The Bike Show

With thanks to the Greater London Authority, here are the cycling-related questions put to the Mayor of London, and his answers, for the month of January 2010. [Read more →]

David Kitchen, aka Velocio, set up the London Fixed Gear and Single Speed Forum almost three years ago. In a short time it has spawned an active and inventive cycling community and in the process the forum has grown to become the world’s eleventh most visited cycling website. David talks about the success of the forum and gives pointers for anyone thinking of using the web to bring cyclists together including how to bridge the online and offline worlds.

The Levenshulme Bicycle Orchestra combine music, theatre, sculpture and bicycles with a sometimes chaotic and often subversive DIY ethic. Their debut album Nine Doors is out next month as a free/flexible price digital download. Band members David Birchall, Zeke Clough, Josh Kopecek, Huw Wahl talk about the sonic potential of the bicycle, improvisation and creating culture out of nothing. Read a review onEast London Lines of the Orchestra’s performance last week at Barden’s Boudoir. Upcoming live dates are on the Orchestra’s MySpace page.

This is the last show of the current season. The Bike Show returns to the airwaves on 5 May 2010.

 

 Standard Podcast [30:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Following on from last week’s show on well-being, we look at the importance of getting a good fit between rider and machine. Scherritt Knoesen of The Bike Whisperer, is a leading London-based bike fitter. We talk geometry, contact points and pedaling action. Read Grant Peterson’s article The Shoes Ruse on the folly of clip-in pedals and cycling-specific shoes. If you go for a fitting with Scherrit tell him you heard him on The Bike Show. You never know, you might get a discount!

Illustration from Cycling Manual, 23rd edition, 1954

 

 Standard Podcast [30:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

January is the perfect month to take a closer look at how to stay feeling good on the bike. In the studio to share their expertise are Michael Crebbin, a sports physio specialising in cycling-related problems, and Rebecca Bogue who teaches a yoga class designed especially for cyclists.

Contact Rebecca via the Bodywise studio in the Roman Road, east London. Her yoga for cyclists class is on Thursday nights 8.15 – 9.30pm at Bodywise, 119 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 0QN. Read more about Why Yoga Is Good For Cyclists.

Contact Michael via the Complete Physio clinic. Read more about physiotherapy for cyclists at the London Fixed Gear and Single Speed Forum and at Rollapaluza.

 

 Standard Podcast [28:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It’s the tenth day of Christmas and this week’s show is like a Christmas stocking with bulges in all the right places. Dr Steve Fabes is about to set off on a four and a half year cycle ride around the world, crossing six continents. He talks about his route, preparations and apprehensions. Any lover of vintage bicycles will be a regular visitor at their local cycle jumble, a fine tradition with a cast of strange but friendly characters. A good place to find out about upcoming cycle jumbles is the Campy Oldy website and there are some pictures from the recent Ripley jumble over here.

Paul Fournel continues his reading from Need for the Bike with a grisly tale of dogs, hospitals, Paris Roubaix and a Black and Decker drill. To buy Need for the Bike, click on the box on the left and Resonance FM will get a few pennies.

 

 Standard Podcast [29:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

With thanks to the office of Jenny Jones AM, here is the monthly digest of questions and answers to the Mayor that are relevant to cycling. [Read more →]

Should cyclists stop at red lights? Why do we feel such a strong urge to keep rolling? Should our behavior be guided by the law of the land or the laws of common courtesy? What would Isaac Newton and Thomas Aquinas have to say about the matter? Bringing their expertise to a discussion of the physics and philosophy of cyclists and red lights are Nigel Warburton of the Open University, the popular Philosophy Bites podcast and author of several classic textbooks on philosophy and Mark Miodownik, head of the Materials Research Group at King’s College London and writer and broadcaster.

 

 Standard Podcast [30:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Tim Dawson, cycling columnist for the Sunday Times, runs the Cycling Books website, the most compendious review website for cycling books. He joins me in the studio to discuss the literature of cycling, from Tour de France to cycle touring. Paul Fournel reads another extract from Need for the Bike. Below is a list of the books discussed in the show. If you’d like to buy them, follow the links to Amazon and Resonance FM will get a share of anything you buy, even if it’s stuff not on the list. What a nice way to help your favourite bicycling art radio station!

The Classics
The Rider by Tim Krabbé
The Escape Artist by Matt Seaton
Need for the Bike by Paul Fournel

Tour de France
Bad to the Bone by James Waddington
Sweat of the Gods by Benjo Masso
Wide-eyed and Legless: Inside the Tour De France by Jeff Connor
Le Tour: A History of the Tour De France by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
My Comeback: Up Close and Personal by Lance Armstrong and Elizabeth Kreutz

Cycle touring & travel
Thunder and Sunshine by Alistair Humphreys
The Hungry Cyclist by Tom Kevilll-Davies
French Revolutions by Tim Moore
Full Tilt – Ireland To India With a Bicycle by Dervla Murphy
Transylvania and Beyond by Dervla Murphy
Blue River, Black Sea by Andrew Eames
A Bike Ride by Anne Mustoe

Advocacy, philosophy
Richard’s Bicycle Book by Richard Ballantine

Those we didn’t get time to talk about
Tomorrow We Ride by Jean Bobet
The Passion of Fausto Coppi by William Fotheringham
The Noiseless Tenor by James Starrs
Golden Age of Handbuilt Bikes and Competition Bikes by Jan Heine
Rouleur Annual 2009
Fixed: Global Fixed-Gear Bike Culture by Andrew Edwards and Max Leonard

To win copies of the current issues of Rouleur and The Ride Journal, send answers to the competition questions to bikeshow-at-resonancefm-dot-com. Thanks to these fine publications for donating the prizes!

And if that’s left you wanting more chat about cycling books, the 2007 Christmas books show is still online to listen again as is the show featuring Andrew and Philip Diprose of The Ride Journal. Matt Seaton wrote an excellent round-up over at The Guardian.

 

 Standard Podcast [32:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It’s the Christmas silly season and newspapers are again rounding on cyclists (aka ‘lycra louts’) for running red lights and putting other road users at risk. Never mind the lack of any hard evidence of injuries or deaths caused by cyclists running red lights, it’s a story that appears to please news and online editors, such as at the Sunday Times yesterday and The Times today.

To borrow a memorable phrase from Peter Mandelson, I am intensely relaxed about cyclists running red lights, where it is safe to do so, i.e. when there is no obstruction caused to anyone using the junction who has priority at the time. Josh Hart has a great blog post on the subject.

Josh says it’s important not to confuse safe behaviour with law-abiding behaviour. “You can follow every law and still put yourself in a terribly dangerous position (i.e. in the door zone). By the same token, you can slow and look around carefully at red lights and stop signs and proceed when no one is coming and you’ll likely never get into trouble. Blindly following the law is a recipe for getting hurt on your bike. Better to trust your own hearing, sight, and instincts than the government’s rigid idea of ‘health and safety’.”

There’s some evidence to suggest that cyclists stopping at traffic lights on the left hand side make themselves more vulnerable to getting squashed by lorries and HGVs/LGVs that find it hard to see a cyclists in that position. This may explain why London Mayor Boris Johnson is considering allowing cyclists to turn left on red as well as riding the ‘wrong’ way down one-way streets as is already the practice in Brussels, among many other cities.

This would go some way towards addressing the second plank of Josh’s argument, that the Highway Code is inappropriate for cyclists. He say’s “unfortunately we live in a society where the needs of one class of road user are prioritised at the expense of more vulnerable road users.”

Buffalo Bill made the same point long ago on The Bike Show when he said that traffic rules were only needed to address the problem of automobiles on the roads, not cyclists, and therefore the rules should not apply to cyclists in the same way. As Josh argues, “The bicycle is a kind of a hybrid animal– somewhere between a pedestrian and a vehicle, and we need to treat it as such… Let’s stop trying to fit the round peg of cycling into the square hole of overly regimented traffic regulations.” Amen to that.

But before anyone accuses me of encouraging a free-for-all at red lights I strongly believe that to run a red light safely you need to have all your senses about you. You need to be looking hard enough to see that there’s no danger. You need to give way to pedestrians who have priority and anticipate those that have not yet stepped off the pavement. Setting traps to catch cyclists running red lights is so obviously an instance of wasting police time, though there is one small respect in which I do approve of Fixed Penalty Notices for red light jumping: If you don’t see the rozzer who nicks you, you weren’t looking hard enough to be safe running the red light, were you? So pay up and consider it a £30 lesson in cycle training. Sometimes when I’m cycling I can’t really be bothered with the effort involved in running red lights so I am quite happy to stop and wait, assuming there’s no potentially left-turning lorry looming over me.

What never seems to be discussed in the whole debate on red lights is why cyclists feel such a strong urge to run red lights, why it makes so much sense for us to do it. Those who write about it invariably ascribe it to the perceived arrogance and smugness of the cyclist, an expression of their innate sentiments of self-satisfaction and superiority. I feel a lot of things when riding the streets of London but superiority is rarely one of them. Certainly not when it’s pouring with rain and another bus has whistled past within a few inches of me, accompanied by a billowing cloud of filth and spray.

Cyclists run red lights not because we consider ourselves to be supreme beings but because of the forces of physics. The nature of the bicycle is that we have to use our own energy to move. Getting going is not simply a matter of disengaging the clutch with the left foot and easing the right foot onto the accelerator. When cyclists stop we have to give up all the kinetic energy we’ve built up and when we start again we have to overcome the inertia of our own body masss and that of the bicycle, the road resistance, wind, and so on. Cyclists running red lights are like people walking in a park who walk in the direction of where they want to go rather than following the paved paths. If enough of them are doing it, the result is a muddy rut in the grass. We don’t blame the walkers, we blame the planner who didn’t think about desire lines when making the paved paths.

It’s my sense that running red lights is much less about saving time than saving energy. A cyclist who runs red lights generally doesn’t save much time because she’ll usually end up stopping at a major junction at which point a law-abiding cyclist will have caught up, or nearly caught up. The vital point is that the red light running cyclist will have expended much less energy. And this is important. Cycling can be hard work, and the perception of effort puts a lot of people off riding bikes. The easier it is, the more people are likely to take it up. (By the same token, all those roadies who use their daily commutes to work out as a form of training, should perhaps reconsider their red light running, since stopping means they use more energy and therefore get a better workout. The expenditure of energy to get up to cruising speed might be considered as a form of interval training.)

All this is just my intuition based on my own experiences of cycling. I’d really like to find a physicist or an engineer who would be able to properly quantify the time loss and the energy loss involved in stopping at red lights. I think the results would be interesting and would help illiuminate the debate. The implications might go beyond the debate on red light running and could be useful for transport planners who, if you ask me, should be working hard to design routes for cyclists that minimise the amount of stopping that’s required. If you’re a physicist or an engineer who could apply your knowledge to these questions, please get in touch.

With thanks to the office of Jenny Jones AM, here is the monthly digest of cycling Q&A to the Mayor, for the month of November 2009. [Read more →]

The cycle camping tour continues into the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, through Vermont and into Massachusetts. Struggles with thunderstorms and flying insects and a visit to the Crane paper mill where US dollar bills are made. Picture above shows the view back down the road from the summit of Whiteface Mountain.

Play on links below. There is an online map of the route here.

 

 Standard Podcast [29:19m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The first of two features on a north American cycle tour undertaken over the summer. Starting in cycle-friendly Montreal and Quebec’s routes vertes and camping on the shores of Lake Champlain, this episode ends with a mildly disturbing encounter with an over-talkative former NYPD officer and child abuse investigator.

Plus more from Paul Fournel’s Need for the Bike. This week he turns his attention to the question of the cyclist’s tan. If you buy the book online from Amazon using the link (left) Resonance gets some of the money. If you’d rather buy it from a shop, then choose the excellent Calder Bookshop in Waterloo. Music from Sharon Jones and the Daptones, Willie Nelson and R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders.

Play on links below.

 

 Standard Podcast [29:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This week’s show looks at the chronic lack of bicycle mechanics with the Ninon Asuni of Bicycle Workshop. Ninon founded Bicycle Workshop nearly thirty years ago after deciding she’d had enough of working as a librarian. She’s now among Britain’s most highly regarded bicycle mechanics with a devoted following in London and the rest of the country. Sean Lally and Ian Perkins of Cycle Systems Academy talk about their mission to train a new generation of cycle mechanics and to reinvent the profession.

Plus more from Paul Fournel’s Need for the Bike. This week he talks about landscape and the bicyclist. If you buy the book online from Amazon using the link (left) Resonance gets some of the money. If you’d rather buy it from a shop, then choose the excellent Calder Bookshop in Waterloo. Music from The Vines, Half Man Half Biscuit and Harmonia.

Play on links below.

 

 Standard Podcast [28:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Bike Show moves into advocacy mode this week with guest in the studio Debra Rolfe, Campaigns Director of the Cyclists’ Touring Club (CTC), Britain’s largest cycling organisation with 60,000+ members. Debra is spearheading the CTC’s new campaign against bad driving by motorists called Stop SMIDSY. The aim is to draw attention to the dangers of inattentive dangerous driving and the oh-so-familiar refrain ‘Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You’. We discuss the campaign and how cyclists can report near misses online.

Also in the show is a preview of 116 to Sea, an exhibition of photographs of the Dunwich Dynamo night ride by Joe McGorty. Joe is joined by Dunwich Dynamo godfather Patrick Field. And then there’s the second installment of Paul Fournel reading from Need for the Bike. Phew, all that in just half an hour!

Play MP3 on links below. Other file formats coming soon.

 

 Standard Podcast [28:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A youthful feel to this season opener with a visit to Lockleaze Primary School in Bristol, one of an number of Sustrans ‘Bike It’ schools acros the country. Plus childhood memories from Paul Fournel, reading from Need for the Bike* in person at the Calder Bookshop. We get the inside scoop on the much-awaited Sturmey Archer S3X, three speed fixed gear hub, from SA’s General Manager Alan Clarke.

If you’re a parent or teacher and want your school or your kids school to be a Bike It school, you can ask on the Sustrans website.

Image credit: Cycling England 2008

Play on links below. Other file formats (e.g. Ogg Vorbis) are here.

*If you buy Need for the Bike by following the link (left), some of the money goes to Resonance FM!

 

 Season Opener: Childhood Daze [28:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It’s late on Friday afternoon, well past beer o’clock, but here’s an idea to make London safer for cyclists: keep the biggest lorries off the streets during the morning rush hour. If enacted I am confident it would save lives. It can be done by tweaking existing legislation. [Read more →]

Transport for London has published a draft Cycle Safety Action Plan. Comments on the plan are required by December 11th 2009. The plan is good in parts but the emphasis is on voluntary measures, partnerships and awareness raising, when what is really needed is tough action against dangerous driving and facing up to the hard decisions needed to make London a cycle-friendly city. [Read more →]

Here are the cycling-related questions from the London Assembly answered by the Mayor this month. The questions cover a wide range of subjects, from lorries killing cyclists (including a question specifically about the Vallance Road/Whitechapel Road junction) to the new cycle superhighways, the London cycle hire scheme and much more.

I’ll be publishing the digest, kindly provided by the GLA, regularly. It’d be great if listeners to the show and readers of the blog would help crowdsource some analysis, give reactions etc in the comments. If there are other questions or follow-up questions that you think should be asked, post them too and I’ll do my best to persuade an Assembly Member to ask them. [Read more →]

They may still be testing the syringes used by riders in the 2009 Tour De France but that hasn’t stopped the organisers announcing the course for the 2010 edition. And it’s a cracker. I didn’t much care for this year’s figure-of-eight route with its anticlimactic ascent of Le Ventoux and total neglect of northern France which – with Brittany – is really the home of cycle sport à la Francaise. 2010 makes up for the omission with a Grand Départ in Rotterdam and four days winding along the roads (and over the cobblestones) of northern France, before branching east into the Champagne region.

Then come the Alps and an extended stay in the Pyrenees, climbing le col du Tourmalet not once but twice, in honour of the centenary of the first time Le Tour featured the climb back in 1910. Of course it was not uncommon for holidaying cycle tourists, men and women both, to ride over the Tourmalet and the other cols of the Pyrenees years before the Tour ever did. So potent is the self-mythologising of Le Tour I expect to tire of commentators informing me that Octave Lapize was the first man to summit the Tourmalet on a bicycle.

But back to the opening weekend, which strikes me as offering a great opportunity for a little jaunt across the Channel. Bike Show contributor, Bob Dylan buff and sometime journalist Matt Tempest has already expressed his delight at the prospect of “watching the Prologue in Rotterdam with a big fat one” (by which I assume he not referring to a Dutch version of the Camberwell Carrot but to the splendid hookers immortalised in Jacques Brel’s Amsterdam). And who am I to disagree? But how to get over there for all the fun? [Read more →]

I went to the Cycle Show yesterday looking out for the big themes that will help define cycling in 2010. I tend to glaze over in of the forests of identical crabon road bikes and hydraulically-enhanced mountain bikes, so if you want the latest on road and MTB, I’m afraid you’ll need to go elsewhere. Last year’s show proved that the fixed wheel craze had well and truly entered the mainstream with every bike company and their sister coming out with pared down ‘urban fixies’, some bringing the aesthetic of the flamboyant trick bike to the established form of the entry-level Langster and Pista. The fixed wheel bikes are still there this year but in much smaller numbers. What I found most interesting in this year’s show was the rennaissance of the hub gear, with Sturmey Archer leading the way. [Read more →]