Catching up (1): The Joy of Bikes

A fortnight of low-connectivity travel in Africa and Europe and a week's holiday in similarly unwired Suffolk have kept me from the blog, but a couple of stories along the way interested me.

The first, which I read coincidentally on the plane (sorry...) to one of Europe's bike-heavens (Amsterdam), was by Andrew Gilligan.  On the eve of the launch of London's new cycle-hire scheme, he celebrated the two-wheeled wonder in the Daily Telegraph as the "perfect machine for our times - cheap, cheerful and carbon-free". 

As a Board member of the London Cycling Campaign from 2001 to 2009, and its Chair for the last three of those years, it's one of my prouder achievements to have had something to do with the huge increase in cycling in the capital in recent years.  Indeed, the Evening Standard even named me as one of London's top-5 environment "influencers" in 2007.  (Conversely, in my working life in the developing world, it's really sad to see capital cities around the globe making the same mistakes in prostituting themselves to the car as London is now having to reverse at such cost; but that's another story, and we will probably continue to wait in vain for an example-setting dictator who eschews motorcades in favour of cycle-cades as his preferred means of getting around town.)

At the end of my time as Chair of the LCC, I was arguing that its role had changed, from a campaign to persuade people of the various merits of cycling - which no one now disputes - to a campaign to ensure that vast amounts of money are not squandered on facilities dreamt up by people who don't have a clue about cycling and the needs and preferences of cyclists.  Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what's happening - as another piece by Gilligan evidences, a lot (indeed he argues most) of the infrastructure that's being installed for cyclists is crap.

The other thing the LCC has been trying to do in recent years is celebrate cycling as part of a way of life, and not as an aggressive urban sport for Lycra-clad, red-light jumping jocks. On that front, the really good news about the Boris hire scheme (apart from all the good leg-over jokes it afforded an opportunity for) is that they haven't succumbed to what I am sure was probably a pretty fierce lobby by "health and safety" types to force people riding the bikes to wear helmets. 

This is not just because there is evidence that, in an urban setting, helmets can actually create greater dangers for cyclists (because motorists view them as "protected" in some way and so behave more dangerously towards them).  More importantly, not wearing a helmet is both part of the relaxed-lifestyle-statement and a celebration of the real joy of cycling in a city, which is the sense of liberation that it brings from all the technical, personal and bureaucratic frustrations of urban life.