effective infrastructure, and more a campaign to change perceptions and attitudes. Politicians might be shallow and opportunistic, but they’re not so stupid that they couldn’t find out how to build decent segregated facilities if they really wanted to do that.

The problem is not that politicians don’t understand what works, but that they can’t, deep down, be bothered to do the job properly. They don’t think it’s important enough, and they don’t think there are enough votes in it (at the moment, they’re probably right, though some leadership might be nice).

It’s great being photographed on a bike because it makes people think you are a man of the people when you’re not. (Dave, George, Boris…) But still, no economically successful voter would really want to ride a bike seriously, would they?

Which is why I agree with most of Edmund King’s recent comments, that cycling has a serious perception problem, akin, in some ways (see caveats below) to racism. Edmund King is a very canny leader. No spittle-flecked road tax rants from him.

He’s one of a few intelligent motoring lobbyists who realise that it’s actually in drivers’ interests to get more people cycling around town. A 25% cycling share on segregated paths would make driving around town, if you really have to do that, much quicker and pleasanter. Everybody wins.

But too many people still think bikes are fundamentally for kids and poor people. (One academic study found that cycling is considered an ‘abnormal’ thing to do.) Resentment of unreconstructed motoring towards cyclists comes through whenever someone off-message like John Griffin pops up.

It also comes through in the purchasing statistics. By European standards, we buy quite a lot of bikes, but they are on average very cheap. That’s because the bikes we buy are bicycle-shaped objects, which look quite nice under the Christmas tree, but go rusty during the first ride, and by the end of January are seized up and disintegrating at the back of the garage.

I’m not wholly comfortable with the racism analogy. You can choose, after all, whether you’re a cyclist or not. Cyclists have never suffered, and will never suffer anything like the persecution of some racial groups. But it is helpful as a measure of the progress of cycling in public attitudes.

We’re now at the stage - approximately early Eighties in UK race relations - where politicians realise they’re supposed to make pro-cycling noises, without doing anything very substantial, and most ordinary people know it’s unacceptable to express vehemently anti-cycling views, though if you find yourself in congenial and discreet company, many will still do so.

Remember those remarks grandma used to make about immigration after a couple of glasses of ginger wine? The casually anti-cycling wing of the road lobby is a kind of drunken racist grandma. In 15 years she’ll be gone. (The rabidly anti-cyclist wing is a tougher proposition, but a few extremists can be contained by the law, as happens, following the analogy, with hard-core groups like the BNP.)

Look at what the angry anti-cycling tweeters have actually said. Insofar as there is any discernible ideology, it’s all about status. “You are the bottom of the road chain,” says the winsome @kfa_12.

I’ve had abuse along the lines of ‘only a loser rides a bike’ for years, though it seems to be decreasing. It’s usually from the window of a van worth less than my bike. I tend not to explain their mistake at the lights, unless I have a segregated escape route very nearby.

In today’s coarsely materialistic culture, the car is a great way way to show everyone how rich and successful you are. Car advertising now focuses only on image: even the cheapest climate coffin on the market will do over 100mph and carry 5 people in reasonable comfort.

These attitudes will take time to shift, but there are many encouraging signs of progress. Olympic success, the popularity of bike hire schemes, still-increasing commuter numbers in many towns, better everyday cycling gear; this all helps. Mainstream celebrity endorsement would also shift motoring opinion. Apparently, David Beckham is at a loose end. Sponsorship by Canondale or Specialized? (Ideally you’d want him on a utility bike but I don’t think Pashley or Gazelle are quite his image)

People are understandably frustrated that the overwhelmingly logical case in favour of spending whatever it takes (not much, in the scheme of things) to create a network of integrated, segregated cycle paths. I agree with Peter Walker’s doubt explained in this blog post that the government has the political will to implement The Times’ plan.

Though the study he refers to, from Lancaster University, seems to me to refer mainly to attitudinal shifts and everyday practicalities like transporting children and shopping (both straightforward with the right equipment). Safety concerns are only one of its three main findings.

And the ignorant view that cycling is for kids and poor people isn’t caused specifically by safety concerns, though those are important. While the second concern, that cycling is not practical with kids & shopping, could be addressed with practical measures like better cycle storage in homes, workplaces and at shopping centres.

So perception, attitude and culture are crucial. And this is where Edmund King’s point is important. Changing public attitudes takes a long time. Even if we leave the analogy with race relations, which have taken centuries of work and are still far from resolved, it takes many years of determined, thankless effort.

I suggest a comparison with the attitude towards drink driving. Forty years ago, it was acceptable to boast that you could drive skilfully while drunk. A 1970’s twitter doesn’t bear thinking about, but it would probably have featured idiots boasting about their drink-driving skills, just like today’s features idiots boasting that they have endangered cyclists’ lives.

Starting from a much lower level of cycling than the Dutch did in the 1970s (about 2% compared with their 25%), it’s inevitably going to be a longer struggle. I think we are about a third of the way through a major revision in UK attitudes to cycling. Of course there’s a lot still to do. Who ever imagined it would be easy?

The Niiiws app revolutionises news reading on phones and tablets...

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 06:25:53 -0500

The Niiiws app revolutionises news reading on phones and tablets by collating popular articles from all titles in the free-to-web press according to their popularity on social media. Newspapers should be very worried: it pulls the rug from under their feet, bypassing not just their home pages but any attempt by editors to organise and promote their own material. That editorial power is given directly to readers, via social media.

So, what icon would such an app naturally choose as its busy icon: the bicycle, of course. As far as I know, Niiiws has no formal connection with cycling at all. It’s just that, like the rest of us, it recognises the extraordinary subversive, subliminal power the concept of the bicycle possesses.

It's the Car, Stupid!

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 06:45:11 -0500

I’ve been meaning to write something along these lines for a while. News stories come up all the time which reveal the damage done to our collective wellbeing by the misconceived and disproportionate status given to the car:

The demonisation of a (surprisingly, Tory) councillor who wanted to do something about congestion
The suggestion - wrong and depressing in equal measure - that the difficulties of high street traders can be solved with more free parking
The continual problems of cycling facilities in London, caused by, at root, the conviction that motor traffic must come first at all costs. There are too many examples of this for me to link to individual examples.
The car is not treated pragmatically as another means of transport, one which should be obsolete in most urban and suburban areas, but as an icon of progress, prosperity, opportunity, even when in practical terms it actively hinders the values it’s supposed to help.

To deal with this threat it’s not enough to point out where, pragmatically, the road lobby is wrong (although we do have to do that). We also have to neutralise the imagery and iconography of the car, to counter the huge weight of positive propaganda created by the advertising and political weight of the motor industry.

It’s a frustrating time to be a cycling advocate. The interest is clearly there. Whether it’s commuters in London - numbers up 15% 2010-11 - or leisure cyclists in the Peak District - where the newly opened tunnels in the Monsal Trail have generated cycling traffic and local jobs beyond all expectation - there are thousands of people who want to ride their bikes in safety.

Cycling seems so obvious a solution to so many problems. Clean air campaigners claim only smoking causes more premature deaths than pollution. Yet another study points out that the forty year decline in walking and cycling, only recently halted, is a significant factor in a public health crisis of obesity, diabetes and so on which costs the NHS over £1 billion per year. And the single biggest reason physical activity has been removed from daily life is the motorised armchair so many people use to go from home to work, school, or to socialise, with only the most fleeting gasp of fresh air on the way.

There’s no shortage of intelligent analysis explaining how road conditions can be improved, and cyclists encouraged and protected. The government’s lamentable response is caused, surely, by their slavish adherence to the doctrine of the road. They put motorised traffic first. Boris writes love letters to Clarkson and his car in the Telegraph, though there’s clear evidence it’s more efficient for a city to rely on public transport than private, and retail business, at least, almost always does better in a car-free environment, as the Very Important Pedestrian days on Oxford Street demonstrate.

We are indoctrinated with the idea that using a car is essential to daily life. But what would happen if, all of a sudden, private cars disappeared? We would shop more often, more locally, buying more fresh food. (Supermarket junkies could always order a delivery). We would have quieter, cleaner, friendlier streets, where people might want to spend more time in communal activity. Everyone’s health would improve. Thousands of accident victims would be spared. People could work during their commute, or better still, get some exercise on their bike.

Of course, it couldn’t happen overnight, and we’d need affordable public transport. The really rural 5 or 10% might need to be exempt. But the perception that the car plays an essential role in our daily lives of often evaporates on examination. A determination to drive is a kind of addiction which distorts and pollutes so much of urban and suburban Britain. The car is a kind of invasive species which has crept into the densely populated UK from its natural habitat of the American Midwest, where there is room for its destructive behaviour.

I used to work in outer London, and commuted there, by bike, from the centre (more or less). Many colleagues drove in from the suburbs. They were dumbfounded by my ability to survive a bit of drizzle, or a slightly chilly morning. I was dumbfounded by their apparent indifference to the hours of delay caused by the seizing up of whole regions when a major commuting route was blocked - and it happened all the time - by accident or roadworks.

I found these conversations surreal. There is no rational accounting for the desire so many people have to sit in an expensive, stationary metal box, staring at the exhaust of the car in front, while it slowly kills you. Wasted time, like wasted life, has been normalised by the road lobby.

The Top Gear team drives most cars on a test track these days. The idea that handling and performance affect most journeys on the public road is a fantasy. This fantasy is made explicit in today’s advertising, which just shows the open road, speed, fun and sex. In many respects the illusion pornography (which I’m not defending, by the way) sells is less deluded than that promoted by car advertising. Middle-aged men like Clarkson are more likely to find a twenty-something partner than an open road, in the south-east, at least. And where the emissions caused by the one can be mopped up with a Kleenex, the emissions caused by the other poison our cities and cause the planet to fry.

Slowly, the tide is turning. Peak car probably arrived in UK about five years ago, although it does not feature in the government’s transport planning. Even the residents of Mayfair, hardly the vanguard of environmental activism, now realise the car imposes environmental and economic costs on their area for which drivers should pay. Many of the largest car manufacturers are now involved in large car club schemes. They know the ownership model is changing. If the car becomes a utilitarian object, rather than a statement of fashion, status and identity, its use can be rationalised. On this issue, young people are more perceptive than the middle-aged: they realise car ownership is an expensive vanity, and would rather spend their money on a laptop to use on the train.

Cycling campaigners have done a huge amount of useful work to promote better facilities in all kinds of ways. But the battle is one of hearts as well as minds, and the car still occupies many hearts. It is a mistake to imagine the car lobby, or its sympathetic politicians, will come round when confronted with reason. Like banking, or News International, it has had a malign influence over public policy for far too long. We must identify where and why the car still has undue influence, and neutralise it. Then we might be able to ride a bike in peace.

When I wrote this piece about the ever-increasing use of bikes...

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 06:18:15 -0500

When I wrote this piece about the ever-increasing use of bikes as business icons in the Guardian’s Bike Blog, there was only space for one photo, and the one chosen was one of the less appealing ones.

So here’s a fuller range of bicycle icons, from the shop Tapped and Packed (maybe it’s a gimmick, but I loved their paper cup with a bike print), the Bombay Cafe Dishoom, and a scarecrow I found in the middle of Suffolk, about the time of our Jubilee celebrations.

Each one is a small thing in itself, but overall, they show how pervasive is the idea of the bike as something dynamic, radical, exciting. I can’t think of any other inventions of the 1880s which still have that appeal.

Riding your Bike to Emotional Fulfilment: Boy and Bike (Film Review)

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 04:18:00 -0500

I’ve made a particular effort to avoid the Belgian Dardennes brothers’ films for over ten years, after a misspent evening watching Rosetta, one of the most eyeball-scratchingly pretentious ninety minutes of celluloid ever to give art cinema a bad name. (You can now see the whole thing on Youtube, you lucky things, without having to track down an arthouse cinema, as I did back in ’99.)

Veering between having no plot and a plot so abysmally contrived you wish they hadn’t bothered after all, it confirms every casual prejudice about serious French (and Belgian) cinema. Its sole purpose appears to be to enable the audience to cleanse its indulged soul of middle-class guilt with bizarre (the fishing scene is to die for) and extravagant fantasies of working-class misery.

So it was only the promise of some hardcore bike imagery that persuaded me to watch Boy and Bike, the Dardenne Brothers’ latest. I’m glad I did: they now have a much better idea of what makes grittily realistic psychological drama.

There’s still plenty of working-class misery, but it is at least plausible. The boy-hero, Cyril - I assume the name is more modish in Belgium - is abandoned cruelly by his father, who can’t cope with him, and passed on to a foster mother, Samantha. Wrestling with feelings of rejection, he struggles to settle in his new home, and most of the film depicts his turbulent attempts to engage with family life, while tempted to deviate by the local ‘dealer’ (interesting French has no word of its own for what must, then, be a purely American practice).

Cyril’s bike is the spine of the action, essential both as a practical object and a symbol for the boy’s emotional growth and opportunity. It’s sold by the desperate father for emergency cash at the start; Samantha’s first act, establishing her as a good foster mum, is to buy it back.

The bike provides the only escape from the concrete wastes of their Liege estate, when Cyril and Samantha go for a ride along the river, which works realistically as a bonding experience, and symbolically as the peace and beauty Cyril has lacked in his life thus far. The film closes with a shot of Cyril cycling back to Samantha. He is, at last, at ease with his life.

It’s a defiantly unglamorous film, exulting in its detailed depictions of the everyday: hand-washing in Samantha’s hair salon, or driving around the backwaters of Liege, a sort of continental Croydon.

Throughout, Cyril’s bike reflects his fortunes and his emotional growth. It’s a good choice of symbol, fitting both the mundane setting and exciting emotional growth Cyril eventually achieves.

But it’s not an original choice: the bike has been offering the same symbolic freedoms for over a century.

The Dunwich Dynamo OK, so I’ve only published these photos...

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:28:35 -0500

The Dunwich Dynamo

OK, so I’ve only published these photos six months after the event. But the Dunwich Dynamo is quickly becoming the timeless event of the London cycling scene. It’s bigger than dates and deadlines. It’s a kind of presiding deity of getting together to share the fun of a ride.

There’s a nice write-up in the Guardian; even more detail on the Rapha blog; and some interesting commentary from a wider range of participants from The Bike Show.

Riding into the dawn is always special, but when you’re heading east, straight into the sun, towards the coast, with thousands of others sharing the pilgrimage … AND you’ve just had several bacon rolls, at 4am, from one of the many kindly caterers, it can’t be beat.

It’s a must-try event for anyone even a little bit interest in group experiences, long-distance cycling, and the landscape of East Anglia.

See you on 30 June 2012.

Here is a broadcast of BBC Radio 4’s Point of View programme by...

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 06:00:00 -0500

Here is a broadcast of BBC Radio 4’s Point of View programme by the philosopher John Gray, who argues that

the scientific and rationalist attack on religion is misguided. Extreme atheists do not realise that for most people across the globe, religion is not generally about personal belief. Instead, “Practice - ritual, meditation, a way of life - is what counts.” Central to religion is the power of myth, which still speaks to the contemporary mind. “The idea that science can enable us to live without myths is one of these silly modern stories.” In fact, he argues, science has created its own myth, “chief among them the myth of salvation through science….The idea that humans will rise from the dead may be incredible” he says, “but no more so than the notion that humanity can use science to remake the world”

(It’s not directly to do with cycling, but there is a bit of a cycling angle, if you bear with me.)

Several very ordinary, everyday examples of this religious instinct - the desire for ritual, for reverence, for contact with meaningful individuals - came to me while cycling round London recently. I used to live near Abbey Road, in north west London, and I was always amazed by the number of tourists who would ask me if they were near the Beatles’ famous studio and pelican crossing. (Usually they weren’t: it’s a long road. The fact they were looking for it from Baker Street to Swiss Cottage is testament to the crossing’s popularity, and London’s indifferent tourist infrastructure). There are lots of tourist-worthy things nearby - Lord’s cricket ground, Regent’s Park, London Zoo, Madame Tussaud’s - but no one ever asked me how to get to those.

There’s not much to see when you get there: just what you can see in the photo, plus the sound effects of cabbies impatient with tourists standing in the middle of the road. There’s even a webcam of the crossing, so you can see how little there is to see.

The point here is, of course, that many people still want a visible, tangible reminder of events or individuals which have given meaning to their lives. Sachin Tendulkar, the great Indian cricketer, recently published an autobiography with small quantities of his blood and saliva in the paper it’s printed on. It sold out. For centuries, religious believers have worshipped relics of saints: body parts, sometimes quite gruesome-looking, which possess special power. Atheists may dismiss this belief, but the popularity of the crossing and Tendulkar’s blood-infused book show that desire for this kind of contact and reverence remains strong.

Richard Dawkins and his tambourine-abusing evangelical opponents make the same mistake - the literalist heresy, it’s sometimes called - by reducing a complex moral, historical and cultural tradition to a set of much more limited assertions about the state of the physical world today. Even some paint in the road, and a wall of banal graffiti can be worth a long journey; or pilgrimage, even.

And what about the bike? It’s the best way to get to the Abbey Road crossing, obviously. Just cycle up and down Abbey Road until you are stopped by lots of tourists taking photos. And if, as John Gray argues, it’s not what you believe but how you live that matters, then what more could life offer than to be a cyclist?

If you like cycling at night, I strongly recommend the Friday...

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:38:10 -0500

Turner's Hill, on the way to Brighton

Dawn at Ditchling Beacon

Ditchling Beacon

Ditchling Beacon

View over Canvey Island

Southend seafront at dawn

If you like cycling at night, I strongly recommend the Friday Night Ride to the Coast, which runs from Hyde Park Corner (London) to an English coastal town once or twice a month, and is making increasingly frequent forays into other regions of the country. The peace of empty roads - many of them screaming with cars during the day - the views of the dawn, the company, the greasy breakfast when you arrive: great experience.

Harry Lime, The Drivers’ Spokesman William Fotheringham...

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:23:00 -0500

Harry Lime, The Drivers’ Spokesman

William Fotheringham says it politely, though you have to love Welles’ style. The part of his speech I’m referring to is when Lime asks Holly Martins if he’d miss any of the dots (=people on the ground) if they stopped moving.

The dots are like cyclists on a busy road. Any cyclist will tell you that it can be alarming when people pass too close, cut you up, etc. But I always find - as William Fotheringham explains - that if you make eye contact with drivers, they treat you with more respect. You are treated like a fellow human, and not like a socio-economic failure (in fact, cyclists tend to be moderately well off, though motorists don’t know it) whose decision to cycle disqualifies them from normal human respect. The fact that drivers tend to pass more closely to cyclists with helmets also suggests that looking and behaving like a recognisable person enhances your safety on the road.

Don’t be a dot. Make eye contact with the drivers around you. Then they will know you are a human being, and at least try not to run you over. Shame drivers have such a seductive figure as Harry Lime to represent them, though.

Scorn the Infidels of Portland!

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 05:38:00 -0500

This post is a reply to the various critical posts which have appeared in the few weeks since my original Guardian Bike Blog about the London Cycle Campaign’s Go Dutch Campaign appeared a few weeks ago. I am responding in particular to the Manchester Cycling Blog post about my piece. Though not without its misunderstanding, this was one of the more reasonable responses I have found, which deserves a reasoned reply.

Firstly, I would remind my critics that the piece was, above all, a critique of the LCC’s presentation of its Go Dutch campaign. As I explained in the original post, most of the LCC’s explanation of the campaign, and certainly those parts a casual reader will pick up on, imply that Dutch cycling is just about bike lanes on main roads, and that not cycling on a lane is dangerous. Both of these points are wrong, and damaging for cycling, because they may put people off cycling where there isn’t a separate lane but there may well be a safe, alternative route.

Much of the criticism of my Guardian post missed this important point about LCC and jumped to the conclusion that I was simply attacking Dutch cycling in general and the use of separate lanes in particular. I am, as I explained in the article, in favour of lanes in many circumstances, but was seeking to balance the presentation of the LCC and other campaigners who distort and oversimplify the Dutch system.

This is not the result of any dogmatic prejudice on my part. I like cycling in NL (see below). The bizarre assertion by the Manchester blog piece that I decided to ‘shun the far superior adjacent cycle-only facility’ when cycling there is simply wrong. I wasn’t cycling with a Manchester blogger, and am surprised by his arrogance in assuming he knows what happened.

In this case, the bike path was quite poor, it was some way away from the road, and when I joined the road, I didn’t see the lane because it was stuck down a ditch. The road was quiet and in my judgement perfectly safe for cycling. I was surprised to be stopped by the Police, because it would never happen in UK. The conclusion I drew being that cycling is regarded as a serious means of transport in NL, not something for kids and hippies, as it still too often is in UK. The Dutch attitude is obviously preferable, but will require a lot of effective campaigning to replicate in UK. No council is going to build expensive lanes for kids and hippies, for example.

As for the accusation of ‘pick and mix’, this term seems to me to be tendentious and misleading. I think ‘empirical’, ‘pragmatic’, and ‘open-minded’ would be more accurate terms. Yes, the Netherlands has, overall, the best cycling facilities, and the most cyclists (as a proportion of population) in the Western world. Yes, there’s a lot we can learn from them, as I said in the Guardian post. Yes, I admire their system, as I also said in the Guardian post. But there are other places, which have had some cycling success with a slightly different approach. Surely it’s worth looking at these places too? For reasons I will come to later, some of them may be better models for progress in UK cycling than NL just now, if not in the longer term.

For example, Ferrara, in Italy, (see here too) has a bike journey share of over 30%. Most of this has been achieved by shutting cars out of the town centre. They are building separate lanes too, outside the car-free zone, but the original success came about by excluding motor vehicles from the streets. Instantly, you have an excellent cycling facility.

Like Italy, UK has many medieval towns and cities which could have excellent cycling centres. Some of these, like Oxford, Cambridge & York, have by UK standards a fair number of cyclists already. Others I’ve cycled through recently - Guildford, Norwich, Bath, for example - have fewer. They could all be radically improved by simply keeping cars out of much of the city centre, and managing more effectively the way cyclists blend with pedestrians in pedestrian areas. Yes, they will need some lanes too, but removing the cars, Ferrara-style, would make a huge difference, very quickly.

Take two recent cycling success stories, Seville, Spain, and Portland, Oregon (US). Both have seen big increases in cycling in the last 5-10 years, Seville by following the Dutch plan, Portland by creating bike boulevards along back streets: essentially the kind of plan I was suggesting for the residential streets of London. It will be interesting to see which is more successful in the long term, but it does at least show that there is a range of effective strategies. To maintain

‘The only truth is Dutch: scorn the infidels of Ferrara and Portland!’

seems to me to be simply weird.

I have taken this graph from the Dutch Bicycle Master Plan 1999 which I found on David Hembrow’s very useful site. This statistic is in a way the crux of my argument, because it encapsulates the cultural problem the UK cycling scene faces. I talked about attitudes in my Guardian post because they are crucial. Cultural attitudes to transport are lower profile, perhaps, than attitudes to God, guns, or sex, but they are, I think, as deeply ingrained.

What this shows is that even in the depths of the Dutch (and Danish, as far as one can tell) cycling crisis in 1970s, % of journeys by bike (‘modal share’ in the jargon) didn’t get much below 30%. (Cambridge has about that share of cycling today, and it is the best share in Britain. No other so-called cycling city - York, Oxford, Bristol, London, Edinburgh spring to mind - gets anywhere close.) And that 30% had come down from about 70% (and nearly 90% in Enschede) only twenty years earlier.

So, most Dutch in the mid 1970‘s could remember a time when nearly everyone cycled nearly everywhere. When, therefore, campaigns began for segregated cycling facilities, there was a clear majority who could see the point, and could imagine they would use these facilities. The best we managed in Britain, looking at the Manchester line, was in the low 30%, and that was before WWII.

There is, in stark contrast to the Dutch cycling renaissance, now no one in Britain who can remember a culture of mass cycling. We have to start almost from scratch, and demonstrate to a sceptical, car-loving, suburbanised, Americanised public, that bikes deserve to be taken seriously as road transport (and are not just a leisure toy, to be strapped the the back of the car and driven to the countryside), and need to be provided for.

Now, if we are going to find the money and the political backing for that infrastructure, we will probably need a larger cycling base than we have at the moment. This needn’t be a chicken and egg situation if we look more broadly at other places, like Portland and Ferrara, which have mass cycling (Ferrara) or at least great improved infrastructure (Portland) without re-designing the layout of the whole town centre. You can call that pick and mix if you like, but I think an open-minded application of international models would be a more sensible description. It seems to me to be naive to imagine we can get a Dutch-style system on the back of a nationwide cycling share of 1.5%, when the Dutch and the Danes began with 30%.

And as regards safety, yes, Franklin’s collection is a bit old, and yes, some of the older separate paths studied were poorly designed. Modern designs are safer. If I’d had more space in the Guardian I’d have gone into it in more detail. But there is still precious little clear evidence that paths are, in themselves, safer. The GB Embassy page quibbles with some of the more recent studies, then settles for claiming that paths make people feel safer. I have been accused in various places of dishonesty on the safety issue. But it’s more dishonest to persist with a blanket claim about the safety of paths until better evidence exists. (The reason cycling is very safe in NL is due to many things, not least the fact most Dutch drivers are also cyclists.) I think we should settle with the still important point that paths encourage new cyclists because they make them feel safer. This is valuable in itself.

Overall, I am quite optimistic about the long term for cycling in UK. We have perhaps the best climate in Europe for all-year cycling: It’s warmer here in the winter than in NL or Denmark, and drier all year round. England (though not UK) is now more densely populated than NL, and that density is due to increase over the next few decades. Population density, as NL has shown for the past century, makes cycling a natural transport choice.

I wish one UK council, where the cause of cycling is already well established, would take the plunge to provide the dedicated infrastructure to make cycling the dominant means of transport in that city. Cambridge is best placed to do this, but it could be York, Edinburgh, Oxford, maybe Bristol. We need an example, in Britain, to show that cycling can be a dominant means of transport, and that if it is, the city will become a more attractive, healthier place to live, and in all probability a better place to do business. Intelligently designed, integrated infrastructure is needed to progress from the 10-25% of bike journeys these cities currently have to the 50+% they could have.

Some of that dedicated infrastructure will be separate paths, but it will also need traffic calming, better law enforcement, and all the other unsexy things the Dutch have done, in addition to better sign-posting of Portland-style bike boulevards. Eventually, I would like British cycling to look quite like cycling in NL, though with some adaptation to suit local environment. (I will happily show anyone who doubts it how easily you can get around London without going near a main road, and how much more pleasant, and just as quick, the journey is.)

But to mount an effective political campaign, we need to understand the culture we’re dealing with. Dreaming that Britain, 2011, is like Amsterdam, 1975, when it’s more like Detroit, might make us feel better, but it won’t achieve much. Let’s do a Portland, get numbers quickly to ≈10%, and show a still sceptical public that cycling can be the fast, clean, urban & suburban transport method of choice. Then we might build the momentum to go Dutch.

P.S.

In a post below the Manchester blog piece, David Arditti comments on the tendency of British cycling campaigners to talk about the Netherlands without having been there. It’s not clear if he means to imply I haven’t been there, but just in case, here are some of my favourite Dutch cycling spots.

The Dutch Frisian Islands are a cyclist’s delight. Many are completely traffic free, ideal for cycling with kids, and wonderfully peaceful.

Canal in the Weerribben National Park

North Sea Cycle Route

As anyone who’s cycled in the Netherlands will know, Dutch people love talking about cycling, and I’ve had many impromptu discussions about their system at campsites, in cafes, waiting at lights, sheltering from the rain, etc.

This is one of my favourite Dutch campsites, Minicamping t’Hofke, near Doesburg (see below).

Ironically, the photo of me in my Guardian profile was taken, on a cycling tour, in the very attractive Dutch town of Doesburg, by the river Ijssel, east of Arnhem. That orange shirt I’m wearing is a Rapha Netherlands country top.

I’ve only recently found this film explaining the planning...

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:10:03 -0400

I’ve only recently found this film explaining the planning behind the bike boom in Portland, Oregon, and am very impressed by it. It shows how much you can achieve for cyclists with relatively simple changes to infrastructure, traffic law, and some effective signposting. This approach is exactly what I have been recommending for the back streets of London, but would work just as well in suburban Britain.

To those campaigners who think that this kind of adaptation of existing infrastructure is a sell-out, I would say that this is the best way to build up cycling towards the 10% of journeys level. Then, when you have 10% of commuters behind you, you will be in a much stronger position to campaign for segregated infrastructure: IF it’s necessary (which it may well not be - see previous posts). Going from nothing to the Netherlands in a few years in London just isn’t going to happen.

Tinker, Tailor, Pinko Cyclist?

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:50:00 -0400

[Spoiler alert - I don’t think the film’s been released in US, yet: plot details given away]

Fans of 1970s British consumer products (seriously cool, if you’re new to this school of design) will be thrown into an orgasmic tingle by the wealth of period furniture and cleaning products on display in the new film of Tinker, Tailor.

Early on in the film Bill Haydon, played by Colin Firth, breezes into the MI6 office, pushing his fine-looking British roadster bike, and tinkling his bell in an open, manly greeting. Darn, I thought, they’re giving it away: he’s obviously the hero. And when Guillam starts swanking about in his Citroen, floating on the gassy Gallic suspension like a maharajah in a sedan chair, I thought, game’s up, you two-faced commie bastard.

Sadly, it didn’t quite work out that way. I wrote in the Guardian recently about the tendency of lazy directors to use the bike as visual shorthand for working class, though I can’t think of many other films where it stands for Communist traitor. You have to pay attention to these details, because the film gives away precious little else in the way of context or back story for everyone apart from Haydon and Smiley. The rest of the ‘Circus’ serve as a kind of tobacco-drenched wallpaper. Fine actors like Ciaran Hinds are left to gurn, and suck on a fag (I mean cigarette) for whole scenes.

If you’re going to rely quite so much on mood and atmosphere to work your plot, I do think you need a bit of light in there with your shade. 1970s shade-tone can easily become a tedious khaki sludge. It didn’t, but there was a fair bit of sludge-flirtation. There are so many close-ups of Gary Oldman’s face, I began to wonder whether there wasn’t a product placement for Gillette going on. And all those shots of Smiley swimming in the Hampstead ponds - a very grown up way of depicting the murkiness beneath the unflappable public face, to be sure - but I got the idea the first time.

Haydon is the only one who opens up, and then, the charge sheet is predictably pinko. (I mean this in an anti-Communist, rather than homophobic, way, although for a 70‘s reader there may have been some overlap). Haydon’s an aesthete, don’t you know, as well as a cricket-loving bisexual and cyclist. Deserves to be shot.

It’s unfortunate that the characters don’t get any more three dimensional, because as things stand all the atmosphere and suspense is barely justified by the slightly banal ending. I get the impression that the highpoint of British Intelligence came and went with the cracking of the Enigma code in WWII. It was tax dollars from MacDonald’s and General Motors, with a little help from the inherent instability of totalitarianism, which defeated Communism, not this dysfunctional, dislikable clutch of poseurs.

Lanes, Paths, and Blind Alleys

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 09:12:00 -0400

And I used to think cyclists were such friendly folk. What’s not to like about people who enjoy travelling at a human pace, engaging with the landscape and community they cycle through, yet leaving no trace of their journey in the environment visited? In stark contrast to the boxed-in aggression of motorists, being on a bike encourages conversation, opens the mind and puts a smile on your face.

When I wrote a piece for the Guardian’s Bike Blog last week contextualising and exploring the implications of LCC’s ‘Go Dutch’ campaign, I was surprised by the vehemence of the response in the blogosphere and on Twitter. It’s good to see cycling debated so vigorously. Almost anything which raises the profile of the argument for better cycling facilities will help move it on. The need for better facilities is obvious, but the best means of achieving it is much more complex.

Much of the dispute my piece has provoked concerns the safety improvements of separate lanes. There is no evidence which demonstrates conclusively and specifically that riding in a segregated lane is safer than riding on the road. (There is quite a lot, some of which I mention in the article, which suggests that it’s more dangerous.) In this article on the GB Cycling Embassy site, there is some attempt at contesting this fact, before the argument is re-focused on the interesting but different point that cycling in a segregated lane makes people feel safer (even if they’re objectively not). There are many quicker ways of doing that. The success of the Dutch approach has many factors beyond segregated lanes, as I explore in the article, though you wouldn’t know that from the LCC campaign, in its current form.

Lanes have their uses, as I explain in the article, but starting from our current situation in London, I’m not convinced that segregated lanes are, in many cases, the most effective way to improve cycling facilities. Especially when we have such large areas of quiet residential streets, from Barnet to Belgravia, which can be quickly and easily signposted and adapted for cycling.

But the view persists among the hardest cycling core that the only plan in town is the lane. A particularly silly example was suggested to me in a Twitter (@lyricalcyclist) discussion recently: let’s build a separate bike lane along Euston Road, a major East-West central London thoroughfare (for out of London readers).

Here it is.
View Larger MapThere are dozens of side roads both north and south. Several of these are major traffic intersections. If we were to build a proper Dutch-style lane, 2.5m wide each side, with priority for straight-riding bikes over left-turning cars, enforced by traffic lights at the bigger junctions, and traffic-light controlled crossings for right-turning cyclists (and if we didn’t do this, it would be both lethal and useless), there would be so many separate traffic lights, for the bikes, pedestrians and motor traffic, that the area would be lit up like Las Vegas and the New Orleans Carnival rolled into one.

To fit a 2.5m lane each side you’d have to remove a lane for motor traffic. You’d have to re-design and re-build every intersection on Euston Rd. It would cost millions, and take years to plan and implement. On one of London’s busiest routes, this - in addition to the extra lights needed to protect cyclists crossing the car lanes - would create gridlock. You’d need some separate light phases for cyclists and pedestrians, too, slowing everything down even more (for bikes as well as motor traffic). We should rightly continue to reduce car journeys in London, but have to recognise that the city will always need road space for buses, and for some essential goods vehicles, supplying shops, collecting rubbish, etc.

With the possible exception of the Green candidate, no politician would sanction the disruption. And when you’d done all of that, spent all that money, you’d still have a facility which would be slower (because of all the extra lights) than taking one of the numerous parallel back roads, and less pleasant.

Not to mention the dangerous and disgusting particulate pollution. It will surprise no one who’s been there to discover that Euston Road is one of London’s most polluted roads, and London one of Europe’s most polluted cities. Air pollution kills quite large numbers of people. Increasing cycling instead of driving is an important means of reducing pollution, but until more progress is made, it seems pretty undesirable to encourage cycling through these corridors of pollution.

I fully support campaigns like the recent Blackfriars Bridge campaign to provide safe cycling facilities on main roads, where there is no other option. But there are loads of other options here. Insisting on a separate cycling facility to make the point that bikes should go everywhere motor traffic goes is a self-indulgent and dogmatic posture. (As is LCC’s apparent desire to create cycle lanes on London’s orbital routes. The North Circular is an urban motorway, along which no sane person should want to cycle.)

With the money and campaigning effort it would take, you could more quickly achieve thousands of smaller but more effective improvements: closing small roads to motor traffic, installing bike contra-flow lanes on one way streets, reducing speed limits, creating extra bike paths across squares, parks etc. These things might not make a few hard-line campaigners glow with self-importance, but they would make cycling in London safer, faster and more enjoyable.

Many campaigns and interest groups have a fanatical wing, which pursues a principle far beyond what can usefully be achieved in practice. A separate bike lane on Euston Road, or the North Circular, is a classic example of this. I’d hoped cycling was exempt. My sad discovery this week is that cycling, like atheism and the Conservative Party, has its swivel-eyed dogmatists.

Visitors to New York usually rush to the Staten Island ferry....

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 16:14:00 -0400

Visitors to New York usually rush to the Staten Island ferry. Not that - correct me if I’m wrong - there’s that much to see on Staten Island, but for the views of Manhattan and the harbour. London tourists assume they have to fork out at least £16.84 to go on the London Eye.

No! Check out the view of the City, from London’s very own free, water-based viewing platform, the Woolwich Ferry! Unrivalled sunset views towards Canary Wharf, with the added bonus of the Tate and Lyle factory, just about the only bit of London’s industrial heritage still working.

Best experienced, of course, by bike, with the bracing ozone-and-diesel-particulate breeze in your hair. (You can wait ages to get a car across.)

WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 07:41:48 -0400

Central Africa: (Rwanda and the Congos). Safely.

Photo

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:31:00 -0400

Photo

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:25:00 -0400

The road, obviously, is a nightmare: routinely jammed, it’s a...

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 05:01:00 -0400

The road, obviously, is a nightmare: routinely jammed, it’s a kind of permanent open wound through north-west London, severing communities and condemning everything alongside it to a booming and sooty nightmare life. Neasden was once, apparently, a pleasant rural retreat, then a thriving suburb, until this monster cut it in half. Now it’s perhaps most famous as the home of Private Eye’s Sid and Doris Bonkers, and its University, formerly IKEA North Circular Polytechnic. That is, it’s an easy target for people wanting a shorthand for drabness.

Viewed high up on the pedestrian and cyclist bridge over the road, linking Park Royal and Stonebridge Park, the road loses its noisy aggressiveness. By bike, you can zip around these places and imagine that the area is not decimated by a kind of transport war zone. It’s true, there’s not a huge amount to see near Stonebridge Park - unless you like shopping centres and watching England be slightly disappointing at Wembley - but the view from the saddle at least shows you how London’s cultural and geographical tapestry first together.

A man in the pub told me Rebekah Brooks does guided tours....

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 04:51:39 -0400

A man in the pub told me Rebekah Brooks does guided tours. There’s an entry phone at the entrance to call for her. Even if she doesn’t seem to hear you, you can be sure she’s listening.