Sober as a judge? Not in Poland

Poland's Constitutional Court, according to the BBC, has just confirmed that it thinks they should punish drunken cyclists with the same severity as drunken drivers.

I wish! If only I was as dangerous after half a Black Sheep!

Then I could mow down with my bike that idiot driver of the TfL-registered hire car, registration number HJ54KNW in case you're interested, who unquestionably tried to knock me off my bike last night because he took exception to the way someone else was cycling...

I could crush the moron taxi driver we saw two minutes later at the junction at the south end of Blackfriars Bridge who dangerously undertook a woman on a bike who was cycling exactly where she should have been and was signalling so clearly it must have been visible from Mars...

I could vaporise the lunatic woman bus driver murderously busting the lights at Churchyard Row just south of the Elephant and Castle tonight... (How refreshing to know that lethal, stupid aggression is no longer the exclusive domain of men!)

Except, of course, I couldn't. At all.

Because, as all of us who enjoy a drink in moderation from time to time and cycle know, the bike has a built-in breathalyser.

If you're pissed, you can easily get in a car and drive it. (I honestly don't know from personal behind-the-wheel-experience, but I certainly do from passenger experience. The closest I ever got to saying prayers was alongside a driver who I later discovered had been under-reporting her drinks intake by an order of magnitude. Avoncliff, it was, near Bath, in 1988. Samantha, you know who you are.)

And drunken drivers kill. I don't need to hammer that point home.

But you try getting on a bike when you've had a drink too many. No, actually, don't. Because I have. It's not possible. Getting on a bike and pedalling it off in a straightish line requires a complex series of motor skills that's simply not going to happen if you're pissed.

And if you are, the only person you harm is yourself. Barked shins, bumped knees, grazed elbows. Possibly the odd scuffed lamppost. It is, fortunately for that idiot minicab man, moron taxi, and lunatic bus driver, a completely unlethal activity.

So hear this, Poland's Constutional Court: you are clearly bonkers and don't know what on earth you're ruling on. How on earth could you have come to such a ridiculous decision? What sort of over-indulgent activity might have led to such fuzzy thinking?

Ah, I think we can guess.

Two die, but cycle lanes get squeezed even more

It's been a sobering week, with two more cyclists killed on London's roads: both women, both crushed by lorries turning left. That brings the total of cycling fatalities in London so far this year to four, compared to nine in all of 2008.

Wednesday's fatality was at the Elephant and Castle; Thursday's, at the junction of Goswell Road and Old Street.

We know the Elephant only too well: a hideous double-whirlpool in south London's traffic ocean, whose dangers are perpetually ignored by politicians. There is a so-called 'cycle by-pass'; but it is badly signposted, counter-intuitive, incomplete, and not remotely satisfactory.


So our blood was boiling last night. The cycle lane at the north end of Blackfriars Bridge has just been reduced to under half its previous width (top right). At the top it has shrunk from 88 inches wide to 34 inches (224cm to 86cm). At the bottom (right) it funnels down to a mere 30 inches (76cm). According to the Department of Transport's design guidelines (Oct 2008, 7.4.2), the minimum recommended width for a cycle lane is 59 inches (150cm).

Worse, though, the lane has changed from a 'mandatory' lane (one traffic must stay out of, marked by a solid line) to an 'advisory' lane (one traffic can go in if it wants, marked by a dashed line).


The photos (right) clearly show the old and new dimensions, and the effect the reduction of width has had: cyclists are now cramped between HGVs and the kerb.


There are roadworks here, which may or may not have something to do with the reduction. If so, the repainting of the lines is a bad solution. There should be far better signage and provision for cyclists; at the moment there is no warning of this confiscation of safe territory. This isn't good enough. And it's dangerously not good enough.

We'd rather be relaxing this Easter weekend than fretting about cycle facilities. But we're chasing this up with TfL of course. In a week when two people were pointlessly killed, simply going about their business on this most gentle, benign and sociable form of urban transport, it seems the most decent way we can turn our anger and sorrow into something positive.

The Vauxhall effect: Park rubbish here

Spotted this in the railway-arch bike parking underneath Vauxhall Station this morning (on a research trip, to be written up in detail shortly): a Sheffield rack cheerily commandeered for use as bin park.

We've seen bike racks used for all sorts of things - lockups for ladders, dog-parks, impromptu gym equipment for children - and I think my bike's a bit rubbish, but this is ridiculous.

Clearly there's something about 'Vauxhall' that gives people misleading ideas. Visitors to Soviet-sphere countries are often amused to find that the name has been appropriated to mean 'central station'.

Georgia's railway hub in Tbilisi, for example, is called Voksal. It gave me a shiver of homesickness when I was there a couple of years ago. Almost as much as glimpsing a signpost in North Carolina to a place called Macclesfield.

From Islington to Japan, three's company

Two-kid bikes are a safe and fun way of getting families around, as the young mum we know in the picture knows. She's got a Dutch bike which weighs a ton (for obvious reasons they have to have stands on them like oil platforms) and isn't the most convenient thing for train station stairs, but she obviously enjoys it, and so do the kids.

See? It is, astoundingly, possible to have a young family in North London and lead a normal life without a car.


Now it may be possible in Japan too. Or at least legal. Because Japan may be about to legalise three-person bikes. Like cycling on the pavement, it's illegal to carry two children on a bike there, but lots of people do it.

Now, report UPI and Japan Today, the law may be overturned, with face-saving reasons such as 'economic situation', 'falling birthrate', 'er, everybody does it anyway' being mentioned.

Japan is a fabulous country, and ludicrously underrated for cycle touring. Wonderful people, great scenery, hot springs and beer vending machines. I spent a few weeks exploring it on a Brompton - there's an amusing article about it all in on bikereader.com - and was only one beer away from falling in love with Chiyomi or Naoko or Harumi and getting married and living there.

In which case I'd be defiantly riding a bike with two kids on a Tokyo pavement right now. Ah, life's dice.

As one door closes, another knocks you off

In the latest issue of New Scientist is an article about a cyclist-detecting car door being developed by BMW. If sensors detect an object nearby as the door is opened, the door opening is automatically damped.

At the moment the technology can only detect lampposts, but they're working on the detection of more convenient forms of transport such as bikes.

To make things even easier for lazy drivers, they could add an automatic recorded announcement that shouts at the cyclist and complains that we don't pay road tax.

In that curious management jargon that equates technology with pastry, BMW hasn't yet made a decision whether to 'roll it out'.

Meanwhile there are still terrible contraflow cycle lanes that force you to run the door-opening gauntlet of parked cars, such as the one in Ebury St (right).

There's a straightforward low-tech solution - make all one-way roads two-way for cyclists and make the speed limit 15mph - but few politicians are going to stick their neck out on that one. Unless German engineering can come up with a problem-sensing device for political necks.

Book now for Dunwich Dynamo before the carrots do

I'm not a racist. In fact, some of my best friends are racers. But I'm more interested in bikes as enabling an enjoyable passage from A to B, not two-wheeled pain barriers through mountain scenery you're going too fast to enjoy. So, when I say I've just signed up for a 200km bike ride, you'll understand it is definitely not a race.


The Dunwich Dynamo is Britain's most famous best-kept cycling secret: an annual ride through a full-moon July night from London to the Suffolk coast along with about 500 other people. It’s not for charity, it’s not organised, it’s not a time trial. It’s not a demo or a commemoration, it has no official start or finish line, and there are no medals or certificates for those who complete it.

In fact, it’s not for anything. It’s just a very long ride in the dark with a lot of people. It’s gloriously pointless, sometimes painful, and done for sheer collective enjoyment, like football or opera or life.

And it’s precisely this non-organised, non-aligned, just-for-the-hell-of-it nature that is the appeal. Everyone who’s done it raves about their remarkable experience, and the cult's growing: from 200 riders in 2003 to over 700 in 2006. Expect about 500-600 in 2009.


This year's Dynamo is on the Saturday night/Sunday morning of 4/5 July. The reason to start thinking about it now is that booking has opened for the return coach, the only sensible way of getting back to London apart from turning round and cycling 200km back. (Some people do, apparently.) If you book now it's only £14 to secure a place for you and your bike back.

Southwark Cyclists help organise the ride, and their Dunwich Dynamo page has lots more information and an online coach-booking form.

It won’t be long before its growing media coverage makes it mainstream, and it’ll get all corporate and sponsored and involve reality TV celebs and people in carrot costumes. So do it now while it’s still cool.

(Thanks to Simon Nuttall for the pics.)

Modern art? Head for the bike racks

How to take revenge on the taxi that keeps hooting at you to get out the way when you have a perfect right to be there? Crushing into a cube perhaps; or make it into a silly public installation, such as this one (right) currently littering the South Bank just in front of the Royal Festival Hall.


By the same artist (Ujino and the Rotators, in case Charles Saatchi is reading this) is an equally baffling display in the free bit of the Hayward Gallery round the corner, in which household appliances jerk into life and play technorubbish.

I'm all for novel uses for that cyclist's essential the A to Z street guide, as previous posts here have detailed. But this seems a waste of a good copy, which could otherwise be used to find the quickest way out. The installation finishes on Friday 24 April, so you won't be able to miss it after that.


To us, some of the everyday stuff you see in the streets is more interesting than most self-conscious modern-art. Up the road outside Morley College, for instance, we were cheered to see this no-nonsense old rod-brake bike.


By stripping off the cover to reveal the skeleton beneath the saddle (right), the artist is clearly making a statement about the unseen structures that support existence. And man's quest for identity in an urban environment. Or infinity. Or something.

Or perhaps they just can't be bothered to get a new saddle. Whatever the case, it's not one I'd choose for the World Naked Bike Ride.