Bikeuser shared blog

some recent searches that have found this site:

shirley high street charity shops blog
legally run red traffic light (you can’t, okay! http://stopatred.org)
halfords shares phone number
east london street names ending in lane (try google maps)
cycling on motorways (don’t do it.)
find puncture without water (blow lots of air into it, listen, feel. spit! I almost never use water.)
cycling development officer southampton
BHF london to brighton accident stats
cycle2work not cycling to work (why not?)
why does my bike tyre always puncture? (wish I could help…)
bromptons back tyre puncture (kind of like any back tyre puncture.)

and lots of cycle2work and cyclescheme, lots of naked cyclists, naked bike ride, etc, southampton cycle paths, and so on.

Cycle lanes: love ‘em or hate ‘em?

There’s that cycle lane that goes over the railway bridge at Southampton Airport. Cycle up the bridge in the cycle lane, and then it suddenly vanishes, just as you reach the top where there’s a tight blind corner. If you’re /in/ the cycle lane, it clearly isn’t safe to just keep going if there’s traffic that’s charging up the hill at going-past-bike-speed (since you’re in the cycle lane and not in the way), so you kind of have to pause (on an uphill!) and wait for a gap to tuck into. Personally, I swing off the mini-roundabout at the bottom in the middle of the lane, and keep out of the cycle lane, especially towards the top. But it’s uphill, so I’m not going that fast, and I’m pissing off the cars behind who could perfectly well pass me if I tucked into the lane.
There’s a lane at the end of Waterloo Bridge that disappears like that, too.
There was some debate at the cycle campaign about lanes going through islands, when there just isn’t room for bikes and cars; safer to keep them or leave them?

The cycle lane they put in on the bridge just below the Itchen Bridge, on the other hand, I love. I used to stick there if I went home at rush hour, queuing with the traffic, and with the new lane I can just slip past it all up to the roundabout and onto the bridge.

Cycle lanes that go through the “dooring” region of parked cars? A friend of mine recently broke her arm when a car door opened unexpectedly as she approached. But keeping out, I have this sense of being nudged inwards by passing cars. Cycle lanes filled with parked cars? (here’s a website of them). My pet hate is cycle lanes filled with pedestrians. Unsegregated, fine, although a bit of awareness that there might be bikes about would be nice. You don’t need to jump right out of your skin when I toot my horn. But those nice green strips on the pavement? No, they aren’t fake grass for you to walk on. Leave ‘em alone. Grrrr.

The analogies that were coming up during the Highway Code petitioning were along the lines of comparing bike lanes with small country routes, and big roads with fast motorways; many drivers, especially new and timid drivers, don’t like motorways, but oh yes, they are faster. And sometimes the country lanes can be more dangerous, with blind corners and hedges pinning you in…

… from mine to Southampton Airport (Parkway), the direct route is Thomas Lewis Way, A335. Straight and flat. Full of whizzy cars. When I’m rushing for a train, I take that, and it takes me five minutes. When I’m coming home, in the dark, I take the slower parallel route down Wide Lane and Portswood Road ~ it’s not bike lanes, but it’s definitely slower. And feels safer.

There’s a wonderful cycle path down the river near Lincoln that makes the third side of a triangle, cutting off a much longer boring route. There’s another on the other side of the river that makes two sides of a triangle, giving you as alternatives a whizzy dual carriageway (straight, flat), or a rather longer (but still flat) cycle route. I found another splendid one running along a dyke parallel to one of those roads that gets packed with traffic but isn’t wide enough to edge past easily. These are great. Bring ‘em on. I enjoy the route from Cobden Bridge down the Itchen; why isn’t the second half of it official cycle path? But it’s a little too crowded with dog walkers for my preference. I’d like to see more cycle contra-flows on one-way streets.

The flip side, lines painted on roads where there isn’t really room, where the lanes are filled with parked cars, where the lanes are too narrow, where the lanes disappear unexpectedly, painted on pavements where they are crowded with pedestrians (tried to go up the Avenue in a hurry?), painted around the edge of roundabouts, those I will continue to ignore.

An alternative to bike lanes: these things called sharrows which are appearing in parts of America, a kind of explicit “share the lane” marking with a picture of a bike and a couple of chevrons on the road. Mixed opinions, I guess. Possibly something like that would be an alternative in places like the Airport Parkway bridge?

Word of the day: Bikeshedding
(“a planning board will approve spending millions of dollars to build an atomic power plant but if you go to them to get approval to build a bike shed they will argue endlessly”)

Context: the university has had a look at a secure bike system which provides individual stands with a bolt that is put through your bike and then locked into place using a swipe card[1]. I don’t know what their conclusions are about its viability compared to the secure bike sheds. I want to know your opinions on uni provision of (secure) cycle facilities: what they currently do, what they should do.

Note: D-locks are basically secure. Either a thief wants _your_ bike in which case he’ll put lots of effort in (and not much security stands up to lots of effort), or he’ll grab the easiest one, and he can be away with a loosely tied cable lock in seconds. Did you know: the smaller the D-lock, the better. This is physics, but it had to be pointed out to me Basically the less room for the thief to mess around in, the better. By the same token, a cable lock wrapped around everywhere and generally not leaving any loose cable to act as leverage, is much better than one wound round once and locked.

Okay. Here are some factors to consider when building facilities:

• “Secure” (swipe card) vs not secure (bring your own lock)
• Covered (rain protected) vs uncovered
• Enclosed (door-card or door-code) vs open (if secure, the swipe is for e.g. a single bike stand) ( enclosed protects against vandalism, secure but not enclosed facilities don’t)
• Distance from a particular building to the nearest facility
• Speed of access (guess this is related to distance)

Then there’s the question of funding the facilities. Secure facilities /are/ more expensive than providing a few u-frames. On the other hand, you can probably get away with stinging your users for some or all of the cost.

• Completely free
• Charge users a flat-rate (annual?) for use of the facilities:
  • large enough to cover building and maintenance
  • peanuts, possibly covering upkeep costs
• Charge users on a usage rate (eg 20p a time)
• Scale charges by position (undergrad/postgrad/staff)
• Fund from car parking fees
• I just invented this one Provide a large park-and-cycle site near the airport, put in a decent cycle route from the airport, preferably flat. Fund cycle facilities from the park-and-cycle income.

Some opinions:

• Undergrads have different cycle parking needs from staff/phds
  • short term parking at many different sites

  • vs all-day parking at a single site
• All “secure” locking should be in some kind of secure shed
• Bike stands, preferably covered, should be provided near to all buildings; sufficient that cyclists don’t have to tie bikes to lamp-posts etc (as they do near Zepler)
• Schemes which are integrated with town (the two train stations and sites close to popular pubs) would be useful
• Parking by the university is difficult, so schemes which promote multi-modal travel may be taken up: secure parking at the train stations, park-and-bus, park-and-cycle, with mainly disabled spaces at the university itself. (Seriously, don’t expect this one to be taken up any time soon).

I’d like to see a rack for, say, 30 bikes, with a roof (I think the roof changes the perception of the space as well as keeping the rain off), outside most of the uni’s buildings. This would take up ~1 car parking space, and there are car parks *everywhere*. I’m wondering whether it would be possible to provide good D-locks at such a rack, maybe on a supermarket trolley type scheme, so that users (a) were encouraged to use D-locks rather than insecure locks and (b) didn’t have to carry heavy locks about (of course this discourages people from cycling to locations that don’t provide these racks). But then how would we prevent people simply taking and keeping a lock? Perhaps the locks could be attached by a cable to a stand, but I forsee terrible tangles occurring.

(The extension of this is the sekura-byk secure bolt on a swipe card scheme that the uni looked at. One of the disadvantages of this scheme is that it becomes cheaper if you put a lot of frames in the same location, whereas I’d like to see smaller racks dotted about the place. Another is that it doesn’t provide any way to squeeze extra bikes in when all the racks are full, whereas with (e.g.) u-frames, people can squish up and get an extra bike onto the same frame.)

Then I’d like to see some secure sheds for people who want to go to their building and work late, possibly into the night. These needn’t be as close to buildings as the smaller frames, but they shouldn’t be too far away (or people won’t use them out of laziness). Ideally, there should be no need for registration to use them; anyone should be able to show up and access a shed. However, the university presumably has good reasons for registration (e.g. to monitor usage, or quickly contact users). There should be sufficient space in the sheds for all the people who want to use them.

Reaching the sheds from the uni. buildings should be via a route perceived as safe, and the entrances to the sheds should be well lit and possibly monitored 24h by CCTV - for personal security, not cycle security.

That’s what I think. I ride a folder, and store it under my desk, what would I know? Tell us! Leave a comment!

[1] This scheme is used at covered locations at Finsbury Park Tube, Walthamstow, and Russell Square car park in London, and seems to be pretty successful.

I went to look for the Southampton naked bike ride on Friday, but I omitted to look up the route before I went and went the wrong way. Didn’t see ‘em. Shame. Apparently over 100 people went and it was very successful. More here.

Somewhere in the FAQ for the world naked bike ride is what seems to be a common slogan: we’re not blocking traffic, we ARE traffic.

The right to be traffic is kind of what was behind the protests about the highway code change of warning. Cyclists don’t want to be pushed off the roads, or to the edges of the roads. Thousands of cyclists signed the petition protesting at the wording. The new proposed wording appends “Use of these facilities is not compulsory and will depend on your experience and skills, but they can make your journey safer”., clarifying (we hope) that cyclists can make their own choices about cycle facilities.

CTC article
CamCycle article

this is an amazing article about cycling in London. We don’t have quite so much scary/heavy traffic, but it’s still all applicable.

Carrying Lots Of Stuff on a bike

Found on the web (well, okay, they’re all found on the web):
(see also: stopatred.org)

. This shirt cracks me up. (read the story)

Potential Sustrans National Lottery scheme along the Itchen. Go and click on the “Pledge” thing to ticky your support so we get money for it.

Finally, I am liking the pentabike:

I have a backlog of things to write about, but I keep being busy or tired. I’m going to waffle about cyclist profiles as a bit of a buildup to some of the other things in the backlog.

I started cycling in sixth form. I am not a morning person, and I could get out of bed twenty minutes later by cycling than walking. We didn’t think about cycle networks, omgsafety (I wore a helmet. A “tuff top” we got during Cycling Profiency in Junior School), or teaching me the Highway Code. I took the bike out for its first practice ride when we got it, moseying off into Lincolnshire with no spare change, puncture kit, 10p for the phone, or map. I crashed it (forgot to look left approaching a T-junction), then I got lost (phoned my sister on a chargecard number and described the road signs to her and she told me how to head towards Lincoln), then terribly thirsty and dehydrated (I nipped into a cafe and they kindly gave me a glass of water), and finally my legs gave out on me and I walked the last three miles home. Then I started cycling to school. I did a couple of somersaults before I found the back brakes. I took up bellringing as my hobby, and so I cycled to ringing, just beyond school, twice a week. I became very enthusiastic about bellringing, so I wanted to go out to nearby villages in the evenings to their ringing practices. So I studied the map for places I could cycle to, got myself a high-vis, double set of lights and a helmet light for the scary roads, and started heading off a couple of nights a week. After about a year, I found the gear shifter for the front cog.
I started to want to go out to saturday ringing practices further afield. I took the bike on the train a few times. I tried hard not to have to say “I can’t do X, I don’t have a car”, but to find workarounds.

I moved to Cambridge, trundled my way through uni, and discovered Brompton. Suddenly, I could take a bike everywhere I went! At first, I didn’t give it that much use, as I wasn’t away from Cambridge much, so it just went in and out of town. Nowadays, I’m often off to different places at the weekends, and the bike goes with me, and it’s a tremendous freedom. I have come to rely on having a bike /everywhere/ (it goes abroad, by boat and train and bus and plane). I’m lost without it. As well as transportability, the Brompton has the advantage that I can beg lifts where people are already driving - for example, when I go ringing on a Friday night at Hursley, I can beg a lift up the nasty scary hill out of Hursley into Chandler’s Ford, as there are people who go that way.

My profile is not really that of recreational cyclist, although I enjoy camping in places like the Dales and so enjoy the occasional camping-and-cycling weekend in pretty places. I don’t own any lycra. I don’t like cycling at other people’s paces. I guess I’m more of a “have bike, will travel”.

A year or so ago, I was looking for a bike shop in Southampton, and after asking a couple of people I knew, I ran a Google search. I found a website referring to the “Bike Users Network”, which looked like just what I wanted. Except that… as I dug through it, I found that parts of it hadn’t been updated since the nineties, one of the email contacts was someone I knew who left Southampton in about 1996, and the recommended bike shops had closed. So I volunteered to try and update it, which is what you have now. As a result I’ve found myself learning more about cycling, bike schemes, and cycle campaigns than I ever expected to when I was mindlessly cycling about town and trying not to get squashed by buses.

I think there are two distinct profiles at the university: undergraduates (who have many/most of their possession back home, live in halls or rooms, and move a lot; who make short irregular journeys, often in packs, between accommodation, uni sites, and town) and staff (who have a settled home, possibly out of town, and all of their belongings with them; who travel regularly into the same place monday-friday and may have a family to shop for/take on family holidays). phds fall somewhere in between. I suspect that the cycle provisions that interest these two groups differ, and that the ways to encourage people to cycle differ between those two groups.

Of course, there isn’t really such a binary division, I’m just generalising. But I’d be interested in other people’s opinions…

Apparently we have something like 15k undergrads, 5k staff, and 4k postgrads. You’d expect (*I’d* expect) a higher proportion of students to cycle than staff, so cycle facilities want to be targetted at students. D’you think? I had a look for a susu cycling forum the other day, but I couldn’t find one. I want to write about uni. bike security next, and here I think the fixed-office vs various-scattered-lecture-theatre-and-tutorial thing is relevant. Possibly there is also a cheap-bike-for-uni thing that goes on among students.