Rage against the cheap machine

In Christmas 1909, a bottom-of-the-range bike from Gamages cost just under £4. That was equivalent to a little over an average month's wages, or 300-odd pints in a pub.

A century later, Asda will flog you a 'bike' for £70. Even on minimum wage that's only two days' earnings, and even in Wetherspoon's it's only thirty-odd pints. Or 175 profiteroles.

This is a testament to a hundred years' engineering and marketing progress: today, for a tenth of the cost, we can manufacture something that lasts a fiftieth as long...

I'm banging on about cheap bikes again in my Real Cycling column in the latest issue of Cycling Plus. No doubt there will be several bicycle-shaped objects under the Christmas tree this time next week - gaudy, crackling, stiff packages held together flimsily by sticky tape. And that's before they've been wrapped.

And as for the weather, well here in central London this morning it's nothing like last February (picture). A few flurries but no settled snow. The roads and pavements are a bit nasty with black ice, but that doesn't photograph well, being invisible. Think I'll postpone that Christmas shopping cycling trip for a while.

Specialist subject: Spain's daft helmet laws

I finally caught up with last week's Watchdog on BBC's iPlayer last night (still available for viewing today and early tomorrow). One item, fronted by John Humphrys, investigated those self-assembly bicycle-flavour novelties sold by chainstores for under £100.

Dogwatch's unsurprising conclusion was that such cheap 'bikes' are not worth the cardboard boxes they come in. And even more potentially lethal than pop tarts.

I was pleased though to learn that Mr Humphrys, frontman of Mastermind and Radio 4's Today programme, is a Real Cyclist. When interviewed by the irritating Anne Robinson after the item (right), he revealed that uses a woman's pink shopping bike, and doesn't wear a helmet.

He said his own experience backed up recent research that not wearing a helmet was safer, because motorists give you a wider berth.


As you know, I put helmets on a pedestal. It's the best place for them. I certainly would never put one on my head.

Unless of course the law requires it, which it does in some dangerous countries with primitive road conditions: Australia, New Zealand, certain US states... and Spain.

But Spain's helmet laws are bizarre, as we found in our highly enjoyable cycle tour there last month. Lids are compulsory (right).


But not in built-up areas (right) such as nice quiet backstreets like this, or busy city centres, where presumably all that traffic makes you less likely to bang your head.

Or up hills (below right). Or if it's hot. I'm told that all this may be in honour of the similar motorbike helmet laws, whose similarly odd exceptions were put in to appease the bare-headed lobby when that legislation came in years ago.


Well, coming from Yorkshire, I think south London's hot, so imagine how Mallorca felt.

Does that mean I don't have to ever wear a helmet there, or would I get interrogated by the police?

Perhaps John Humphrys should try it out. He'd be better at the interrogation than me. Indeed, I wish in cycle-policy meetings I had his talent for asking fearless, succinct and incisive questions, instead of Evan Davis's.

Turn those unwanted gifts into decoy bikes

Bike theft in London is booming. Over 18,000 were stolen in Westminster alone in the last year, up 1,000 on the previous 12 months. Now Boris Johnson is being asked to increase the use of 'bait bikes' to trap thieves, according to the Press Association yesterday. It's something our cycling mayor knows all about: he says he's had seven taken over the last decade.

He's not alone. Lance Armstrong and David Cameron (twice) suffered the same fate recently; and Muhammad Ali, the story goes, got into boxing by accident when his bike was nicked.

I had a bike thefted in 2005 in that hotbed of cycle larceny, Twickenham (I'm not joking - apparently it is). I came out from a convivial curry with friends to find an empty rack, and did that ten-minute wandering-in-disbelief thing. Had I locked it somewhere else? Had I come by bike at all? Did I ever have a bike in the first place? Do I actually exist, or am I someone else pretending to be me?

You feel that, at least, the removals team could leave you some sort of notification, perhaps a sticker or card on the rack, informing you the bike had been stolen, like when your car is towed away.

It had been double-locked. It was registered on immobilise.com. I reported it to the police, who were about as keen to see me again as they would an internet date whose profile photo had proved ten years old. I scoured second-hand bike shops, second-hand websites, Brick Lane. All to no avail: less then five per cent of 440,000 bikes reported stolen in Britain every year are returned to their owners.

Talk to many a lapsed cyclist and a saddening story often emerges: they used to cycle a bit until their machine was stolen, and they never got round to replacing it. (The average loss for an uninsured stolen bike is nearly £350, so it's understandable.)

Anyway, if the Met want decoy bikes for their scheme, I have a suggestion. Do a house-to-house run just after Christmas. Every other family house will have an eighty-quid thing with two wheels, bought as a present in the naive belief it was a bicycle, ridden twice, and chucked in the garage when it proved as rideable as a supermarket trolley.

It seemed a steal at the time - well, now perhaps it really can be. Bingo! Two problems solved at once!

Tyring work

Ah. Probably better not to wait until your back tyre looks like this before getting a new one. Even if you want to get the maximum wear out of it. I wondered why it felt a bit spongy last night.

Still, at least I could bring my spare el-cheapo bike out of the cobwebs and use it to cycle to the shop to buy a new tyre. I take back everything I said about it in July.

Hangover from buying a cheap bike

Over at the Guardian bike blog, Helen Pidd has been testing out Asda's 'cheapest UK bike'. Unsurprisingly, the £70 BSO - 'bicycle shaped object', the acronym used on bike forums to dismiss such cut-price junk - turned out to be nothing but trouble.

I acquired a BSO unintentionally in 2007. I'd Eurostarred to Belgium for some riverside riding and Belgian culture (beer, chips, chocolate, comics, bitter linguistic factionalism) with a chum. He had taken his folding Airnimal; I had organised to hire a bike on arrival. But for various reasons, mostly the cheery can't-do attitude of the hire shop, the rental bike fell through.

Determined not to miss out on a cycling holiday, I strode across the road to a Decathlon-style chainstore and bought their second cheapest bike for about £120 (top right). It had dynamo lights, mudguards and a rack, and was called mystifyingly 'Gosport Railway'. I wondered why a French-made bike should be named after a Hampshire town's train link, especially when it's said to be Britain's largest without a railway station. Then I realised it was actually 'Go Sport'.


Well, it saved the holiday, which went without a hitch. (Apart from the Airnimal, ironically. It blew a non-standard-size tyre, which fortunately took two days and 15 bars to replace. Then its entire derailleur collapsed, luckily necessitating a well-lubricated layover in a French village where we found a cycling blacksmith.) And I somehow smuggled the bike back on Eurostar, wrapped up in a discarded sleeping bag.


It's languished in a shed since, as a 'spare bike'. But it never gets used. Because it's just so horrible to ride. It's stiff where it should be smooth and loose where it should be tight. The gears slip. The brakes judder. The saddle is made of concrete and the derailleur of tinfoil. The flimsy tyres could twist into a sausage-dog to amuse a kids' party.

Sleek and shiny and black, it looks like a million dollars. And rides like a Big Mac 2-for-1 voucher. For a leisurely camping bar-hop round rural Belgium it just about did its emergency job. But use it round London? I'd feel safer skateboarding through Blackwall Tunnel.

Cheap bikes are a waste because, as Helen confirms, they're just so unpleasant to ride. If this was your first experience of cycling, or at least the first since your paper round, it would put you off for life. Just three hundred quid will get you something that's worth repairing when it goes wrong and which is actually a joy to use. If we want to get more people using bikes, low-budget junk isn't the way to do it. Now, happily, Eurostar encourages you take bikes; it may be a steep £20 each way, but that still leaves plenty to enjoy Belgian culture.