Cambridge, cycling paradise? Rubbish!

Cambridge may be touted as England's so-called 'real cycling capital'.

But in fact its modal share of bike journeys is still low, as this photo proves. Despite the expensive riverside cycle path, only ONE person-journey is being made by bicycle, compared to TWO on a boat, FOUR in a narrowboat, and two cows occupying valuable space but carrying NO passengers.

Anyone trying to convince you that the town is some sort of 'cycling paradise' is clearly deluded.


And take this valuable Brompton, left outside the Co-op in Newnham.

It's not locked. Obviously the place is so full of thieves, bandits, brigands and cutpurses that locks are useless.

Instead, the owner has had to leave it with not one but TWO guard dogs, who viciously wagged their tails and tried to lick us when we approached.

Things are so bad there they've had to create a new website, Cycling Sorted, to cope with everyone's suggestions for improvements to the cycling infrastructure.

So, cyclists, avoid Cambridge at all costs. I'm grateful to be back in London, I can tell you.

My art belongs to Glasgow: Free hire bikes coming on trust

Exciting news from Glasgow, where 50 white bikes will be left out around the city for the public to use for free from 16 April to 3 May.

It's an art event called the White Bike Plan, and organisers say they hope karma will prove effective at punishing anyone who nicks one of the bikes.

Theft and vandalism has plagued similarly trusting schemes in the past, most notoriously in 1960s Amsterdam (right), when most of them ended up chucked in canals, stolen, or smoked.


Well, trust is a wonderful and precious thing. Too precious to waste on people, if you ask me.

After all, look what happened to this bike (right) we spotted at East Midlands Parkway station this weekend. It had only been shackled up by the carrier rack, so the thief merely had to undo the bolts to get at the bike.

It would have a time-consuming, though not unpleasant, task. Simply cutting through the cheap cable lock would have been quicker. But as anyone knows who's waited for a train at the desolate and remote station, any way to fill in time is welcome.

Let's hope that karma catches up with the thief. A karma with two bottles of Buckfast inside it.

Juggling ideas about half-stolen bikes

A couple of weeks ago, London's bike racks seemed festooned with wheelless frames.

Yesterday it was the other way round, with cycle parking apparently a nesting-ground for frameless wheels (top, Barbican; middle, Southwark Bridge Road), the remainder of the bike having easily been liberated without the need for bolt-cutters.


Are the two types connected? Are theft patterns changing to reflect different types of carelessness among those locking up their machines?


Is this juggler anything to do with it, perhaps using the bike racks to store his equipment between street-entertainment gigs?

Biking round London is full of such mysteries. None as mysterious as the Horseferry Road contraflow, though, about which more tomorrow...

Hanwell Locks: Take your bike on a flight tonight

I'm quite a fan of short-haul flights, so long as they're canal locks. They offer a best-of-all-worlds cycling experience: gentle freewheel downhill; scenic waterscape; and sometimes, a lock-keeper's cottage isolated from the road system where a ruddy-faced chap in a self-knit sweater has a sideline in home-made pickles or carvings.

Britain's longest canal downhill, the 30-lock monster serpent at Tardebigge near Bromsgrove, has a towpath but it's 'not officially open for cycling', according to British Waterways. (I intend to investigate just how not officially open it is at some point soon.)

Caen Hill's famous 16-ish-lock staircase (above right) just outside Devizes is visually more impressive, being as straight as a cycle pump, and as wheezy if you try to bike up it, and welcomes cyclists too. (There's a chapter about it in my book.)


Five Rise Locks at Bingley (right) is shorter (but, being in Yorkshire, steeper and tougher) and is also a cycling frisson.

London cyclists can enjoy the gravity-assisted tour of locks on Regent's Canal and Hertford Union, but the towpaths often duck under bridges in an alarmingly narrow and twisted way, so you have to keep getting off.


So the best London lock-flypast is on the Grand Union Canal at Hanwell Locks (right), about a mile or so before Brentford, as the canal starts its final descent south to join the Thames. It's a sequence of half-a-dozen locks with a pleasantly wide, curving towpath, and connects the vivid little-India melee of Southall with the shiny little-Singapore office blocks of Brentford, and the little-England riverside village of Old Isleworth lauded two days ago.

So we recommend downhill canals. Perfect riding for a summer's evening. And from your position of freewheeling ease you can gongoozle at the narrowboaters hacking through the locks. Watching honest toilers engaged in tedious, repetitive tasks for minimal gain may enlighten you as to how your line manager feels when they see you working in the office.

Thames Crossings 0: Teddington

I spent a couple of days over Easter cycling all the cyclable crossings of the Thames, east from Teddington Lock – the tidal limit – to Dartford Crossing, mentioned in yesterday's post.

The rules of the ride are simple:
1. Start on the north bank at Teddington, cross here and head downriver.
2. Cross whenever you can.
3. Stay as close to the river as possible.


The Teddington crossing is actually just above the tidal limit, so I've numbered it zero, but it's the best place to start. Going downriver from here there are 30 more separate cyclable crossings, ending with that tunnel and bridge at Dartford.

The whole 31-crossing trip (bridges, tunnels, ferries) is best done over two leisurely days of about 20 miles (four hours' easy cycling) each, breaking it somewhere in central London. Most of the route is traffic-free, it's all flat, it's a fabulous mix of rural, suburban and cityscape scenery, and there is absolutely no shortage of cafes and pubs. And what wind there is should be behind you.

I'll cover one bridge per day on this blog over the next month.

Getting to Teddington is easy: there are plenty of trains from Waterloo, and the station is a few hundred metres from the bridge down High Street and Ferry Road. The bike map for this bit is London Cycling Guide No. 9, one of the excellent TfL series available free in bike shops or online.


Teddington's crossing is a pair of charming little Meccano-like bridges: a suspension (top right and middle right) and a girder (bottom right), which meet on a small island in the middle.

They were built in the late 1880s, paid for by local subscription. That was the beginning of the bike boom, but they were clearly designed as footbridges, with some steep steps. However, a couple of years ago, wooden ramps were added that give you and your bike smooth passage over the whole crossing.

From here it's a couple of miles of smooth traffic-free riverside tarmac or gravel along the south bank to the next crossing, a tiny passenger ferry.

Bike-lock inflation yes, but this is ridiculous

Bike theft is a problem in London, and 'lock inflation' has clearly taken hold. In 1979 you could use a cheap combination lock. In 1989 you needed a strong D-lock. In 1999 it was more like two D-locks.

In 2009, if this bike parked outside The Horse pub near Waterloo last night is anything to go by, you require two D-locks, a stockade and defensive moat.

Dye, thieves! The exploding cable lock

Today's the last chance to see the exhibition of anti-theft devices at New London Architecture.

In my previous post about this exhibition, I didn't mention the SmartLock, one of the exhibits there.

This is a conventional-looking, lightweight cable lock which contains highly pressurised liquid. When the cable is cut through, the liquid explodes (right), covering the cutter in dye and in 'smartwater', which is invisible but forensically traceable. There's a video at the SmartLock website (where the image comes from).

It's not in production yet as far as I can tell, but I'll be surprised if it really does work. The cable lock by itself offers no protection, so the careful cycle parker will still be using two heavy-duty locks anyway. The advantage of smartwater traceability will be zero: every detail of my stolen bike was registered on immobilise.com, the theft was reported within minutes, but the police simply don't spend time and resources on recovery. (I spent hours prowling Brick Lane Market, second-hand bike shops, and websites such as Gumtree that carry lots of bike ads, all to no avail.)

As to the deterrent effect of the dye, I'm about as confident in that as in Hull City's chances of staying up this season. How much would a cloth dampen the explosion? How obvious will it be that a bike's been spattered and therefore tampered with? Will a spattered bike really be unsaleable? Will thieves abandon the bike out of surprise after they and it get spattered, leaving you with a bike but a spattered one, and if so will people then assume you're riding a stolen bike?

But it's an idea worth trying, and if it eventually does get into production then we'll find out.

It's tempting to think 'why don't you put cyanide gas in there', but that would be immature and stupid. For one thing it's much too quick. Better something slow and painful, polonium maybe.

There's more anti-theft information and resources at bikeoff.org.