Anyway, a comment on a Guardian editorial on the absurdity of this assertion made me think:

“I have to admit, there is a nice driver or two about who — in rush hour — politely wait for me to cross a four lane roundabout feed with no pedestrian crossing in the pouring rain pulling my wheelie suitcase. These are the conscientious objectors of the war, traitors to the driving shock troops who see a puddle and a pedestrian in proximity and say to themselves ‘Aha! Let’s have some fun!’.” (emphasis mine)
– http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/7851556

I drive every day. I have no other choice except move house, or find a new job (neither of which is a desirable option). I am a reluctant driver, though, and I commute in a tiny Ford Fiesta (with a 1.25 litre engine that is, in my opinion, about all you need in a car this size; anything else is gross over-application of power).

The country A-roads that form my daily route get the odd roadie/MAMIL cycling on them. It’s not something I fancy doing, but fair play to them: they have every right to be there. I tend to ride mostly around town, or on the Bristol/Bath Railway Path or Kennet & Avon Canal Path. I’m always very careful to give them plenty of room, and I reduce my speed when passing them. Although I’m in a car, I wish these cyclists no harm (obviously!) and go out of my way to drive responsibly around them.

Thus we come to the war that does exist: that on Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs). Whether by inattention, distraction or outright malice, cyclists and pedestrians are frequently on the receiving end of behaviour that, were it to take place in a different context (i.e. by “youths” and not in a car), would rightly be seen as anti-social.

And so to my declaration of Conscientious Objection from this war: I may drive, but I’m not lining up with the Jeremy Clarksons and James Martins of this world to run people off the road just because they use a different mode of transport.

A seven-year-old boy from London who was aiming to raise £500 for the Haiti quake relief effort through a sponsored bike ride has raised more than £72,000 (n.b. now over £100,000).

– http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8477345.stm

The bike ride is a great effort, and the fundraising really got going after Charlie was featured on BBC Breakfast. None of what follows is intended to knock what Charlie has done, so please don’t take it in that way; it is merely a comment on our collective attitude to cycling here in the UK, with reference to kids in The Netherlands (highlighted on David Hembrow’s blog).

There are three cycling story staples in the UK media:

1. Cyclists (especially on pavements) are a menace to society
2. One or more cyclists gets killed/seriously injured in a collision (unless you’re BBC London News, who deem cyclists getting killed on a regular basis to be less important than motorists getting parking tickets).
3. Cyclist rides distance to raise money for good cause

All of these stories are newsworthy (unless you’re BBC London News…) because cycling remains an outsider activity. In the Netherlands, children ride to school further, daily, than Charlie Simpson did for his one-off ride. It’s a normal activity, so a child’s bike-ride-of-note would doubtless be rather longer as a consequence.

Kids in the UK want to ride to school, but often can’t because their parents won’t let them out of (justifiable, IMHO) fear of ever-more-dangerous roads. Kids in the Netherlands can ride in near-total safety not because of the numbers, but because of the infrastructure.

The sad thing is that we’re trading safety now (cocooned in a car on the school run) for danger in later life (heart disease, diabetes and the rest).

These three types of cycling stories run by the UK media all do their bit, unfortunately, to marginalise cycling, making it appear to be an activity undertaken by the brave, the mad and the poor.

I long for the day when, rather than death, charity or cyclist-pedestrian conflict, it’s bike infrastructure projects to make our towns and cities better places to live and work that make the front pages.

“you have to go big enough to where it’s at least 1 bike per 200 residents. I think that’s a bare minimum for the good function of the system”

“cities who made too small an organisation, too small [a] network, don’t have real success”

“when you have not enough stations. not enough bicyles, the people don’t choose it”

“It’s seamless, it’s easy, it’s fun. What’s better than having a public bike be a part of your public transport system?”

– Happy Birthday Velib on Youtube

(Found via Karl McCracken’s blog)

Carbon emissions are only one of the car’s many downsides. An electric car:

• will still get stuck in traffic,
• will still be driven at reckless speeds, even by the “otherwise law-abiding”
• will still kill people in crashes
• will still insulate people from their surroundings, sucking the life out of communities
• will still prevent occupants from getting any exercise

We need more cycling, not hare-brained schemes like this. In fact, paying people to cycle is a positive step that would be a net benefit in reduced health costs and road maintenance costs.

Bristol gets a lot of attention as the UK’s first cycling city, and it undoubtedly has too many cars in certain parts of the city. Bath, a much smaller city, also has parking problems in certain areas. It also arguably has worse cycle provision. I ride a combination of roads, car parks and cycle lanes during my 3-mile commute.

On my ride to work today I witnessed two examples of how bikes get a raw deal in day-to-day encounters.

First: a van in the ASL zone at a the bottom of Brougham Hayes.

It didn’t inconvenience me, but it just displays an insidious arrogance in the mind of some drivers; a mindset that thinks that non-motorised vehicles don’t have a right to be on the road.

Second: a delivery truck parked in the contra-flow cycle lane in James St. West:

I stopped and spoke, very politely, to the driver. He was polite too, and his reply came down to “what can I do? I can’t park on double-yellow lines! I’ve got my hazard lights on!” as if the hazard lights protected cyclists from the oncoming traffic if/when they had the guts to cycle round the truck. There were some empty (albeit private, off-road) parking spaces that he could have pulled into, but no. The cycle lane it was, because it’s an easy target.

The truck belonged to a company called CEVA Logistics, whose tag-line is “Making Business Flow”. I assume they don’t mind business flowing right through the tattered remnants of the Highway Code and any unlucky cyclists in their way.