Let's twist again: Britain's bendiest road

One of Britain's strangest roads is in Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute off the west coast of Scotland.

The Serpentine Road was built when the town boomed as a Victorian resort, its ten hairpins enabling the horses to carry building materials up to the manor house on top of the hill. Or so the bloke in the pub down the bottom told us, anyway.

A curious biking experience either up or down, it's much more exciting than the much-vaunted 'crookedest street in the world' Lombard St in San Francisco. It's twistier, and it's two way, plus you don't have all the gawping tourists.


London's twistiest bike path is on the Ornamental Canal just west of St Katharine's Dock by Tower Bridge, while the twistiest road in England is said to be Zig Zag Hill, part of the B3081.

But neither offers what Rothesay (right) offers, which is superb Victorian architecture, a restored Victorian public toilet in posh marble, stunning views, and a fish and chip shop owned by relatives of Lena Zavaroni. Ha! Take that, San Francisco!

Google's Street View vehicle heroically ascended the road, and on one of the views you can see a cyclist pushing wearily upstairs.

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The 22-mile cul-de-sac: Britain's oddest road?

This is one of the strangest tarmac roads in Britain: a 22-mile long single-lane cul-de-sac that simply stops dead at the end of Britain's most fjord-like loch, many miles from anywhere.

It's the road from near Invergarry, on the Great Glen Fault in northern Scotland, to Kinloch Hourn, at the top of Loch Hourn on the epic west coast. (See map - Kinloch Hourn is on the extreme right, the road going east from there.)

It's an astonishing cycle experience: three hours of quite awesome, remote scenery (right), with the road entirely to yourself. On a sunny day, like we had last weekend on our trip there, the panoramas are awesome: cobalt-blue lakes, royal-green hills, polished-mahogany sheep turds.


Apart from a handful of walkers heading for the virtually roadless hiking wilderness of Knoydart, and the odd service vehicle for the hydroelectric dam on vast Loch Quoich (right), you'll see no traffic at all. Kinloch Hourn itself has a campsite, one B&B, a cafe which may or may not be open when you're there. Your chances of mobile phone access are as narrow as the road in its long, steep ascent away from the shore.

The prospect of cycling over 22 miles solely in order to turn back may not be attractive to everyone, but there are two ways to include the remarkable road in a linear trip. (We did it west to east to follow the tailwinds.)


The first is to cycle the rough but rewarding old pony track between the village of Corran and Kinloch Hourn. (The journey to Corran is a major undertaking in itself, probably involving a train to Mallaig, ferries to and from Skye, and a ride round the spectacular coastline of the Glenelg peninsula; or train it to Kyle of Lochalsh and cycle up and over the 350m Ratagan pass to Glenelg.) On a sturdy mountain bike that's no problem, but probably too uncomfortable on a road-touring bike with panniers. You'll bruise your bananas.


So your second option is to get Billy Mackenzie's by-appointment Arnsidale Ferry (above and right) between Arnisdale (next to Corran) and Kinloch Hourn (or wherever else you want him to take you). It's a half-hour trip on a thrillingly fast iron tub of a boat along a jaw-dropping sealoch, between the Glenelg and Knoydart peninsulas. It's reasonably priced too, especially given the remoteness and convenience (think of it as a water-taxi).


Once dropped off at the jetty near Kinloch Hourn, you can admire the very end of Britain's longest no-through-road (right), where it turns into a walking track.


Then you can cycle the extraordinary 22 ½ miles back to civilisation (ie pub) at Invergarry. The first mile or two is a steep uphill (right), too steep to cycle for most; from there you have no major climbs, and the trend is downhill after Loch Quoich.


The oddest thing about the road though is its lack of warnings where it starts, from the A87 in Glen Garry. Not even a 'T' sign, never mind Caution This Road Is 22 Miles Long And Goes Nowhere. Ah, another metaphor for life.

Bike Monopoly 3: Whitechapel Road

Whitechapel Road is a busy main road - the A11, in fact - running through London's East End, for about half a mile between Whitechapel High St and Mile End.


It's packed with shops and sprinkled with bike parking. The buildings ranging from the historic Bell Foundry (right, the oldest manufacturing company in Britain, dating back at least 450 years) to the grand East London Mosque. At the Mosque (below right), especially on Fridays, the faithful praise Allah, the most merciful; while if you tour the Foundry they'll tell you that in the past, a careless employee unfortunately inscribed a bell TO THE GLORY OF DOG.


At the western end, Osborn Road runs off north. Follow your nose here: it quickly becomes bustling and colourful Brick Lane, renowned for its Bangladeshi shops, and dozens and dozens of restaurants that sell curries built from garishly-coloured steel and plastic. Or perhaps they just taste that way. (We prefer Southall for spicy eats: better, cheaper, more varied.)

Just beyond the western end, by Aldgate East tube station, is Whitechapel Art Gallery (below). Entry is free and you can amble round the works on show. Be advised, before you start commenting knowledgeably about the witty postmodern use of urban service-culture semiotics, that the first gallery on the right as you go in is actually a restaurant and not an artwork.


Monopoly's Whitechapel Rd costs £60. What could this buy you there? A few feet away from Whitechapel Rd, on Fieldgate St, the New Tayyab restaurant is the one to head for if you want a fine curry experience. Sixty quid will get you a slap-up meal for three or four - it's bring your own, so you can economise on drinks. Just remember what bumpy East End streets do to cans of lager if transporting them here in your panniers, though.

Maths proves the Blackfriars Bridge Paradox

Lots of stuff on London's roads is paradoxical. Taxis furiously overtaking you ten metres before a red light. Drivers who moan that you shouldn't be on the road, but complain when you're on the pavement. Cycle lanes provided for your safety that disappear at the dangerous bits such as junctions. The one-way system north of Oxford St. It goes on.

But here's a real-life, mathematically supported paradox. Closing Blackfriars Bridge and its approach roads to traffic (the black-striped sections in the illustration on the right) would actually improve the overall traffic flow in London. That's the counter-intuitive suggestion in a 2008 paper by academics Hyejin Youn, Hawoong Jeong and Michael Gastner.


Their paper, The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks, looks at the traffic networks in London, Boston and New York. They propose from their data on traffic flows that Blackfriars Bridge Road (right) - wow, I never thought I'd see that appearing as a term in an equation - could be a real-life example of Braess's Paradox.

That's a theoretical situation where drivers, each choosing the most efficient route for themselves, actually don't produce the overall best solution for traffic flow - and that by closing off some of their options, you force them into a more optimal solution.


In fact, a tiny bit of part of the route they black-stripe out, St Bride St, is already peds-and-bikes only (right).


So let's do the thing properly and test the science! Close the road and turn it over to bikes! Then everyone's happy. Traffic flows better elsewhere, and we'd get a whole 3km-4km of gloriously wide, car-free bikes-only track, scything across central London. Not just the bridge (right), but the approach roads too would be ours. Motorists couldn't object because it would be SCIENTIFICALLY PROVED.

Boris, are you listening? That's what I'd call a Cycle Superhighway!

Holy roads, Batman

London's streetscape changes, exhilaratingly, from day to day. New buildings go up; new roadworks take you to excitingly unfamiliar routes; new potholes form. The streets have an entire tectonic system of their own.

I've been keeping my eye on this growing monster on Waterloo Bridge. It's on the northbound side, near the north end, by the bus stops. It's been patched and filled before, but it's a losing battle. The rock-cracking temperatures of the Snow Events last week, and the sledgehammer bus wheels, keep quarrying away at the Waterloo lithosphere.

It's a whopper! An opencast mine. An extinction-event crater. A rift valley lined with fossils of uncharted taxonomy. It took me five minutes just to clear out the geology field trip from inside it, so I could take a picture.

Well, it's quite big, anyway. Large enough to drown a small mammal in, at least. And I've reported it.

You can report this sort of thing online quite easily. The CTC have a pothole site for example, fillthathole.org. Alternatively, FixMyStreet.com is another high-tech general-purpose reporting website, and allows you to upload photos (always a help).

FixMyStreet also apparently offers an iPhone application: point the iPhone camera at the pothole, fill in a short form, and the iPhone's GPS senses where you are and which council area you're in, and magically sends the complaint with the photo to the relevant officer in the council. Then creates a Facebook group and organises a party to celebrate.

However, according to people who know about these things on Southwark Cyclists' e-group, you're likely to get quickest action on a 'red route' (controlled by Transport for London, usually denoted by red instead of yellow lines at the side) if you report it directly to the TfL website - otherwise it might go to the council instead and involve a delay.

It's a shame the road is so busy, as otherwise it could provide untold adventure-leisure opportunities - boating, bungee jumping etc. Though actually, maybe cycling over Waterloo Canyon is enough of an extreme sport, thanks very much.

Parking hoop-la

My Biking Partner spotted this collapsed bike (top) round the corner from where we live yesterday. Clearly it was dangerous - not only blocking the pavement, but also at risk of being squashed by the car.

So BP did what any public-spirited citizen would do: leave the bike where it is, and go home to get the camera.

It was for a good cause though. Pictures were taken and emailed to local council cycling officers with a request for cycle hoops to be installed.
We really like cycle hoops. Devised by a student called Anthony Lau, they are intended for places where there isn't space for conventional Sheffield racks, but where the demand for bike parking is such that people shackle up to road furniture anyway.

Adding the hoop (right) turns a greasy pole into a sensible bike park. You have two points to lock it with your two locks, it won't fall down, and you can't lose your bike to that trick of unbolting the sign at the top and sliding the bike up and off. It happens. (The hoops need special tools to undo them.)

The hoops cost shillings, and are easy and quick to install. Southwark and Lambeth are already rolling them out, which I suppose is what you do with hoops; you can see lots of examples along Union St (right) from Southwark tube station, for instance. More details on www.cyclehoop.co.uk.

And yes, of course we did put the bike back upright. After waiting a few minutes on the off-chance that the driver of the parked car might turn up and accidentally steamroller the bike, of course. That would have been a cracking YouTube video.