Cycling Cultures blog

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is recruiting community and professional members to join the group that will develop their guidance on promoting walking and cycling. Information about the community member role can be found here and for professional members details for this role can be found here.

NICE guidelines are used both to guide practice and to suggest areas for future research. In my research I’ve used several of the existing sets of guidelines to provide evidence when writing papers and to help confirm or deny my ideas about where gaps in the evidence might be and where more work is needed.

I participated in another big penny farthing race, this time at the Smithfield Nocturne. This is the first year they have included a penny farthing race. And there were two of them; a 1mile sprint and a 20min plus five laps endurance race. There were 30 competitors from all over the world. The racing was fierce; the course was super fast and technical and the corners were tight. The racing was started with a band of muskets which was fantastic and the crowd support was indescribable. I had a brilliant time. I scored a third in the sprint and came tie with Charlotte for 6/7th – the placings are all a bit out in the results as the organisers hadn’t expected us to go quite so fast ad as a result didn’t keep track of the lapping : )

I am really hoping the penny racing is a regular feature of the annual event.

I returned to London for the weekend from Bristol for this and caught the coach rather than the train for cost reasons. This meant I couldn’t bring my bike. The last thing I felt like doing when I arrived at Victoria was getting on another bus, so I hired a bike instead. This is only the second time I have used one of these bikes and I was seriously impressed by the simplicity of the process. I found a docking station, put in my credit card, chose a 24hour hire period, grabbed my ticket and released a bike. It then fell over as I am used to a diamond frame and clamping my knees together while I faffed with my bag did nothing to steady the bike. I also found the bike wobbled if started at the lights in the highest gear. Apart from that, I found the bike very easy to use; the gearing is fine for stop-start city riding, the brakes were tight, the upright position made me smile at people and I enjoyed the fat tyres that ignored the pot-holed road.

I was humoured by how many people had to get passed me, regardless of the fact that I was generally going at the same speed or faster in some cases. The fact that I wobbled occasionally and the bike fell over at the start of the ride probably made me look like a novice cyclist, and in many respects I am a novice London Hire Bike rider. It reminded me of how we tend to look at other road users as different; even though we are by and large all multi-modal citizens with differing levels of experience in each mode. Interviewees have talked about being multiple kinds of riders; road, hybrid, mountain bike, touring, family, solo, social, commuter, slow, fast, stressed, relaxed, confident. They also walk, drive cars or are car passengers, have motorbikes or scooters, catch buses, trains and coaches. I rarely ride these kinds of bikes as there are few occasions when I am without a bike so this experience was great, not only because it was a thoroughly nice way to get home but it also served as a reminder about what it is like to be another kind of road user.

I’ve been searching for bike theft stats for a paper I am writing that explores mobile responsibility. They are not easy to find. As this Guardian article highlights, there is a significant discrepancy in actual theft and reported theft.

Top 10 police forces for bike thefts in 2010:
Metropolitan police: 21,315
Thames Valley: 6,060
Greater Manchester: 5,185
Cambridgeshire: 4,477
Avon and Somerset: 3,895
West Midlands: 3,222
Leicestershire: 3,057
Lancashire: 2,727
Sussex: 2,668
Humberside: 2,440

Just watched this new short video about the Danish Bikeability research project.

The Bikeability project is a large mixed methods study involving research both in Denmark and the Netherlands – more here.

and while on the topic of cycling cultures…some material from the recent Building Cycling Cultures event is available here.

I will be jumping on the train from Bristol tomorrow to speak at the Building Cycling Cultures event, alongside Dave Horton and Griet Scheldeman (of the Understanding Walking and Cycling project, UWAC), Jon Orcutt and Karen Overton from New York, and many more people who are involved in building cycling cultures. See here for a Guardian article about UWAC and Cycling Cultures ahead of the conference.