Bike Monopoly 22: Chance 2 of 3

We've selected "Drunk in Charge" Fined £20 as our second Chance.

Under the Licensing Act 1872 (we learn from bikeforall.net's handy guide to cycling and the law) it is an offence to be drunk in charge of a bike. Just as it is an offence to be drunk in charge of a cow, and we certainly wouldn't condone such drink-driving. But it seems the law is never enforced.

More recently, the Road Traffic Act of 1988 makes it illegal to cycle on a road or in a public place if 'unfit to ride... that is... incapable of having proper control' though drink or drugs.

You can't be breathalysed or asked for a sample, any more than a pedestrian or horse can. So - as long you have proper control of your bike - you can enjoy a drink or two and cycle home.

Combination locks can be useful here. If you're too drunk to remember the combination, or to be able to work the fiddly barrels, you're not fit to be cycling anyway.

Meanwhile, I'm
(a) off soon to cycle in Poland, where the penalties for drunk cycling are somewhat bizzarely the same as for drunk driving - so better go by car if you're thinking of a heavy session, cycling could be dangerous with all those pissed drivers - and
(b) going to set up a bar called Moderation, so that I can truthfully tell the doctor I only drink in Moderation.

Bike Monopoly 21: Strand

Gershwin's song 'Strike up the Band' was apparently referred to by wordplay-happy British musicians as 'Bike up the Strand', no doubt to the mystification of our mid-20th-century transatlantic chums.


In practice, biking up Strand's three-quarters of a mile (no definite article - at least, not according to the streetname signs) can be a very tedious affair, particularly westwards towards Trafalgar Square, or round the traffic-Dante semicircle of Hell known as Aldwych. The road is jammed with lane-hopping buses, taxis, buses, taxis, buses and buses, and the buses can be a problem too.


It's a long and eventful journey though. Starting from the griffin at Temple Bar, the boundary marker for the City, you cycle westwards past the Royal Courts of Justice (above right), the facade of the old closed Strand tube station (right), and Somerset House.

Then, past Waterloo Bridge, you have on your left Savoy Court, the only place in Britain (by repute) where you have to cycle on the right both ways (it's currently being quasi-pedestrianised though).




This part of Strand is home to a million shops where you can buy the sort of things you buy in shops. So thick is the traffic, and sometimes the drivers, that you'll see cyclists scooting along the central reservation past the queues, just because they can (right). It leads you to Charing Cross on your left, before throwing you slightly off-kilter on to the bottom of Trafalgar Square.


Monopoly's Strand costs £220. What could this buy you there? In the words of the music-hall song, 'Let's all go down the Strand (have a banana)'. For that sum, depending on offers of the day, you could buy well over a thousand bananas from the Tesco Express on Strand.

Bananas can be a measure of cycling distance - we once met a German on a recumbent who ate 31 bananas in the 310km between Berlin and Hamburg, which suggests Strand is about an eighth of a banana.

Bike Monopoly 20: Free Parking

A non-square, and a bit of a non-issue: bike parking is free anyway, isn't it? If there are no stands, there's usually some railing or drainpipe or silly art installation (right) that you can use...


So, perversely, we'll look at paid-for bike parking. For example, the London Bridge Cycle Park (right) is a secure bike parking facility under the arches by London Bridge station, next to (and fronted by) the laudable On Your Bike.


You can leave your bike in their locked, attended compound for £1.50 a day or £5 a week; there are changing facilities too, though no showers. One drawback is that it closes at 7.30pm, so you can't spend a spontaneous evening on the town without recovering your bike first - though that may change positively in the future.

Business is whelming rather than overwhelming so far, but the concept of paid-for, top-end bike parking with facilities (and showers...) is something we may well see more of.


Indeed, at the recent City Cycling Forum in the Guildhall, we learned about the Shower Club. This is a scheme in preparation to create kind of health-club-style bike facilities in the City, with showers and secure parking.

The future for such things may depend on commercial input. For both the Shower Club and the LBCP, the funding may depend on income from local businesses who buy up a slice of the facilities for the use of their employees. LBCP has a whole upper floor dedicated to local-company use, and that's looking a promising source of subsidy.

It would be great to see secure cycle parking and shower rooms (as well as onsite bike maintenance) becoming a recognised perk offered by the workplace. But then it'd be great to see that tenner I'm sure I had this morning, too.

Sign up for putting mileages on signs

One of the things I love about cycling in the Netherlands is the signs. They don't just tell you how far it is to the next pancake shop, they give you much more: Alkmaar 4,2km Amsterdam 38km Deutschland 193km Kowloon 13328km Proxima Centauri 3.9 x 10^13km and so on. They're signs full of excitement and possibilities. By bike, anything is possible, they seem to say.

Not so much in England - in general, bike signs don't even bother to give you distances at all. I got into a disagreement with the Cycle Superhighways Tsarina the other evening at the City Cycling Forum because she told me they're probably not going to put distances on the signage for the Superhighways. Why not? Because some people might be confused by them. Well, I said, some people are confused by anything you can't vote for by telephone on a Saturday night, but that doesn't mean we should dumb every damn thing down to what marketing Barbies can understand. Which shows why I should never go into politics, TV, marketing, or probably any sort of paid employment.


So I was pleased to see this sign in Hull on yet another of my recent trips there. The National Cycle Route fishtail sign here (above right and right) is right in front of one of the few central Hull buildings not to have been relaunched by the Luftwaffe as a pile of rubble. It proudly encourages you to cycle to ROTTERDAM 231m ZEEBRUGGE 235m. And all but five of the miles the signposts tell you about are actually done by the North Sea Ferry, an easy flat cycle path up the road, while you sleep. I like that kind of cycling.

Cycle lane: bin and gone

Something for the weekend sir? How about another amusing picture of a blocked cycle lane.

This is the one on the footway near the top of Park Lane, obstructed by a council litter bin. [Insert joke about rubbish here - ed]

Bike Monopoly 19: Vine St

Vine St may be the shortest street on the Monopoly board - barely 40m - yet, in its short space, it achieves something remarkable: it has absolutely nothing of note at all. No shops, interesting facades or even lamppost to lock a bike to: just a dull, scruffy cul-de-sac with a few rear entrances mooning at you.


The cipher-street's puzzling inclusion in the game is down to a police station that was here in the 1930s when the locations were chosen (the orange set represents law and enforcement). However, it's unlikely you'll see as much as a Police Community Support Officer on patrol here, never mind a rifle-toting Met marksman. Which means you can break whatever cycling laws you can with impunity here, though it's hard to see what you could get up to in a street that you could lose down the back of a sofa.

(Of course, London has lots of other short streets, some of them even more bewilderingly minor than Vine St; but that's straying from Monopoly to Trivial Pursuit.)

Monopoly's Vine St costs £200. What could this buy you there? Apart from sneaking through the back entrances to a potential shop, there's no way to spend any money in Vine St. (Unless you do try breaking some cycling law and get caught and fined, but that's improbable.) The next best thing might be to treat yourself to a dinner for four at Fishworks, the restaurant that occupies the pedestrianised roadspace of neighbouring Swallow St.

Bike Monopoly 18: Marlborough St

There isn't actually a Marlborough Street (except for the one in Kensington SW3, which is clearly not what they mean).


There's only the Batman of Great Marlborough Street and its Robin of Little Marlborough Street, just off Regent Street and Carnaby Street.


The greater of the two is a shortish, typical busy central London street, with shops and traffic and vehicles parked where they shouldn't really but of course everyone does anyway.


The lesser is a tiny back-lane notable only for a shop with flowery wallpaper on the outside.


But if you cycle here to shop at, say, the idiosyncratic Liberty's, half department-store, half ship, you might find parking a problem. There's not much, and what there is - on the pedestrianised bit that leads off to Carnaby St - is usually full (right).

There are stern notices (below) warning you not to use the railings, which of course everyone does anyway. (I once had to moan about the clothes chain Jigsaw chaining promotional bikes to the railings here, using up a precious parking space with dead weight.)


Monopoly's Marlborough St costs £180. What could this buy you there? With £180 and Liberty's in front of you, the world is your whelk. Take the scarf room for instance: obviously you couldn't afford a nice one, such as the £580 Cashmere Ronnie Wood, but you could pick yourself up a cheap and cheerful Hermès scarf for a mere £140, and still have enough for a coffee and cake to boast to your friends about your extraordinary bargain.