Bristol, Britain’s first Cycling City, aims to introduce a Paris Velib-style cycle hire scheme, operated by Hourbike. My fear is that, by having a system that is too small, the scheme will fail. Some quotes from the Happy Birthday Velib video (linked below) bear this out: bq. “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” Read more...

Apparently, yes: they do.stm: the relentless obsession with Carbon emissions (while important) has led us into a blind alley of thinking that electric vehicles are somehow “green”. A clue: they’re not, unless the energy used to propel them comes from a renewable resource. Otherwise, all you’re doing is swapping local pollution and emissions for those far away; you know what they say about “out of sight…”. Carbon emissions are only one of the car’s many downsides. Read more...

As widely reported elsewhere, a judge has ruled that cyclists may be partly at fault if they are knocked off their bikes while not wearing a helmet.html. The issue was discussed on BBC Radio 2 by Matthew Bannister, standing in for Jeremy “Daily Mail FM” Vine. Just after the intro to the piece, there was an advert for the BBC’s coverage of Formula 1 car racing (something that encourages some drivers to drive like idiots), an unfortunate juxtaposition but typical for the MSM, where “dog bites man” or “car driver kills people” isn’t news. Read more...

There are some great blogs out there documenting the worst excesses of a car-supremacist culture (in which we in the UK live): both the behaviour of drivers and the panderings of local authorities to them, despite claims by certain extremist groups that drivers are persecuted by councils. 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. Read more...

I’ve been a member of our local Freecycle mailing list for a few years, successfully using it to offload and acquire various items, from a double futon bed to an mp3 player. In 2006, Giles Turnbull blogged about Freecycle’s shortcomings, from a usability and webapp point of view. It boils down to “Freecycle is a great idea unsuited to living inside a mailing list once the size of the list is >100 people”. Read more...