Cambridge fieldwork begins
I visited Cambridge on Monday this week to start the fieldwork. Temporarily without bicycle myself, I did a lot of walking. After doing the first Cambridge interview I got the bus down to Addenbrooke’s to recruit some participants.
There were a number of different cycle parking areas, marked on the site map. I concentrated on two of the biggest; one near the Hills Road entrance and one near the entrance to A&E. I quickly got rid of a lot of the postcards and they’ve elicited a good few responses.
Later in the day I stood around watching cyclists use a junction on Mill Road, which was reasonably busy despite the poor weather. It was an interesting comparison to observations elsewhere. Especially given the heavy rain, I felt that there was relatively little ‘specialist’ clothing (compared to what you’d see in Central London, for example). A number of people were wearing jeans; some didn’t have on waterproofs. There was quite a mix of ages and genders.
Mill Road is quite narrow and at times there was ‘stacking’ of cyclists as well as motor vehicles alongside them. The road camber meant that as the evening went on the puddles in the gutter got larger and larger.
Mill Road isn’t itself a designated cycle route, but the junction where I was waiting does cross a recommended route, and there is a banned right turn open only to cyclists. I think a couple of these cyclists were turning right.
Mill Road is blessed with a number of bike shops, where I dropped off some more postcards. You can buy second hand bikes, children’s bikes, and Dutch Cargo bikes – like this one which I saw parked outside the Co-op.
