Hire education: Cycle scheme roadshows get going

The first of several dozen London Cycle Hire Scheme roadshows was in a hot and sunny London Fields on Saturday. The roadshows display a hire bike for you to sit on (though not actually ride around), information boards and videos, and examples of the street furniture and signage that will decorate the docking stations.

You can also pick up very handy free docking station maps, something that doesn't seem to have it to the TfL Hire Scheme web pages yet.



Forthcoming roadshows, from 19 June to the end of September, will visit many of the busiest parts of London (Leicester Square, Hyde Park etc) and some of the quietest (the Emirates Stadium, for instance).

The bikes are generously-saddled three-speed jobs with the manoeuvrability of a washing machine, but they seem sturdy and easy enough. The saddle range looks just about OK, roughly catering for anyone between five foot and about six-four; or in metric, 150-195cm; or in tourist, Japanese girl to Dutch bloke.

Some worry about the safety aspects, complaining about lack of helmets. But it's impractical to issue helmets to everyone at risk. How could you provide them for all those pedestrians anyway, in the path of an inattentive tourist riding a wheeled anvil?


If you live in Southwark or Lambeth and want to try out a hire bike before the scheme starts on 30 July, you can do so if you sign up for free or subsidised cycle training, reports the SE1 website. We're strongly in favour of the bike hire scheme and are very pleased with what we've seen so far. So I'll be right in the queue - anyway, I could do to work on my biceps.

Sustain pedal: Bike-powered music in Hackney

Yesterday the Bicycle Music Festival came to London.

A collective of San Francisco musicians called Pleasant Revolution started their bike-based European tour, in which the electricity powering their PAs is pedal-generated by members of the audience.

(The show went on despite one of their number coming a cropper on a Surrey hill en route to the gig.)


We caught them in a hot and sunny London Fields, the Hackney park just north of Broadway Market.

This short video of the occasion shows one of them, CelloJoe, in action. And no, I've no idea why one of the cyclists is pedalling backwards.

They're in Regents Park until 7pm today, and further 'guerrilla gigs' are threatened round the capital too.



I quite like this idea of audience control over power supply in gigs. Especially if the guitar solo is starting to go on a bit.

Way out cycle racks at Burgess Park

Nice stylish new cycle racks at Burgess Park, between Walworth Road and Old Kent Road in south London...



...though they seem to have installed them across the exit lane of the car park. Still, who pays attention to arrows, eh? They'll be expecting cars to stop outside ASLs next!

Tall story: Double-decker bike commuting

This chap - snapped outside Kennington Tube station the other day - commutes round London on his double-decker, six-foot-tall bike. Well, an upright riding position in London is quite useful.

When stopping at lights he has to find something to lean against. No doubt it comes in useful when riding through potholes, though, as he can still see over the top of them.

Elephant soon to be only half as lethal

Work has started remodelling one of the notorious twin roundabouts at the Elephant and Castle, here in south London. By early 2011 the southern roundabout should look like this, reports the SE1 website.

At the moment, the gyratory is a horrible experience for cyclists. It's especially dangerous for those heading south (from the bottom right of the picture to the top right). Buses in the left-hand lane on the approach to the roundabout force you into the middle lane (where the grey car is in the illustration of the future layout). Fast traffic intending to turn left (to the left of the picture) comes up behind you, overtakes you and then cuts across left in front of you, usually hooting, and swearing in some of London's hundred-odd languages in daily use.

There is a so-called Elephant and Castle cycle by-pass, but it's incomplete, slow, narrow and hard to follow. It's quite fun tracing it all the way round if you have an hour to spare one day and want to visit nooks and crannies of south London you've never been to before, though.

Anyway, the new layout should be a massive improvement. Even if a better option was vetoed by TfL because it would have reduced traffic flows. All we need to do now is deal with that lethal northern roundabout...

Monument to Bank: Barclays sponsor everything bike

I've been away for a while, and look what happens while my back's turned: Barclays turn out to be the sponsors of the forthcoming Cycle Superhighways, which at least explains the blue colour.

The first two launch on 30 July. I suspect the experience of using them will be familiar to anyone who's waiting in a gradually shuffling line in their local branch to cash a cheque.

I talked about the Superficial Cycleways on a recent edition of Jack Thurston's excellent Bike Show, on London's Resonance FM. I'm not very impressed by them. I'd have suggested a more appropriate sponsor. Landsbanki, perhaps.

The Cycle Hire Scheme is also being sponsored by Barclays. This scheme I'm much more confident, and more positive, about - despite the revelation by the London Evening Standard yesterday that many tourist hotspots won't have a docking station nearby.

(They refer to 'the first map' of the docking stations, without ever giving details - do they mean the one by Cycle Hire App, which has been around for several weeks? Curiously, they illustrate the story with a picture of Gerri Halliwell riding a non-hire bike with a dog in a basket).

Anyway, it's good to have such a major sponsor on board. If the Superficial Cycleways themselves carry logos and ads for the sponsors, that's fine by me. It'll give me something to read while I'm jammed up in the lines of cyclists clogging the too-narrow blue strips at the lights.

Quirky London 20 of 20: Visit the very centre

Where is it? Trafalgar Square, at the top of Whitehall, at the statue of Charles I, just under his horse's bum.

What's quirky about it? It's London's very centre: the point to which a 'distance to London', notionally, is measured. It's the origin of the national roadmap; England's kilometre-zero. The point used to be marked (from 1290 to 1647) by Eleanor's Cross, a replica of which now stands in front of Charing Cross Station, a few yards east. You can comfort yourself with the thought that, whichever direction you head from this point, you're getting away from London.


Why bike there? This point is unique in that from a single point, you can see both the seat of the monarchy (Buckingham Palace), the seat of government (the Houses of Parliament), and the seat of a horse. You're right by Traf Sq too, of course, and you know what that means: you'll spend the next quarter of an hour finding a cycle rack.


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