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On this street every single house has off-street parking for at least two vehicles. Baron Gardens is a very wide street, four to five lanes wide, which could easily be converted to a cycling-friendly street on the Dutch model. Instead the ‘cycling-friendly’ council has re-allocated road space to car parking. Not only are there parking bays at the side of the road, parking bays have even been created down the middle. This is car dependency gone mad. It also deters cycling, because it creates lengthy pinch points where cyclists are forced into conflict with vehicles approaching from [ continue reading #Redbridge council: suppressing #cycling and promoting #car-dependency ] The extraordinary level of road violence against Britain’s children is underlined by a new report. This report will, of course, be totally ignored by the Department for Transport, politicians, the medical profession, the new ConDem petrolhead government, and the Association of Chief Police Officers, all of whom are full committed to the car supremacist status quo. By tomorrow this report will be forgotten and will recede into the mist. One child in every class is killed or injured in a road accident by the time they are 16, new figures show. During their childhood one [ continue reading Road violence against children in Britain ] Chris 531 has added a photo to the pool: (CLICK HERE FOR MORE »» Mercian Cycles , owners frames and bikes Pool 1960′s MERCIAN ADVERT: .) Never before has an entry on this blog merited over twenty photos and never before has there been as much beauty in a single entry. Bicycle fanatics are some of the most eccentric people on the face of the Earth. Their passion unites generations of cyclists and their love for two wheels makes the world a healthier place. I’m sure every town has one and in NYC, there are dozens. Most of which are in their 50′s leaving a few in their 30′s. Cicli Devotion is run by the latter. Matthew Devotion has one of the [ continue reading A Look Inside Cicli Devotion ] Let’s say it again. Among the greatest obstacles to the development of mass cycling in Britain are the nation’s two leading cycling organisations, the Cyclists’ Touring Club and the London Cycling Campaign. They both deeply damage the prospect of cycling ever really taking off in Britain. Both are fundamentally committed to the doomed strategy of ameliorating the conditions of vehicular cycling. Cycle lanes are a perfect example of this campaign strategy, supposedly delivering an improvement in conditions for cycling. The fact that cycle lanes have failed to raise cycling’s modal share is of no interest to the [ continue reading The #CTC : suppressing #cycling ] After witnessing such heady exuberance within the bike industry during last summer’s “bike boom”, it’s no surprise that few could foresee the current industry downturn, probably brought on by lower gas prices and the deepening recession. Those who were prudent should weather the winter, but it’s going to be a tough road for those dealers who were carried away by the promise of a new golden era of cycling and over-bought for the coming season. (CLICK HERE FOR MORE »» EcoVelo » Blog Archive » Golden Era or Flash In the Pan?: [ continue reading Golden Era or Flash In the Pan? ] People often use the fact that they don’t have showers at their work as a reason for not bike commuting. This is a silly excuse. I assume your work has a bathroom? If so, all you need is a towel, a change of clothes, a hair brush, and some deodorant to get you through the day. Also, bike commuting is not bike racing. Leave 5-10 minutes earlier and slow down to a pace that keeps your heart rate comfortably below the point of huffing and puffing; about the same as if you were taking a casual walk. [ continue reading News Flash: Bike Commuting is NOT Base Jumping ] The IAM, the UK’s largest independent road safety charity, recommends cyclists: Take up a primary position around 75-100m before reaching a junction, in the centre of the lane, providing it is safe to do so. This move will mean that drivers exiting the junction will be more likely to see the cyclist as they are in the same traffic flow as more hazardous vehicles. Take the “secondary position” when cycling along a straight stretch of road which is clear of junctions [ continue reading Cyclists: claim your lane, says IAM ] Well this is rich isn’t it? “If the app stops you having one ‘bad’ accident” – what is the sliding-scale and what would be accidental!! SHAME ON YOU TUAW – AND APPLE© FOR ALLOWING IT ON iTunes. Is Text’nDrive Pro worth $19.99? If you avoid even one traffic citation for “texting while driving,” you’d probably come out ahead. If the app keeps you from having a bad accident while you’re distracted by your iPhone, then it’s worth every penny you pay for it, and more. (CLICK HERE FOR MORE »» TUAW review: Email while driving with Text’nDrive [ continue reading be an ARSE and email while driving with Text’nDrive Pro for iPhone (!!! you what?) ] 20 August 2010
 |  | category: can't make it up!, cycling, location+, scofflaws, tolerated crime and hypocrites, social media tools, the state we're in, transport, travel  | comments are closed 
File this cycling invention under “solution in search of a problem”. A team of design engineers at MIT, led by Christine Outram and Carlo Ratti, last week won the US national round of the James Dyson award for their “Copenhagen wheel”. Effectively, it’s a wheel that turns a normal bike into an electric one and throws in some “cycling 2.0″ web elements, as Jack Schofield described it when it was unveiled during the Copenhagen climate summit last December. It stands to win £10,000 if it goes on to win the international prize of the design engineering awards, and [ continue reading The #bike #wheel that’s too clever for its own good ] “The past three years have seen the rise of the uber-techno, super-flashy, full-carbon fibre, bobby-dazzler road bike. The market for these bikes has expanded faster than a 45-year-old’s waistline, partly thanks to the success of the British cycling stars at the Beijing Olympics. Marketing departments have produced smart advertising messages that encourage a bit of freedom, elite performance and memories of teenage derring-do. And the result can be seen on Saturday and Sunday mornings as middle-aged blokes polish the rear derailleur, lower the mirrored shades and pedal into the hills. Every couple of weeks, you’ll see a girth of [ continue reading Mid-life crisis? Enter the ‘MAMIL’ ] 17 August 2010
| | category: Gallery of the bleedin' obvious, clothes, cycling, hills | comments are closed If you stripped an urban bike-sharing system down to its bare essentials and tossed in a healthy dose of technology, you might end up with SoBi, the "social bicycle system." SoBi uses a gizmo that fastens to the back of any bike and functions as a lock, a GPS unit, and a bike computer. With a SoBi account, you can use a mobile app (of course) to find an available bike nearby. When you're done, you just lock it to an existing bike rack where someone else can pick it up. Without the need for [ continue reading Sobi: A Leaner, and Maybe Smarter, Bike-Sharing System ] Called “DIY Streets,” the program brings neighbors together to help them redesign their streets in a way that puts people, safety, and streetlife first. So far, individual streets have benefited from DIY redesigns in 11 communities in England and Wales. Recently Streetfilms got a walk through of one successful DIY project — on Clapton Terrace in London. With the people who made it happen as our guides, we saw how planners and neighbors collaborated to transform a place where speeding used to rule into a local street with calm traffic and safe space to socialize. Streetfilms | London’s [ continue reading London’s Do-It-Yourself Approach to Safer Streets ] Nice Graphic but they forgot to write an article worthy of it! FT.com / Magazine – The Information: Cycling to work. The outcome of all that PR for cars is more sales as well as more congestion, more pollution and a greater demand for scarce parking spaces. There would have been no need for the congestion charge in London if not for the success of the auto industry’s publicity machine and the popularity of motoring programmes. Reversing the trend of ever-increasing car ownership and use is not as difficult as it seems. If governments were to limit car advertising, as they did with alcohol and tobacco when the health impacts were recognised, people would take decisions about their [ continue reading Want to promote cycling? Cut back car adverts now ] Designed by Adam Pickard, the stainless steel Road Popper fastens to the rails of your saddle to provide a luxurious bottle opening experience. Well, at least it holds the price tag of a luxury item, but the $40/€30 (inc. shipping) is justified in the product being is fabricated to order – ‘we developed for our own use and decided afterward to share’. Fair enough mate, I mean I’ll be sticking to whatever piece of rubbish opener/lighter I can get my hands on to open my brews but it’s still a cool product I reckon! available HERE [ continue reading the ‘Road Popper’ bicycle-mounted bottle opener ] The government recently published their National Travel Survey, looking at the stats and patterns in the UK’s transport habits during 2009. The campaigning department at CTC thrives on this kind of data, and Chris Peck shared some of the survey’s insights with me. It is a mixed picture. [ continue reading National Travel Survey shows falling levels of youth people cycling ]
The Phil Liggett CTC Challenge.
It all began with this question: “If the bicycle is the standard bearer for sustainable transportation, shouldn’t the object itself communicate the same message?” via Robillard victor. The Patently Apple blog shared information today about a patent application from Apple that details development of a “Smart Bicycle System.” Here at BikePortland headquarters we recently received a GPS unit to try out from the folks at Strava, developers of an online tool that lets people share and compare their routes and times. BikePortland.org » Blog Archive » Apple looks to make bikes ‘Smart’. In 2008, The Times columnist Matthew Parris was slapped over the wrist by the Press Complaints Commission after he used his column in The Times to write about the decapitation of cyclists. Parris had started his article thus: “A festive custom we could do worse than foster would be [ continue reading After ‘Dykes on Bikes’ is AA Gill going to go on about ‘Fairies in Fords’ ]
Local trails ala cx from Andy Wardman on Vimeo.
We are such polyps. Look at the human body, then look at a bus, or even a small car. No contest. Which is why it makes sense to segregate cycling from high volume motor traffic. But that would impinge on the ‘right’ to drive or park a car in central London, or even use a taxi. A friend of mine was killed when a delivery lorry pulled out sharply in front of her as she cycled through Covent Garden. I am amazed it doesn’t happen more often and my cabbie had a few choice words to say [ continue reading novelist Susan Hill ‘doors’ a cyclist ]
Abraham Maslow is famous for creating the “Hierarchy of Needs” — a graduating set of general requirements for human motivation. Like this: The idea behind this pyramid is that you need to fulfill the needs in the lowest (Physiological) level of the pyramid before you start thinking about the needs in the second-lowest (Safety) level. Then you can move on to the Love / belonging needs, and so forth. Then, hopefully, once you have satisfied the needs in the first four levels, you can start working on self-actualization, at which point you are a fully-realized human. Which would [ continue reading Fatty’s Hierarchy of Needs ] Next year’s July full moon is 15 July and Dunwich Dynamo XIX is 16/17 July 2011. Lots of rude people cycle twonks littering Suffolk lanes with flashing lights and leaving muesli bar and energy-gel wrappers littering the lanes again. The amount of illumination that people think is necessary is ridiculous! At any point in the night it is possible to cycle with the lights off but people ride with halogen, LEDs, headtorches and more – enjoy the dark wayfarers. The ride was fantastic and it was such fun to be among so many lovely people off their heads and [ continue reading DDXIIX Job done, 10 hours total ] routeyou_viewer_width = 700; routeyou_viewer_height = 410; routeyou_viewer_color_background = ‘FFFFFF’; routeyou_viewer_language = ‘en’; routeyou_viewer_route = 118314; The nicest leisure routes on routeyou.com When will people #ditchtheflash ? Written ethical codes don’t count for much in cycling. There have been a couple of attempts to make professional cyclists sign charters stating they won’t take drugs, but they have been quietly abandoned, because they didn’t stem the tide of positive tests, and they were viewed solely as window-dressing. The unwritten rules are another matter. They are everywhere, although the Contador-Schleck episode shows that as in Pirates of the Caribbean, the “code” is sometimes merely viewed as a guideline. Winning the Tour de France means learning its unwritten rules | William Fotheringham | Environment | guardian.co.uk. “stop blowing holes [ continue reading Winning the Tour de France means learning its unwritten rules ] |
 
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