Free to go: Dr Bike tomorrow at Oval, Clapham

Dr Bike sessions are pretty regular things round London: council-subsidised roadside stalls where you can stop off on your morning or evening commute.

You get your bike checked over, and any simple maintenance work such as brake adjusting or gear tuning, all done for free.

There are two (extra ones, by popular demand) tomorrow in Lambeth on Cycle Superhighway 7: a morning one at Clapham Common from 7.30am-9.30am, and an evening one at the Oval from 5.30pm to 7.30pm.


We were at last Thursday's very well-attended Oval one (above and right), and it's the best site we've seen for a Dr Bike: right on a major commuting route, and prominently visible to cyclists stopped at the lights just beforehand, giving them plenty of time to see the stall and decide to stop.

It's also the ideal application for an underused, and not particularly otherwise usable (below), triangle of concrete sheared off from casual use by three fast main roads. So we think this is a good candidate for a semi-permanent, or at least more regular, showpiece Dr Bike location.


These are popular. The wait for a free mechanic can be half an hour in peak time. While waiting, you can stroll across to Oval station and pick up your free Evening Standard to read cover to cover. Still leaves another twenty-seven minutes to fill, though.

So we think a session here could be a candidate for a bike-powered smoothie-maker stall, catering for the captive market of cyclists queueing for their free work to be done. There's a small fortune to be made by someone. As ever in life though, it helps if you start with a large one.

Cycle Superhighways: safe as Bank of, er, Iceland

The Transport for London website has a nice new page with more details about the forthcoming Cycle Superhighways - the express cycle lanes which, it is confidently expected, will double the amount of cycle blogging in the capital.

The page indexes all 12 routes at a glance with their pretend start and finish dates. For the two routes opening this summer - Barking to Tower Gateway CS3, and Merton to Bank CS7 - there are also route maps and schedules of works.

There are also some artist's impressions (right) of what the routes will look like, which immediately contradict the assertions lower down the page that the routes will be 'direct and continuous'. (David Hembrow's blog analyses the impressionable artist's work in more detail. He's as unimpressed as we are.)


This is a more accurate impression (right) of how the routes will actually look.

The Superficial Cycleways are already a standing joke in cycling circles. But cycle campaigners are used to going round in circles.

It's not a particularly funny joke, though. Because there are many places where, we suspect, safety issues will be submerged beneath the B&Q emulsion.


Take, for example, the junction on the right. The cyclist is going west along the A24/A3, Kennington Road, just passing the fork left to Brixton Road. (The Oval cricket ground is just a Eoin Morgan reverse-sweep away to the north.) He wants to go straight on, towards Stockwell.

Now, at the moment, this is lethal. You can see why. From the previous junction, either you go along in the bus lane and then try to cut across a lane of fast-moving traffic; or you stay in the left of the middle, straight-on, lane, sandwiched between two lanes of fast-moving traffic.

And this is on Superficial Cycleway 3, Merton to Bank. So surely they'll sort it out, to make it 'safe and continuous'?

Maybe. Maybe not. The schedule notes provided on that TfL web page are unclear. All they talk about is "rearranging southbound traffic lanes... This will make it safer for cyclists".

Posting to the Lambeth Cyclists egroup about the "evil Oval", local cyclist Mark Knox said: "When some of us rode the route with the engineers and planners, we gave them all sorts of advice about this huge obstacle to easy cycling. One of our favoured options was restricting the left-turning Brixton/Camberwell-bound slip road to buses and cycles, and requiring all other traffic to carry on to the crossroads.

"What we stressed was that unless something radical was done to calm this junction, no route through it could be called a cycle superhighway. Sadly there is no mention of any measures to civilise the possibly even more perilous northbound straight-ahead journey through the junction."

Will such re-engineering happen? It's possible, just as it's possible that Lord Ashcroft might move in next door to us. But all we expect is a glossy strip of Dulux Caribbean Midnight. The great Cycle Superhighways Swindle. A bluewash.