One way to avoid punctures: Ski-bikes in Germany

We've just got back from southern Germany, where it was too snowy and icy to cycle.

The Bavarians, though, see such weather as an opportunity rather than a threat. This was what we saw on the local BOB train out of Schliersee. Each carriage here has space for twelve bikes, and about as many snowboards or sets of skis.

Does this count as skis or a bike (picture)? Not sure, but it certainly isn't a wheelchair.

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.

Bicycling baronet to cycling Speaker?

We already have a cyclist mayor of London in Boris Johnson, and a potential cycling Prime Minster in David Cameron. Now, according to the BBC, one of the candidates to replace Michael Martin as Speaker of the House of Commons is Sir George Young, the 'bicycling baronet' who has a history of positive contributions to cycling legislation.

There are some backbench cycling MPs (such as Emily Thornberry) too. But we'd have to go some way to return to the kind of cycling levels among members of the House at the turn of the 19th century. A column in the Pall Mall Gazette of Saturday 13 August 1898 had this to say about the Parliamentary recess:


Parliament is away, and, to a large extent, awheel. In popularity with members of Parliament the bicycle can give many points to the motor car and yet beat that mechanical atrocity hollow. Nor is the passion for wheeling confined to any section or any party in the House. The Lord Advocate of Scotland is enthusiast enough to essay to travel northwards and homewards from Westminster by this agreeable means, though we doubt whether he will complete the journey in this way; Mr. William Field, whose robust brogue is the delight of the House of Commons, is one of the latest victims of the prevailing epidemic, while Mr. Healy's partiality for the cycle led him to defend the privileges of its riders with quite remarkable vigour in the House the other day. Sir John Gorst's lurid machine, coloured a Post Office red, is an object of daily wonderment in the Session, as he wheels gently down Victoria-street. Mr. Stuart Worley is a constant and careful rider; and Sir Howard Vincent is greeted with a benevolent grin by hundreds of his blue-coated former subordinates as he careers about the West End. The officials of the House, too, have quite taken to the exercise, and one of them, Mr. Archibald Milman, is at this moment covered with honourable bruises sustained in the too eager pursuit of this kind of pleasure. But the cycle is no respecter of the persons of its riders.

Thanks, as ever, to the comprehensive, searchable British Library website of digitised newspapers (it's paid-for with some free content if accessed outside the library, but all free inside).

How much does cycling cost?

Bikes are not free. They're just free at the point of use, like the NHS or hotel toiletries or dinner at your mum's. You've already paid for it somewhere else. But they're cheap... aren't they?

Yesterday's Independent reckons London commuters can save a couple of grand a year by cycling instead of taking public transport. Their article is a bit light and could have done with some more case studies, but it's good to see another reason for cycling being pushed in the papers.

The Independent article quotes Sustrans's figure of running a bike as £75 a year. That's far too low if you cycle every day. In that case I'd put it more like £150-£250 per year.

It's hard generalising for all cyclists, but I keep a record of all my bike-related bike expenses for tax purposes, so can be pretty accurate with my own figures. (Obviously, as that's for tax, it's not in my interest to minimise costs.)

Last tax year I spent £360 maintaining my bike, accessories and bike clothing, for a total use of about 4,500 miles (7,200km). Most of that was for replacing worn bits (chains, cassettes, waterproof jacket, new wheel to replace the one turned into a Thomas Heatherwick-style sculpture by London potholes etc.)

Not cheap - but certainly much cheaper than if I'd done all those journeys by public transport, never mind taxi. A rough calculation suggests I'd have paid at the very least £1800 on buses and tubes for the same movements.

Though, in fact, about half the journeys I made would have been impossible or impracticable by bus or tube: short hops around town, jaunts out to places remote from bus stop or train station, or spontaneous side trips.

A separate question is: how much have I saved by making all my out-of-London journeys by bike and train, instead of car? Tricky to judge, as there are obviously lots of trips I might have done by car which are impossible or impracticable by bike; but as it happens all the places I visited (holiday, relatives, work) were convenient by rail and cycle. This boils down to rail fares versus car costs. I spent £640 on trains; running a cheap car for the same outcome would, a very rough calculation suggests, have cost me at least £3000 in petrol, depreciation, insurance, servicing and so on.

(I don't own a car because it's all hassle and expense and wouldn't enable me to do anything I can't or won't already do. I hire a car whenever I need one, which in the last five years has been once, for ten days; otherwise we simply don't need one.)

Which is all very nice, but saving money is not why I cycle. I cycle because it's fun and I love being in control of where I go and when.

Nevertheless, according to the above, I've saved myself something like £23,000 in the nine years since I moved to London. Which does raise the question: where's it gone?

Saints alive! Brompton Oratory and bad cycle lanes

Cycled past the Brompton Oratory (right) this morning, the splendid Catholic church in West London which somehow gave its name to the folding bike.

There's a statue of the much-venerated figure of Cardinal Newman adorning the church, so why not of the Brompton's much-venerated designer Andrew Ritchie, patron saint* of the ingenious folding personal transport solution, who used to live just opposite in the bike's early days.

According to the church's website, the name 'Brompton Oratory' is incorrect, though that's exactly what the sign outside calls it. They maintain its correct name is the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, but I wouldn't have been so keen on a bike called 'Mary'.

We'd been having an inline skating lesson with Mike van Erp, who's great fun and a brilliant teacher, and being a very active cyclist (whose bike-cam videos of bad drivers appear on YouTube) is obviously the right sort of chap. I only fell over when I laughed. Quite often, then.

We explored the back streets of posh West London on our way home. Down Ebury St (Google map below) is a contraflow cycle lane in a one-way street that's a bit like those cures that are worse than the disease.

The lane (right) forces you to ride right alongside the line of parked cars. One hastily opened door and the best you can hope for is a nice memorial at Brompton Oratory. Unless you ride out a safe distance from the parked cars, in which case you're staring down the barrel of the traffic gunning the other way.

But the lane isn't completely useless: on our visit, it was reassuring to see that the cycle lane did serve a useful purpose, as a taxi park.


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* Of course, the patron saint of the bicycle is in fact the Madonna del Ghisallo. I'll try to remember that next time I have a bike nicked.