The good and the bad.

Yesterday at 8:36am I realised an ambition that has quietly been growing for a number of months...I am now a cycling grandfather!  A quick ride up to Sidcup and voilà! (Mother, father and granddaughter are all exhausted but fine.)

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And at pretty much the same time this morning, a cyclist ended up under the wheels of a rush-hour construction HGV at the junction of Deptford Bridge and Deptford Church Street.

Mercifully, it was not a fatality.  The woman was admitted to hospital with ''leg injuries'' - I couldn't get any more information out of the WPC I spoke to.  There's a lethal combination that repeats itself: London, drag-sweeps, construction lorries in rush-hour traffic and a disproportionate number of women cyclists. 

No one is ever in such a rush to get there - stay behind.  Always.

More faded London and cycle lanes

Life has taken me up to Whitechapel a couple of times in the last week.  There is a cluster of fascinating buildings around the Royal London Hospital, many of which ended up being swallowed up by the hospital over a very long period.  This hospital appears to have had a talent for expanding since very long ago.  The brand new all-in-one building to the east has been conceived to capture it and put it all in the same place and must be due to open shortly.  But I doubt whether the hospital has it in its genes to stay put for any period of time.

This old wall sign is on one of the buildings incorporated into the hospital and I wonder what it said and how long ago it was painted.  My best guess for the text: JUVENILE CLOTHIER, though I can't make out the arched word at the top beyond an H to start with and an S to finish.  As for its age, well...very old.

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Down by Limehouse basin there's a very odd cycle lane.  They've dispensed with the normal traffic to the left principle, made it one way and put a contra-flow cycle path on the wrong side of the road.  I'll now have to go back and try to figure out why they've done it like that.  It is confusing - I ended up cycling towards an oncoming cyclist in the same lane.  I was correctly on the wrong side of the road, the oncoming cyclist was incorrectly on the right side.  So I veered over to the left which in nearly all situations would have been correct but it meant going out head first into oncoming one way traffic.

The important thing with such eccentric road layouts is that they are signed very very clearly.  Though how you're supposed to cycle along this path is a bit of a mystery...

Presumably the bins are there for putting broken bikes into

Portrait of an ASL

Looking at the Woolwich Road junction with the Blackwall tunnel approach overpass on google street view the other day, I was reminded of a cyclist who was killed at this junction almost a year ago.  This is what I saw:

The thing partially obscured under the silver car is a bike lane, the thing under the white van and blue car is an ASL (an Advanced Stop Line, for the use of cycles, and cycles only).  I don't know what date this view was recorded but it's before the fatality.

So what have the highway people done in the year since Adrianna's death to improve cycle safety?  I went along to see this weekend.

Have they made the cycle lane any clearer?  No.  Have they made the ASL more visible?  From the evidence of this picture, no.  All that they have done is to put up a ''cycle route ahead'' warning sign.

And how is the ASL line faring?

Well, it's not too clear is it!  The lorry, by the way, is not committing any offence because it was already there when the lights changed.  This, however, is the next step:

The blue car rolls up beyond the stop line with the lights still on red, perhaps taking its cue from the lorry already in the ASL and edging forward to get a better view of traffic approaching from the right.  Or perhaps it's so the car can get away from the lights in front of the lorry (both are heading for Greenwich).  Or perhaps because of inattention, deliberate disregard or ignorance.  Or any combination of these.

In the space of a few minutes I watched how traffic approached the ASL.  I ended up with so many pictures of infringements that it would take too long for me to upload all the photos.  So, just a handful. 

The did not see/did not know driver - note it's a left-hand drive vehicle so if you spot a beer can, it's actually in the passenger's hand not the driver's.

The follow the leader driver - ''well, he was there first:''

The ''I really can't be doing with these stop lines'' drivers:

And finally the ''I'm having my lunch not wearing a seatbelt with kids in the back (unbelted)'' driver:

I think a picture is emerging...

Cycling grandfather (1)

So, a couple of days ago, my daughter phoned me up.   Yesterday this arrived on my doorstep:

This little thingummybob is a 58mm Marmoset Minor, or Marmoset III, if you prefer.  Early days yet, of course.  But if all goes smoothly, I'll be a grandfather in 6 months time.  This in fact is his/her very first appearance on a public forum so you'll have to pardon the back-to-the-camera shyness.

How do I feel?  I think ''eekstatic'' describes the mixture of panic and joy.  But I may turn out to be one of the pioneers of cycling grandfather blogs - fairly unsurprisingly there don't seem to be many at all.  Cue puns about the cycle of life....

A little while later....

Cycling scapegoats: addendum

After my last post about cycling scapegoats, John pointed me in the direction of a recent Evening Standard article. The person behind this anti-cycling ranting in Westminster council is Angela Harvey, chairman of the Built Environment Policy and Scrutiny Committee and of the South Area Forum. She also spoke on yesterday's BBC's Radio 5 Weekend Breakfast programme. (It's a 3 hour programme so skip forward to 1:41:00 for the 5 minute feature.) After her Standard assertion about a rogue cyclo-terrorist:

We're always getting little old ladies who are knocked down and abused by a cyclist, who leave them on the ground as they ride away.

was apparently hit by a Freedom of Information request and found to be red-light jumping reality, she dropped this fantasy and, stressing that she is a cyclist, talked about towpath prams:

...cyclists are rushing through and we may end up with a pram in the canal. That's what we're very worried about.

I'm not quite sure how giving Council officers powers to issue fixed penalty notices to cyclists for road traffic offences can have anything to do with Regent's Canal racers. Last time I looked, canals weren't on a public highway. British Waterways affairs actually have nothing to do with what the residents have talked about. And the reason cyclists use the towpaths is because they want somewhere quiet, flat, red-light free to commute and exercise on. Because the roads are jammed up with traffic. Towpath use - responsible towpath use - is actually relieving the strain on Westminster's roads and they aren't thinking of improving cycle provision apart from the City Hall inspired cycle hire initiative*. Each cyclist on the towpath is one fewer on the road. And each cyclist on the road is taking up far less room than the alternative modes of transport.

So, because Angela Harvey has a bee in her bonnet about cyclists, they're damned for being on the roads (knocking down old ladies) and for being off the roads (pushing prams into the canal).
If you want to see this Angela Harvey, she was last seen riding roughshod over Westminster Bridge on a red Vendetta.

*For a cheap laugh, the minutes of Westminster's cycle workshop are worth a read. Whereas we only get a cycle hire scheme, they actually get a Cycle High Scheme

Cycling scapegoats

Evidently taking its cue from the Daily Mail school of journalism, the BBC's Inside Out (London) broadcast a piece on red-light jumping cyclists in the city last night. As any journalist writing an ''Opinion''* article in the Mail will know, the best way to kick things off is to appeal to prejudices with the all-time classic cycling cliché: the lycra lout. These are the opening words of Matthew Wright's presentation:

''I think we're all familiar with the capital's lycra louts, that breed of cyclist that bombs about the street, flouting the Highway Code, missing pedestrians by a whisker and giving the vast majority of sensible riders a bad name. Well, thanks to pressure from those who've borne the brunt of bad riding, councils and the Met police are starting to clamp down on these two-wheel transgressors....''

Well, so much for challenging stereotypes, eh? The rest of the piece showed lots of cycling clips, many perfectly law-abiding cyclists and the odd dangerous and illegal manoeuvre. And what do you know? None of the transgressors filmed were wearing lycra. That wasn't the point though, was it? I don't know how many hours the film crew spent trying to nail a shot of a lycra wearing cyclist breaking the law or putting pedestrians in danger, but they didn't manage to film a single one doing it. (They did admittedly manage to get one fellow in lycra being pulled for an infraction but missed the actual offence.) But though the film failed to nail any of these two-wheeled lycra lout transgressors, the stereotyping remained unchallenged and, if anything, was reinforced.

Now, I'm not going to defend red-light jumping. But having twice been alarmed yesterday by the sudden acceleration of a car behind me making a dash through a ''London green,'' while I was already slowing for the red light, I will argue for a sense of perspective. Which is more dangerous, a cyclist weighing under 100kg travelling at 15mph or a motor vehicle accelerating through a red light? This is not a particularly difficult question.

What I find most unsettling about this picking on sound-bite scapegoats is that it diverts attention away from the real dangers on the road. Focusing on the cyclist blinds us to where the dangers actually are - and this is why I use the word ''scapegoat.'' Drivers see the hi-viz motes but not the beam in their own eyes.

And as an illustration of that selective blindness, here's a still from the programme. Yes, before a bevy of bobbies, we can all see the cyclist red-light jumping. But unremarked and uncriticised in the programme, what's that behind the cyclist? Oh, they didn't notice the big blue thing in the background. Because they were busy concentrating on cyclists. Perspective, please!
*''Opinion'' here is used by the press to evade censure. ''It's not a reflection of our editorial policy, the views expressed are those of the commissioned author.'' Right, that went well, let's commission another piece....

London Skyride

...or should I call it The Mayor of London's Skyride? No, I'll call it London Skyride because none of the other Skyrides feel the need to name it after their mayor. Anyhow, it happened today. I rolled up at Cutty Sark Gardens expecting there to be a handful of bikes - but you'd need pretty big hands for this lot:



And this was early, bikes were still arriving from all directions. Just after 11am we set off for London, (accompanied) children going immediately after the leader and the rest of us followed in what was possibly the most chaotic ride up to town - and definitely the slowest - that I've ever experienced. Here's a view of the monster crocodile just on our way down Creek Road


Just up the road, where Church Street joins Creek Road there was already one taxi driver at the front of the queue, swearing and handwaving and rolling menacingly forwards at one of the marshalls, fulfilling the traditional role expected of a London cabbie - and, of course, by almost everyone who's cycled in London . I don't suppose he'd ever seen that many taxi-fare dodgers in his life before. It was facinating to watch the different reactions of motorists, though most of the smiles and waves of encouragement did come from cars on the other side of the road.

Several hundred car horns later - isn't it illegal to sound horns on a Sunday? - we eventually stop-started-crawled our way to Tower Bridge and over to the Skyride eastern access point near Tower Hill.

A lass on a podium to the left of the picture above was announcing over a PA that they'd been expecting 50,000 but believed that they already had 60,000. I've no idea how you can estimate the number with any degree of accuracy - I had certainly never seen so many bikes in one place before. Even without lights, there were enough to create their own traffic jams.

Here's a tribute to Sponge-Boris No-Pants:

I guess I'm being a little unkind...it really does makes a change to see London dominated by bikes without fear of traffic - well without fear of the usual traffic, anyway. Trafalgar Square seemed pretty spacious:

Though that's most likely because the route onto the Mall was so busy:

Strangely, the atmosphere wasn't particularly carnivalesque, more about lots and lots of people enjoying a gentle ride through a busier yet quieter London on a lovely warm Autumn day. Though there's always some clown who feels the need to go just that bit further, that little bit higher...this man, innocent though he looks, almost took me out on a sharp bend with his rear wheels. And he didn't even notice!

And of course some people just have to push the envelope, or in some cases, envelop the push bike: below are some BSOs (Bicycle-Shaped Objects)....




















And if you've ever had to cycle into a headwind, you'll know the immensity of the force you're fighting against. This young lad has reconceived the Raleigh Chopper (c. 1975) by using a headwind to generate the power needed to ride into a headwind. Pure genius!

Almost finally here's St Pedal's Cathedral, simply because it is Sunday after all...


And, do you know what? Many cyclists are what I've seen called ''sociable loners'' - and I think I'm one of them. On the way out, the lass on the podium had revised her estimate upwards to 75,000 and I think I cycled past/round/with/had to evade most of them. It was quite a relief to get onto the Lower Road back to Deptford where you can ride more smoothly, without too many lights or people holding you up, doing silly things in the road, without upsetting tetchy cabbies. Because in the end, I want to cycle peacefully and safely with everyone, be they in a car or on a bike, without feeling in danger. So yes, there have to be more cyclists on the road simply to make drivers more cycle-aware. And you're not going to achieve that by segregating two-wheelers from the four-or-more-wheelers.

Still, it was a lovely day out, and doing it one day a year isn't going to ruin your life - unless you're a taxi driver with anger management problems. In which case, get your heart MOT'd at the first opportunity.