Bikeuser shared blog

I went to France last weekend.

I took the bus to Victoria, and cycled through London to St Pancras.

In Paris, I found a road going south from Gare du Nord. It was big and full of traffic, and the bus lane was marked no cycling.

Conveniently, a cycle lane was provided on the pavement. Mostly, the pedestrians kept out of it.

It continued at the traffic lights.
Paris was quite well signed. The cycle lanes got their own signs in green.

Further down the road, the cycle lane rejoined the bus lane. Then I got to a big roundabout and was left to fend for myself. I followed another cyclist, without lights, without hi-vis, into the traffic.

Hardly any of the cyclists had lights or hi-vis. I saw quite a few riding the Velibs.

Then I got to Grenoble. Apparently Grenoble is one of the flattest cities in France. In the middle of it, there is the Old Town. Then there’s miles of newer suburbs round it. Out towards the University, along the river, joggers and lycra-clad cyclists exercise. You can tell where you are by the bikes. In the old town in market day, cyclists trundle up and down on bikes with saddles too low and crates bungeed to the rear.

I think this one is a supermarket basket. Out towards the suburbs, and in the university, the bikes look like those I expect to see in English towns. Not many mountain bikes. Along the river, nothing but thin tyres and lycra. In a more expensive suburb, we only saw one bike.

We mainly walked around the old town. I didn’t like to take too many pictures of bits of tarmac, but I was struck by the way the cycle facilities were ubiquitous. Every no-entry sign had a “Sauf cycles” added. Every one-way street had a contraflow. Cycle lanes or routes were marked on all the roads.

I don’t know what it was like in the rest of Grenoble. This?

Then I went back through Paris and came back to England and hurtled into the London traffic. In the morning between Waterloo and Vauxhall I raced a couple of commuters. There’s nothing like being in the middle lane of fast-moving traffic for keeping the speed up ^_^. I noticed a cyclist with an enormous pile of linen bungeed awkwardly on the back of her bike, and another trundling along with a substantial trailer following behind. The awesome green cyclists have gone from Lambeth Bridge.

Then I came back to Southampton. Grenoble has a MetroVelo scheme - there were yellow metro-velo bikes around the place. People were riding them. I thought I took a picture but apparently I didn’t. Paris has its Velibs. Southampton had OYbikes but they are gone. Poor Southampton.

I said I was over helmet debates but…

If you fix my cycling style, and skills, then some ways you can increase my safety are (1) increasing the population of cyclists (2) reducing the population of motorists (3) reducing the intelligence of other cyclists (4) increasing the intelligence of the motorists.

1 & 3 work because they lead to 4 (or at least increases the alertness/wariness of the motorists).

So to improve my safety, the best thing I can do is encourage bums on bikes, and discourage bums in cars.

If I decide that I can’t do much about everyone else, but I’d like to be a safer cyclist then some things I can do are

(1) avoid getting squished

- make myself more visible:
– cycle in the appropriate bits of the road and don’t lurk in drivers’ blind spots
– wear hi-vis
– have good lights

- make myself more predictable:
– obey the rules of the road
– indicate what I’m about to do, don’t stop suddenly, keep in lane

(2) avoid getting hurt if I am squished

- roll when I fall
- wear a helmet
- …

(3) avoid squishing things

- look out for pedestrians, especially dog walkers. slow down for them. ring my bell. use lights.

What category does:

- don’t wear flares that get caught in the chain and cause me to fall off

come in?

Okay, so let’s start again.

Fix everyone else’s behaviour, and I can improve my safety by dressing appropriately and keeping my bike in order and cycling better. Fix my behaviour and I can improve my safety by getting bums on bikes.

Now, if everyone who’s got on a bike also tries to improve their safety by wearing hi-vis and wearing helmets and keeping in lane, then cars will become less wary, so average safety might actually go down. We’d hope, I think, that that would keep absolutely in line with the numpty-ness, so that the accident rate stays the same.

But - cyclists would then look like a bunch of anoraks, in cycling clips and yellow jackets and helmets and with panniers and lights swinging from their wrists. Which would totally put kids off cycling because it’s “not cool”. So the population of cyclists goes down, reducing my safety.

What nobody really knows is how the numbers balance. And yeah, I didn’t even mention cycle lanes.

I am *so* modelling this for the next stage of my phd.

- helmet debates
- cyclists v cars arguments

things I am not bored of:

- chocolate
- taking pictures of cycle lanes

places I have been

- cambridge (full of tourists who STOP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD HELLO I AM TRYING TO GET PAST *BRINGBRING* gee I might I as well put my bell to permanent ‘on’ but then who would listen to it get me a super loud hooter already)
- lincoln (same as ever it is on a hill)
- france via portsmouth

Portsmouth was like, well, lots of places with cycle networks. It seems the cycle network between, um, fareham and the portsmouth ferry terminal is actually pretty good. But they don’t sign it properly. The A27 wasn’t too bad but it does go up and down a lot. I had to go down that way again recently and it is far, far, less pleasant at 7pm than it was at 10pm. They seem to be building more cycle path on it but the trouble with off-road cycle paths is things like overhanging nettles…

France, France was splendid. Maybe my French google skills are a bit lacking because I can’t find anything on the internet about the beautifully marked cycle routes I followed round Le Havre - mostly on road, but the roads had signs everywhere. Presence de cyclists! Partageons la route! Disembodied bicycles!

A cycle race overtook me. I tried to catch up with it but I was knackered and failed. Boo. I’m thinking of Turbo-charging my bike (so I can get more miles-per-gallon-of-chocolate).

There was a tunnel thing in Le Havre - under part of the town centre. It had a special lane for cyclists so I went in. Whoooosh.

These guys cheated

Summer, people, summer. There’s all this fuel stuff and maybe Britain is getting back its bikes stuff and it’s slow but - my dad has sold one of his cars and is cycling more and maybe in twenty years the roads will look quite different.

I read this in “Around the World on a Penny-Farthing”:

…my bicycle causes the first runaway since the trifling affair at Lembach, Austria. A brown-faced peasant woman and a little girl, driving a small, shaggy pony harnessed to a basket-work, four-wheeled vehicle, are approaching; their humble-looking steed betrays no evidence of restiveness until just as I am turning out to pass him, when, without warning,he gives a swift, sudden bound to the right, nearly upsetting the vehicle, and without more ado bolts odwn a considerable embankment and goes helter-skelter across a field of standing grain.
The old lady pluckily hangs on to the reins, and finally succeeds in bringing the runaway around into the road again without damaging anything save the corn. It might have ended much less satisfactorily, however, and the incident illustrates one possible source of trouble to a ‘cycler travelling alone through countries where the people neither understand, nor can be expected to understand, a wheelman’s position”…

plus ca change…

! Last week to take up the university’s Cycle2Work scheme and buy a nice bike to cycle to work with.

! Bike week 2008 14–21 June, lots of gentle rides to test out your new bike with, or relax post-exams on. See http://www.southampton.gov.uk/leisure/events/home.asp and http://www.southamptoncyclingcampaign.org.uk/events.shtml

! Kick off bike week by joining the colourful cycle cavalcade, taking off from the Bargate at 11am on the 14 June

! Naked bike ride reportage linked here: http://www.southamptoncyclingcampaign.org.uk/media.shtml

! Did you know you can borrow OS maps from the local libraries? Did you know your university card can double as a library card for the local libraries? Take out a map and take off into the New Forest or the rolling Hampshire countryside…

Tonight, 6pm Omdurman Road by the common, bare as you dare.

Tomorrow, ladies’ ride, 10am, somewhere on the common, look for the hats, Five miles to fabulous.

Sunday, daytime, Riverside Park (by the Itchen in Bitterne Park), Springwatch/Breathing spaces festival thing. Bat boxes and green stuff and that.

Your gratuitous rant for the day:

“Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will rape them.”

a) Many women modify their lifes - smoothly, naturally, without thinking about it - based on that fear, a background fear, not a constant panic, rather an awareness.

b) Society and the media propagate that fear. Our local news constantly publishes stories about sex attacks and tries to label places as no-go areas. Sex attacks do happen and are bloody horrible, but the fear and the statistics don’t seem to be in the same place.

c) Same with cycling, actually - many people’s fears of cycling and being hit by cars and things don’t match with statistics.

(d) which is perhaps one of the reasons cycle lanes are useful for getting more people cycling, even if regular cyclists often hate them)

e) and cycling can mitigate the fears of attack (at least compared with walking, but probably not so much as driving)

f) and cycling gets safer if more people are seen on the roads on their bikes, just as “dangerous” no-go areas after dark might be safer if people thronged through them

g) “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will rape them.” is probably a neat summary of the reactions of the people _not_ going on the naked bike ride. The men say stuff like “Southampton can’t handle my naked body yet”. The women think they’ll be perved over. ( yeah yeah I’m generalising)

h) Gender dynamics exist. Get over it. And that means a mixed ride won’t have the same dynamics as a ladies’ ride. Here, have a tissue.

Oh yeah, cycle2work scheme should be open now. If you’re uni staff, buy a bike! (Details in previous post).

* The university is opening its cycle2work scheme for the first two weeks of June, the perfect time to buy a bike. If you are employed by the university, this is an opportunity to buy a bike tax-free on a kind of “hire-purchase” from the university:

The scheme involves employees sacrificing a proportion of their salary each month and in return the University will lease to the employee a bicycle and cycling safety equipment. It’s open to all employees who have a minimum of 12 months’ continuous service prior to the date of the start of the scheme, and a contract of employment for at least a further 12 months’ continuous service from that date.

This employee benefit is currently managed externally by Halfords, one of the largest cycle retailers in the UK. Employees will be able to select a bicycle and associated equipment with a value of at least £100 but no more than £1000 and pay the University over a 12 month period, enjoying savings on tax and NI. The University will own the bicycle and any equipment bought under the scheme for the duration of the scheme. At the end of the hire period, employees will be able to buy the bicycle and associated equipment from the University for a “fair market value” (approx. £25 - £35).

For more information, visit: http://www.resource1.soton.ac.uk/hr/working/pay/taxfree/bike.html, or
contact Ana Fernandes, University of Southampton, Human Resources Department, George Thomas Building, Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ; e-mail amf@soton.ac.uk or extension number 24054.

* 14-22 June is Bike Week and there are loads of different cycling events on, so have a look through the list at http://www.bikeweek.org.uk/event_search.php . 17 June is Bike to Work Day, perfect for all those new cycle2work bikes!

* Friday 6 June: Naked Bike Ride: as bare as you dare. Meet at 6pm on the eastern side of Southampton Common, in the clearing next to Highfield Road and opposite the junction with Omdurman Road. Website: http://nakedwiki.org/wiki/Southampton

* Saturday 7 June: Ladies’ 5 miles to Fab: Wear a hat to be noticed and never mind the helmet! The ride will go from the 1000 Bellemoor Rd entrance to Southampton Common. Flat 5 mile cycle ride into the city centre for coffee. Phone Dilys 023 8077 7472 or email cyclewise@aol.com for more information.