Rio grand: Cycling in Madrid

I've just come back from Madrid. As the pleasant young man in Tourist Info confidently told me when I asked for a bike map, there isn't such a thing. Nobody cycles in Madrid.

Last Sunday (top right and bottom right) I rode past several thousand of those nobodies, on the new 10km riverside cycle path and in the vast parklands of Casa de Campo.

In the centre of town, true, cyclists are as rare as a vegetarian bullfighter. There are no cycle lanes at all, and virtually no cycle parking. And I thought Manchester was bad.


This is a typical scene (right): intrepid bloke on bike wondering whether to risk riding up the main road, or weave in and out of strolling pedestrians on the footpath. Or just give up and spend all afternoon with beer and tapas.

But a few cyclists do ride around the old centre. It's not only possible but, in the mazy backstreets, actually quite pleasant. If you've cycled in London, and certainly Manchester, central Madrid will seem no more challenging.


So I hired a bike from the excellent Trixi Bikes - only 8 euros for four hours - and spent a blissful Sunday afternoon on two wheels.

The few miles of that riverside cycle path, Madrid Rio (right, see map of path), and Casa de Campo, were absolutely stuffed with cyclists. Clearly a lot of people have bikes, and a lot will use them if the facilities are there.


Facilities such as bike-friendly bars and cafes: Casa de Campo was full of them, their bike racks full with Sunday riders enjoying a one-euro-fifty glass of beer with free tapas (right).

As I blogged in May, Barcelona turned itself from a cycle desert into a cycle oasis in a few years thanks to sheer political will.

There's nothing to stop Madrid - whose main roads are gridlocked with motor traffic despite good public transport - doing the same.


Despite the fact that, as the Tourist Info man said, nobody cycles.

Which planet am I on?

The latest issue of New Scientist magazine reviews a new book, The Pluto Files: The rise and fall of America's favorite planet. The author, Neil deGrasse Tyson, wasn't directly responsible for the demotion of Pluto from planetary status in 2006. But after installing a new Pluto-free display of the solar system in New York's Hayden Planetarium, where he is director, he received hate mail, and evidently decided to cope with it by writing this book.

Well, anyone who's cycled from York to Selby, or from Taunton to Bridgwater, has proof of Mr Tyson's folly. Both cycle paths have scale models of the solar system, and both feature Pluto as fully-fledged planet. So it must be.

The York-Selby route is the world’s second longest cycle path. To scale, anyway: at 1 in 575,872,239, it represents a six-billion-kilometre-long rail trail. It begins just under the ring road south of York, with a 2.4m diameter golden globe representing the sun, and finishes 10.3km away just outside the village of Riccall with the tiny 6mm sphere that represents Pluto (right). En route you have all the planets, sized and placed to that scale.

It vividly illustrates the emptiness of space, very different from the crowded celestial pool table suggested by your school textbook. Though, granted, as you strike south away from the sun, things start off relatively congested. Mercury, the size of a ball-bearing, is 101m from the sun. Venus, slightly larger, is 87m on. Another 72m brings you to Earth, a bright blue gobstopper splendidly painted with continents and oceans. Mars, a vivid crimson pea, is 136m beyond.


Jupiter, swirly and as big as a football, is over a kilometre on; Saturn, adorned with its rings, is a similar distance past that. To reach grapefruit-sized Uranus (right) and Neptune you have to go another 2.5km and 3km respectively. If you think the name of Uranus is bad enough, it could have been worse: when William Herschel discovered it in his back garden in Bath in 1781, he wanted to call it George.

Finally comes Pluto – or rather ‘134340 Pluto’ as it is now officially known, following its relegation in August 2006 to the minor league of planets along with other distant orbital chaff such as 90377 Sedna, 136199 Eris, and 50000 Quaoar. But it must be a planet because here it is, just outside the village of Riccall, along with its satellite (or rather, planet twin) Charon.

Each is as big as the sort of thing that falls out from inside your bike during some ambitious piece of DIY mechanics and doesn't appear to fit anywhere when you try to put it back. You just can't imagine how something so small and so far could possibly be detected from earth, the size of a mouse trackerball 11km distant, especially when it's only illuminated by the sun, back on the A64 by-pass.

But if Pluto seems remote, consider that on this scale our nearest stellar neighbours – the Alpha Centauri family – would be 70,000km away. Space has an awful lot of not very much. But then Selby could well be full of Dark Matter.

As if that wasn't enough proof for the planet-denying Mr Tyson, there's TWO more Plutos on the Taunton-Bridgwater canal in Somerset, a canal which has a double set of scale-model planets along its length, and which somehow manages not to be linked to the rest of the waterway system.

In this case the sun is halfway between them, at Maunsel Lock (where there’s a Canal Centre; OS 193, ST309298). The canalside orrery has a double set of planets, ranging out from the sun in each direction. So, to scale, it’s even longer than York’s.

It’s 23km along the canal from the Bridgwater Pluto to the sun and beyond to the Taunton Pluto, which has placed the now-relegated planetoid in the decidedly non-league location of a supermarket car park (right). Pluto, which as any fule kno is A PLANET, wasn't discovered until 1930; well, they should have looked here.

There's quite a bit more about these routes and other similar ones, including how-to information, in my book (see left).

Here's a Google map of the York-Selby route:


View Larger Map

Not especially London-centric, I know, but I couldn't resist it, and it's worth trying to snag a cheap rail deal to York to do this path. And tomorrow's post will be very London, I promise.

Comedy Cycle Lanes 1: Nine Elms Lane

This is the first in a series about bad bike facilities. (For the mathematicians among you, the series is infinite, irrational, and monotonic increasing.)

First up is one of the crown jewels of crap cycle paths: the one along Nine Elms Lane in south London, between Queenstown Road and Vauxhall. Here's a Google map:


View Larger Map

I've been past it several times, and greeted it like an old friend yesterday when I went into Clapham to have my teeth re-grouted.

Well, not so much an old friend, more like a vengeful and ugly ex-partner from a messy divorce.

Anyway, the path starts just by Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, where stray or unwanted apostrophes are taken in and cared for. Here is where you can join the path. Except that you can't, because they fence it off from the road by these toothpaste-coloured blocks.
If you get as far as rappeling the blocks to get on to the path, then once you've abseiled down the pavement, you can practise your slalom skills.
A bad bike path is a bit like those hitherto unseen characters that join the Star Trek party, beaming down to a dangerous planet populated by bad actors: you just know it's only a matter of seconds before they disappear horribly. Sure enough, the Nine Elms path expires here, only to rematerialise after the bus shelter. (All cyclists, of course, simply ignore the path and opt to follow the road.)
Finally, just by the turn-off to the fruit and veg volcano of New Covent Garden market, comes your comic highlight: the cycle path completely blocked in the space of ten metres by an electricity box, a street light pole, and - boom, tiss! - the sign for the cycle path.

To be fair, the same bike path is also blocked by the sign for the bike path at several other points on the bike path, and on the one that runs along the opposite side of the road.

Do you know of more LOL bike facility incompetence? Other chortle-making cycle-path cluelessness? Or perhaps you're a publisher who wants to push a book called Crap Cycle Lanes, which I distinctly recall was actually my suggestion? Let me know...