Choo Choo!

Evidence!

obstacles

Just met up with Alison Conder from East Cambs Council who's in charge of the country park in Ely. The main reason was to look at the best place to put cycle parking but also to put in some ideas on usage, signage and publicity for the park. My main contribution was my idea of getting schools to design bike racks but the funding isn't there and they already have a number of stands they have been given 'for free' that I think came from a council depot somewhere so free ones are always good. We agreed it would be ideal to put them next to the play equipment so hopefully some time soon, when I go there with the kids there's somewhere to leave our bikes. The project has been a money pit with many errors and areas where money wasn't well spent so there's no more money for my sand pit idea either. The paths around the park weren't built wide enough so now there is an issue as to whether to allow bikes into the park and as they already use the park, it's more a case of how they can be used without upsetting or injuring people in the park on foot. I suggested a cycle sign saying give way to pedestrians, so as to encourage consideration. I hope that next year we can hold a family cycle day organised with the Cycle campaign which should be within what the council would like to hold events which publicise the park. I rang my Dad just now, just to say hello and mentioned what I've been up to and tell him about the blog. He believes that there is no way that the UK with it's car based economy will ever be the cycle friendly place I envisage - it would put too many people out of work. I'm not sure how - we own a car and will continue to do so - we have a family and there are many excuses for using our car that don't involve under 5 mile journeys that the bike is mainly used for and the main way that we want to encourage people leaving their cars at home. It will still need servicing etc. Anyone who's seen "Who killed the Electric Car?" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/ will know that the electric car was swiftly scrapped when they realised that it put the entire car related industry out of work. Oil has the world on it's knees and will continue to do so for at least a few more decades, that doesn't mean we can't have our town centres be places for people rather than cars. It made me think that there is alot of resignation out there and it will take something pretty huge to change things. Huge things come in small bits sometimes, like water and every drop makes up an ocean. There are many sides and view points to protect and I am well aware that there are still 20% if not more residents in the Netherlands who never get on a bike and who will always leave their house by car. I know there are - my Mum is one of them. Still, she is proud to live in a country with a fully integrated public transport and cycling system. She drives every day to work, about 25 miles and I guess it's not a journey she could easily make any other way, especially with a book full of school stuff. The point is that those that can do. The fact that they can means that employers also are thinking about where they locate their places of work as the majority would prefer to get to work by bike, or at least a proportion of their work by bike. I've always stipulated, even in the UK I want to be able to cycle to work. This has been pretty much impossible since moving to Ely and having kids as I wanted a short journey which is why I've taken up childminding. Working in Cambridge would leech a good proportion of my income on train fare and if I ran a car it would leech a larger proportion of my income running a car. It doesn't add up. I am not getting a job to feed a car. So, there are many obstacles to getting this place to live in where there is truly a choice to leave the car at home for short journeys and as far as I can see today, they include people misconceptions that we don't want anyone to own a car, local authorities wasting money paying consultants to advise then ignoring their advice because they didn't give them a budget or the budget was slashed, thus wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds, and now the lack of money available leaves us with a transport infrastructure that revolves around badly maintained roads which has led the population to all go out and buy 4x4s. Then they have to have well paid jobs miles from where they live to afford to run their 4x4s so they can get to work. Now what?

This video moves me to tears. This is fantastic.

An example of bike advertising?

You're killing the kids

http://www.ecf.com/news/youre-killing-the-kids-velo-city-live-coverage/

Article on how vehicle emissions and lack of activity are out weighing the benefits of saying the Olympics will inspire kids to be more active.

English young lady vs Dutch

What would advertising for bikes be like?

trailers

Aha! we are taking over the universe! well there was one there when I parked up anyway. I saw another one outside waitrose - 3 in town at once! We will be demanding our own carpark next

Ely

I have lived in Ely since 2005. My then fiancée, now husband and I moved up from London having decided it made a good place to settle down and have kids. Ely was a popular destination for young families and had doubled in size since the millennium. My son's school had to add multiple classrooms and facilities as have and are all the schools in Ely, the place is growing fast. I read somewhere the 2nd fastest growing town in the UK.
In the garage of our semi are quite a few bikes, Leon's bike, soon to become Reuben's; a 16 inch Specialised with pedal back brakes and really nicely designed stabilisers that don't come loose and flop about. Toby's bike, a Merida hybrid, recently purchased to replace his Ridgeback that after a decade commuting in London then 5 years retirement in the garage of occasional use, on it's last service the bike shop said it had had it's day and everything needed replacing. My Brompton, red, 3 speed L3 - used to do up to 100 miles a week in London, very comfortable and fast - I have an extended seat post due to my height and a very comfy Liberator saddle, I've replaced the rubber thing that joins the back wheel to the frame with a harder rubber suspension thingy usually used for recumbents. I'm a heavy bird and it makes the ride less bouncy. Then I have a Halfords full suspension mountain bike that I actually hate and intend to sell and replace with a hybrid. It's too small for me and I was daft to buy it even if it was £25 plus a £35 service.
My absolute favorite is my Bergers 28" wheel dutch bike, 3 speed sram, hub gears, dress guard, chain guard, front cargo carrier back carrier with paniers with rain cape for little boy, enormous motorbike lock and cable extension for AXA horse shoe lock (will lock my trailer to the bike) and Hamax Sleepy for Reuben. It weighs an absolute ton, but it goes amazingly, so comfortable and great for everyday to school and into town. Then there's my trailer, I can carry two in the trailer and one on the back of the bike.
Most days Leon rides to school on his bike with me on the outside of him and Reuben sits in the Hamax. On rainy days, I'll take Reuben's mate Alex to school too, the two of them in the trailer, dry days I let them scooter, Leon goes on the path on his bike and I'll either walk or follow on the bike.
We are really lucky in that once we've negotiated the busy road, the rest of the journey is a cut through path.
There are maybe 10 parents, 20 tops in total who ride their kids to school, so out of the two schools next door to each other this is not really very many. Why is that? The school run is plagued by cars parking, leaving cars on pavements, corners and up in residential areas close to the school, there is one bike space by the main gates and a couple of places inside the school that are sensible to lean a bike. There's a lovely new shed by the Nursery entrance with space for maybe 20 bikes, every day it's completely full of kids bikes and scooters. In a Dutch school this parking would have made up maybe a tenth of the parking available, that parking would be rammed full and overflowing.
There is another guy who has the same trailer as me, we chatted about how useful it was, how much the kids enjoy it and how it's alot cheaper than a second car, not to mention easier to park. In Cambridge, only 15 miles away, we wouldn't be unusual, but in Ely we of one of maybe half a dozen bike trailers I've seen in the 7 years I've lived here.
Ely is a couple of miles wide, many of the journeys made would take maybe a couple of minutes longer by bike, why are most of the cyclists in Ely either only visible cycling to the railway station first thing in the morning on a week day or over 70?
There is a bit of decent bike parking in Ely, it's full on a Saturday and usually the 10 Sheffield stands are half full at any one time, as are the half dozen spaces outside the Library. Cyclists are relatively rare in Ely, if cycling started to gain popularity, where would all the bikes get parked?
The Ely Cycle Campaign is approaching 6 months old and already we are being consulted on a variety of issues like this, it's fantastic. We are on the crest of a wave where there is money that needs to be spent on encouraging more cycling and they need cyclists to instruct what needs doing where.
My main issue is that there is plenty of research that suggests that  the women wont ride bikes on UK roads; they are too fast, too dangerous, too bumpy and forget sticking your kid on the back or on a bike with you. I do it and it's fine but I am, lets face it a life time, experienced, confident cyclist. If you last rode a bike as a teenager, what are the chances that the bike in the garage is in desperate need of a service and probably doesn't fit you properly/you never really got the hand of the gears and every time you touch it it covers you in oil?
I want to examine how we are marketed bikes in the UK, how the roads can be made perceivably safe enough for cyclists who aren't among the thousands, mainly men who use the roads now anyway, how can we get women riding bikes that are comfortable, wont cover you in oil and will carry 30 quids worth of groceries and a toddler.

#ilovemybike

Reuben is a little monkey

#ilovemybike: the bakfiets

This is one of my Dad's current modes of transport. He bought in in Holland about 15 years ago while I still lived there, it cost about £500 in today's money plus another £400 to ship it to England. It had a flat bed with sides, he rebuilt the flat bed to his specs. We replaced the back wheel in about 2001, I was working in a bike shop at the time and we ordered the 7 speed sram with hub brakes (they don't come with gears, just a pedal back break, this one could easily be 30 years old). I built the wheel at bikefix, well, I followed the instructions of the experts but essentially I put it together and it's still going. The hands, Dad made. He uses it as part of his market stall on Newbury market selling wood carvings.

Even bike girls get the blues

What does the title mean? I saw a film about 20 years ago called Even Cowgirls Get the Blues based on a book by Tim Robbins. It involved cowgirls among other themes and when I left the cinema, I unlocked my bike and reflected that much like cowgirls are connected to their horses, I am to my bike. It is my freedom, my means of getting around, I take great pleasure in riding around rain or shine and it makes me feel good. At the time I was living in Holland and I was by no means unusual in my choice of transport but I felt constantly grateful for having that access to my bikes and where I could go - the roads I cycled on, the fantastic cycle paths and the ease and simplicity that it brought to my life as well as everyone else's. The Netherlanders take it completely for granted but I never did.
I was born in Reading, Berkshire, UK in a suburb south of the River Thames called Caversham. The dead end street I lived on was called Short Street and there were 11 houses, I lived at number 10. It was a perfect place to learn to ride a bike, when I was 6 or 7, my Dad got a child's bike frame from a salvage yard (my Dad and I went there with his hand truck on a regular basis, him to look for tools and things, me to find pretty shiny things). He painted the frame Red and built me a bike, I still remember learning to ride it with the saddle down low, like young kids do now with step bikes. I was on it all the time and once as a punishment, my Dad took the saddle off it. I missed it so much I got a cushion off the sofa and started riding round with the cushion instead. Needless to say I got the saddle back quite quickly, he was taken by my tenacity.
When I was 9 my parents divorced, I saw it coming and had already decided I would stay with my Dad, we were best friends despite his moodiness. He said himself he was a crap husband but a good Dad, to me at least and later to my younger sister who didn't really get to know him again properly until she was an adult as she went with my Mum and new husband. The divorce was the most amicable in history, everything including us two girls was split down the middle. My Dad lives in a world of his own, a free thinker a rarity in any time. He didn't drive and had no intention of doing so, as a boy he'd loved Bugatti's and the romance of the motor car but the idea of driving everywhere in one never appealed to him. To him they are lethal weapons in the hands of most drivers (really rather true) and preferred to rely on his own muscle strength plus for long distances the train, to get from A to B.
What then do you do in 1980 with a 9 year old if you need to commute to Reading Station to get on a train to go to work? Dad was a primary school teacher, so it made sense that I travelled with him to his school and negate the need for child care completely, but how? He joked, we'll get a tandem! a month or so later outside the Emporium, a favourite source of old hand tools and for me a favourite source of costume jewellery and antique bottles, was a Holdsworth pre-war mixty bar ladyback tandem for £70. It was fate. We rode it home, Dad stripped it down and along with a Falcon roadbike frame that he'd earmarked for me when I was older we took the stripped down frames on the train to London to a shop on the Old Kent Road to get them sprayed and badged, I chose sky blue, the tandem was a sort of royal blue. When we went to collect them we brought them back and Dad built the tandem with hub brakes - two people are heavy and he thought this to be more reliable, 4 dérailleur gears, widely spaced with a crawler gear necessary in Reading. The star attraction was the back carrier made entirely out of Dexion (I shall check the spelling) - Mechano for adults, he called it, it had two main functions, it was good for holding bungees in place, you could carry practically anything, and frequently did with enough bungees and finally there was a handle about 5 inches long and half and inch thick bolted in at the end across the rear light so that I could lift the back of the tandem on and off trains. In those days all trains had guards wagons, often full of sacks of post and we would have to clamber over the sacks of post with the tandem sometimes although mostly it was simply a case of opening the double doors, Dad would lift the front in and I would follow with the back wheel using the handle. Worked a treat. For two years we commuted from Reading to Crowthorne on the Guildford train from platform 4b, the trains froze, caught fire, broke down and generally got us there and back most of the time, occasionally we'd wait for hours at Crowthorne station, and then when nothing came through, cycle on to Wokingham to catch the Waterloo to Reading train. A few times I think we cycled all the way, roughly 10 miles I think but usually this was a last resort. Holidays involved taking camping equipment to Steam Rallies and cycling I'm not sure how far on busy major A roads. I remember it took all day and a couple of years I think Janet, my younger sister who would have been 10 or 11 cycled on the back of the tandem and I cycled on the Falcon, that by then fit me.
As a teenager, I could more or less decide on a spec and my Dad would build a bike to suit, I already had the choice of borrowing his bikes; a Holdsworth road bike that had such a short wheel base, cycling it makes you wonder if the bike is possessed with it's own power, a Trade Bike with a huge metal frame basket that was fixed to the frame, the handlebars and front wheel moved independently which took a bit of getting used to. And the tandem of course, I did occasionally take friends on it, boyfriends later on into my 20's. I had the Falcon and a roadster style bike with a frame with cross handlebars, sturdy carrier for bungying my enormous Saxophone case. It was much like the hybrids that later came into fashion for commuting in London, but with mudguards and a carrier. I liked the wide handlebars that implied a bmx style, comfy too. This was my going to school bike.
Dad and I would do pub crawls in the Summer on the Tandem. We would cycle out west where the A34 western bypass now is on ancient b roads and do a round trip of about 10 miles of an evening taking in the Furze Bush, the Craven Arms and other pubs on the way. We listened in the pubs to live music and chatted there and back about anything and everything. Dad later allowed his house to be a washing and bath station for all the Newbury bypass protesters. Hundreds of protesters used his bathroom! I left Newbury in my late teens, hated the place and have only ever returned to visit my Dad since. I cycled out west to see what a mess they'd made of our favourite pub crawl a few years ago. Words fail me.
In the 80's, School uniform did not include trousers for girls and this really annoyed me, often I would cycle to school in trousers and 'forget' to bring my skirt. It annoyed me that half a century or more of emancipation and I was still forced to wear a flippin' skirt.
My best mate in my early teens lived at the top of a steep hill, by then we'd moved to Newbury by the way. We lived almost at the bottom of the hill and I had the choice of 5 different hills I could cycle up to get there, I visited most evenings so, some taking considerably longer than the closest but I chose different hills to keep it interesting I suppose. I was quite good at climbing hills, from riding the tandem, Dad rarely got off and walked we just plodded up the hill however long it took. There were very few hills that defeated him.
Neither of us had super light bikes, chose the extra weight of mudguards and carriers for convenience and practicality, he is in his early 70's now and still cycles up all 5 of these hills and more, a month or so ago he reported to me a journey where he cycled a 30 mile round trip which ended up with him cycling home along the A4 between Reading and Newbury at 11 o'clock at night, cycling on the path, the path ran out, he wobbled into a ditch and ended up in the branches of a tree, bike and all. He got home OK. Somehow.
I am notorious with my old school friend for taking her on bikes round the terrifying Robin Hood Roundabout in Newbury, we were about 15, there are maybe 7 different exits and the roundabout is probably about 100m across from exit to exit. I would fearlessly cycle anywhere but for most people who might cycle purely for leisure, they would avoid roundabouts as much as anything else because they didn't know how to cycle across them. My tactic was to take the lane like a driver would, simple as that. It's worked for me all over London when I lived and cycled there. Made sense to me the perceived danger for most people will see it otherwise. As far as I know, cyclists don't often get hit on roundabouts though, mainly things turning left or right on to them or changing lanes without seeing them. Roundabouts look scary on a bike to most people and yet they aren't hard. It's annoying when a car will undertake or overtake on a roundabout, it's not done and it usually serves to put me in the wrong lane to come off. One never overtakes anything on a roundabout so why do drivers think they can over take bikes?
Anyway, roundabouts is one of the reasons I'm starting this blog. Why, in England do they build cycle paths where the road is clearly wide enough anyway, then write END when you get to anything where a 'normal' person might require some assistance? I will be exploring possible solutions - there are a variety of ways, depending on the size and number of exits you can make a roundabout less intimidating for cyclists who aren't like me or the other many thousands of cyclists who use the roads today. Most of these are Men, men who drive or at least have good road sense. Whether they stop at red lights or not (I do but only since I turned 30 and decided it was time I set an example), they are saving the economy millions by leaving their car at home. I want to see roads across the UK that are fit for women and children to use safely. Having lived in Holland for all of the 90's, this will form a large part of my inspiration but not entirely.
Bikes have formed a large part of my life and they still are, they might be a part of a lot of other women in the UK, if only they were given the opportunity.
This is a jumble, but I am attempting to create some sort of context, I am not your typical cyclist, who is? What interests me is what we can do to make cycling for women as easy as it clearly is in Holland and Germany. We really really need to. I don't want to force everyone onto a bike - just want people to have the choice to leave their car in the driveway and walk, jump on a bus, tram or train or of course, jump on a bike.