The Lo Fidelity Bicycle Club have written a rather fun blog but still serious post about the highway code for cyclist.

69 You MUST obey all traffic signs and traffic light signals. That means NOT breaking red lights. The wearing of a replica professional team kit does NOT make you immune from all traffic laws. You know you are doing wrong because of the self-righteous yet furtive look you always have when you’re doing it. FAILURE to comply means ALL OTHER ROAD USERS INCLUDING LAW ABIDING CYCLISTS and SOME OTHER PEOPLE I’VE JUST THOUGHT OF have the right to abuse you. [Laws RTA 1988 sect 36 & TSRGD reg 10(1)

72 On the left. When approaching a junction on the left, vehicles will turn in front of you, out of or into the side road. Just before you turn, check for undertaking cyclists or motorcyclists. Do not ride on the inside of vehicles signalling or slowing down to turn left despite the fact they just overtook you at speed.

73 Pay particular attention to long vehicles which need a lot of room to manoeuvre at corners. Be aware that drivers may not see you. They may have to move over to the right before turning left. Wait until they have completed the manoeuvre because the rear wheels come very close to the kerb while turning. Do not be tempted to ride in the space between them and the kerb. In fact, if you see a lorry indicating or making a turn just STOP for goodness sake. The World is a brighter place with you still in it.

74 On the right. If you are turning right, check the traffic to ensure it is safe, then signal and move to the centre of the road. Allow for BMW drivers that will still overtake you even in the middle of your manoeuvre. Wait until there is a safe gap in the oncoming traffic and give a final look before completing the turn. It may be safer to wait on the left until there is a safe gap or to dismount and push your cycle across the road. No-one is going to stop as motorists are always in a terrible hurry for some reason.

Do click here to read the rest of this post over on Lo Fidelity Bicycle club, it is rather amusing but ever so correct.

LINK : Direct.gov.uk – Highwaycode – Cyclists

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1. RLJ
2. SillyCyclist IX
3. SillyDriver III

Make full Bikeability cycle training compulsory before anyone can pass their driving test.

It would need to be current, like the drivers’ theory test, which must be passed up to 3 years before the licence can be granted, so a school playground session aged 7 will not suffice.

The reasons are several:

One – if all drivers have first qualified as cyclists, they will be more aware of cyclists on the road, why they’re positioning themselves assertively, how much room to give etc and roads will be safer for all users.

Two – the age when most children stop cycling (often due to peer pressure) is the mid-teens, and this is also the age when they start wanting to learn to drive. Making cycle training a part of this formative experience will normalise cycling and remind young people just how much they enjoyed it. Planting the seeds of healthy and environmentally-friendly travel at this age can only be a good thing.

Three – once people are trained to ride bikes easily, they will see the attraction of cycling more, they’ll be more confident and are much more likely to use their bikes on a day-to-day basis, rather than taking the car on short journeys, thus reducing traffic and pollution on local streets.

Absolutely splendid idea and spot on to the idea I had.

The chicken and egg situation is that we need to be road aware/wise before we go out on the road but we can’t become that without using the roads. But cycling is a great way as Bryony write in her post to get everyone prepared to use a bigger and more powerful vehicle. Like when you take your motorbike license you have to gain experience before you can use a higher cc’ed motorbike.

And of course if you learn to drive an motor vehicle you need to be retested every say five years. It is simply wrong that you as a 17 year old can take your driving licence but don’t need to check your skills before you are well into your 60′s. So you can not touch a car for say 20 years but you are totally legal to drive one, how much history, maths or physics can you remember from your school days ?

LINK : Idea to revolutionise cyclist/driver interaction?

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1. LGV Cycle Safety – epetition response
2. Children should be encouraged to ride to school
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This film is Copenhagen seen through North American eyes, as they say it took a long time in CPH to get there but they did. And we (yes even London) can do it but we do not have 30-40 years to get to the same place that CPH are at right now. As the people in the films say we can do it and they are from America ( sorry just a little joke) we here in London can do it too. We just need to educate road users would that be the fella on a BSO or racer or that massive 4×4 and then the rest will come.

While Streetfilms was in Copenhagen for the Velo-City 2010 conference, of course we wanted to showcase its biking greatness. But we were also looking to take a different perspective then all the myriad other videos out there. Since there were an abundance of advocates, planners, and city transportation officials attending from the U.S. and Canada, we thought it’d be awesome to get their reactions to the city’s built environment and compare to bicycling conditions in their own cities.

Wonderful film isn’t it ? So lets us get out there on our bicycles and make this happen, it can only become a win win for us all.

EDIT : Was just shown this this tourist information film (TravelTalks) from 1937, nothing much have changed since eh :)

LINK : Velo-City 2010
LINK : Cycling in Copenhagen – through North American eyes

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1. VELO-CITY GLOBAL 2010
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1/ They do invite you as a cyclist to move into the door zone. Please don’t as when you do so you invite other road users to over take you. Not a safe or comfortable place to be, squeezed in between a parked car on your left, which door could fly open at any time, with another speeding past you on your right in a narrow space.

Taking the right position on the road as a cyclist it will take you right over these things, which I know is quite annoying and it will ruin a good ride. But the discomfort from doing so is nothing to the discomfort of being doored.

2/ And then there is the name of these thing – Sleeping police men. I mean who in their right mind would go out unto a road and sleep? Dear officer of the law you will not have a great night sleep out there and you will soon cease to be a sleeping police man you will be a …. police man.

So can we go back to call them speed humps.

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Half of all children want to cycle to school but just two per cent do. A third of children are now driven to school, many for journeys of less than one mile.

Quite a sad quote, ain’t it ?

I have often talked to children at the schools where I train Bikeability and they are simply shocked that I cycled there. And then I find out that they live pretty much down the road, no more than a mile and a half away. They know it is not that far away because it only takes 5min in a car to drive. Knowing the area they live, many children could cycle safely to school on the road. And even on the journeys where they have to cross a busy road, there are pedestrian crossings for them to use.

Just a little training is needed. E.g. walk with the child the journey a few times and talk them through the route, junctions etc, and then let them walk ahead of you a few times so that they are doing the crossings by themselves, with you supervising from a distance. I bet you that within a week little Jr. is walking to school just fine alone. With some cycle training that many schools are doing or through companies like cycletraining.co.uk your child will get to know all there is to know about cycling on the road. Then with some support from you, the parent, they will be cycling to school in no time.

The more kids that cycle to school, the fewer cars doing the rat run there will be and therefore quieter roads to cycle on. A “win win” I would say.

In the time that I have lived over here, I have only seen three families teach their young ones how to cross the roads. One of them was a German family who clearly spend time explaining how the little green man works. The most popular ways I see people train their little loved ones are either …

1/ Dragging the little loved one across a dual carriageway where there was no pedestrian crossing. Well there is, but it’s about 25m down the road. These things are magical: other road users will stop and give way for you while you are crossing. You do not have to play dodge ball with the other road users.

2/ Throw little Jr. into the Chelsea tractor and drive less than a mile to the school. I was at a junction doing some training and a lady and her daughter across the way climbed into the car and drove away only to arrive two and a half minutes later without her daughter. That distance you would be able to walk in ten minutes and it would be good for you.

LINK : Sustrans children should be encouraged to ride to school not prohibited
LINK : Couple warned over allowing children to cycle to school alone

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Sustrans has teamed up with the Future Jobs Fund to enhance the National Cycle Networks and give new skills to unemployed young people.

Trainees will get chance to train to use diggers and other machinery while renovating and revitalising sections of the National Cycle Networks, including in Bideford, Barnstaple, Taunton, Bath, Swindon, Chester, Liverpool, Manchester, Whitehaven, Lincoln, Rotherham, Leeds and Consett.

182 unemployed young people, aged between 18 and 24, have been taken on for a six-month contract. Trainees have to have been unemployed for at least six months to be taken on by the scheme.

Though I do hope that these cycle lanes will be better than what sustrans tend to put up.

LINK : Sustrans launches cycle path scheme for the unemployed

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1/ they are doing more than 10/15 or even 20mph, quite often in a 20mph zone.
2/ to just gain 5 yards (in a hurry) and then get stuck behind another slower or stopped vehicle.
3/ at all costs, e.g. cut right in front of the cyclist so that they have to do an emergency stop.

Munster Road, SW6, in London is a great road for this, every and I mean every morning I have SillyDriver who just has to get past me, who is doing around 15mph. On a road with many speed bumps, plenty of road narrowings and parked cars on both sides of the road, which makes it narrow and very hard to overtake on. Every day I have a SillyDriver trying their best to over take me at all costs, easily two or three times before they succeed.

Attempt number one: Pull out, figure out that there is no room to do the manoeuvre, hold back wait until they are past the bollards.

Attempt number two : Pull out, figure out that there is an oncoming car and there still is no room to do the manoeuvre.

Attempt number three: Pull out, for the heck of it, revving the engine in the wrong gear to the max, which clearly can’t be any good for the motor, speed past me at break neck speed, way too close to comfort, hit the speed bump hard which clearly did break something judging by the scraping sound, which I of course laugh out to, which they of course don’t like. And then the SillyDriver comes to a quick stop less than 100 yards up the road in the queue ahead, which the SillyDriver would have seen if only they had looked a little further ahead than their bonnet of the vehicle they are in.

At which point I just cycle right past them, with a little wave, on the right all the way up to the junction of Lille Road and Fulham Palace Road where the tail back stated.

I have only one question, why ?

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2. SillyDriver I
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Great for us cyclist and other road users, the more flags the better you are ;)

LINK : Stupid drivers forced to display white flags with red cross

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This made me think about Contested Streets a documentary about Copenhagen and Jan Gehl an architect and urban planner. I watch the full length film some time ago but right now I can only this 9-10 minute clip. The clip talk about that in Copenhagen there is around 30% who uses the public transport, 30% uses their own cars and 30% on bicycles but in summer that number for cyclist goes up to 60%.

Yes Jan and his colleges in Copenhagen have been at it for 30 odd years to get Copenhagen to where it is now, a cycling heaven. If only London could learn and listen to what they have learned, I’m sure that we don’t have to wait that long to get London up there along with Amsterdam, Portland and Copenhagen.

I was looking around for what else Jan Gehl was doing and I found this talk at RIBA Trust over on gleeds.tv Introduction, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. All around 13-15min each clip but the whole presentation is worth watching, funny and something we all can learn from.

Jan have worked all around the world, in Melbourn, in New York etc and he says that London is probably the worst city he have seen when it comes traffic management. Where pedestrians and bicycle are second hand citizen and the car is the king.

Come on London get your finger out and do something instead of this half hearted attempt with Super Cycling Highway.

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2. VELO-CITY GLOBAL 2010
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Please do remember wearing an helmet does not make your cycling safer it is the way you cycle that makes your cycling safe. So jumping the red light, cycling on the pavement, jumping up and down the kerb and cycling around without looking where you are going etc with a helmet is not safe cycling.

A ill fitted helmet is as good as wearing none, I have blogged before about how to fit your helmet in my post, SillyCyclist III.

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