Christmas already? Must be time for a climate rally

Two large parts of central London were closed to traffic yesterday. The closures were for two separate, but enormously important, events. Events highlighting issues which will affect all our lives radically in the very near future. One, in anticipation of the Copenhagen summit starting tomorrow, was the Climate Change rally from Hyde Park to Parliament Square. The other was Christmas shopping in Oxford St.

Obviously, I didn't want to wheel my bike amid an angry, shouting, jostling mob. So I went on the Climate Change rally (right).


As Mark Twain said, everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Well, here were a few of us - 20,000 according to the Met, 30,000 according to the Sunday Times, so probably in fact about 50,000 - trying to do, well, something.

I don't suppose it'll do any good. I don't expect the Climate will take a blind bit of notice. It'll just go on changing anyway, regardless of whether or not the human chain actually did manage to link up all the way round the Houses of Parliament (I'm told there was a missing link around St Thomas').


It was all very good natured, sociable and chatty, with a broad spread of age ranges tending towards the mature. It seems everyone has an interesting story to tell: at one point I found myself invited, for instance, to a fetish club off the Walworth Road. Perhaps my prospective hostess mistook my bike's padlock and chain for something more exotic.

But the Climate Change rally was lots of fun, and I thoroughly recommend these events, as you can turn up without actually having to commit yourself to anything. I joined somewhere in Piccadilly and followed sections of the march past Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall.


More fun than the march itself (which was a bit too full of shrill whistles for my liking) was the opportunity to cycle off-piste, on sections of road taped off from the marchers' route, but still closed to traffic. Runway-sized stretches of Piccadilly, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square (right) and Whitehall were both traffic- and march-free, and sheer delight to swan around on two wheels.

Of course, now the march itself is over, the hard stuff, the real work, the genuine challenge, begins: all that darned Christmas shopping.

Paint relief

This lavishly graffitoed van, spotted in Paris this week, suggests something we could try in London. Instead of wardens issuing parking tickets, they spray graffiti on to illegally parked vehicles. At a stroke, this encourages paint-happy vandals into proper regulated jobs, and provides a strong disincentive to bad parking.

Keep death off the roads. Drive on the pavement

The Indie's article yesterday (on how cyclists are three times as likely to die on the roads in the UK as abroad) ended up as a comments pillow fight about pavement cycling. (Thanks to those who made sensible, considered contributions - you know who you are.)

It's the way of things these days. You can't go to any sort of meeting involving the most tangential reference to bikes without being buttonholed by some mad person when they see you're a cyclist. Often, though not always, it's a 50something woman with a 'now listen to me because my feelings are more important than everyone else's' expression. And they bang on about pavement cycling like it's anthrax or a dirty bomb or Bhopal or something. They were nearly killed by a pavement cyclist the other day and it's your fault and what are you going to do about it?

You try to explain, carefully and reasonably, that the problem is vastly overhyped. That on average one person is killed from pavement-cycling incidents every four years (possibly the cyclist) but 40 pedestrians are killed by cars every year so that's clearly the much bigger problem. (Such as this astonishing footage from the BBC website yesterday. Why isn't your silly buttonholer taking this up instead?) That there are already laws about dangerous yob cycling and that should be tackled through normal policing but sensible shared-use has to be encouraged because London's transport infrastructure won't cope otherwise.

But that doesn't shut them up. All they do is then drone on about licensing bikes, and how that'd stop it, just as licensing motor vehicles has put to a stop to all car accidents.

Bah. All very depressing. The whole pavement-cycling issue is like complaining about mobile phone loudmouths on trains was ten years ago: it's not dangerous, it's just annoying. But it's become the reason du jour for pompous people to whinge.

Velib's striking success

I've just been in Paris for a couple of days. I'm very interested in visual art, and I certainly got the authentic French experience: standing outside art galleries which had been closed thanks to a public sector strike. Groups of young Parisians were standing around outside smoking and answering every question with a shrug. They were the pickets.

A very nice young lady from the Guardian interviewed me at the Louvre. I don't think she can have been in the job long, because she spelt my name correctly and got the quote right.

But at least I could shuttle between the inactive museums quickly and conveniently, thanks to the famous Paris bike-hire scheme, Velib'.

It really is a good system. Signing up for a day pass is quick and easy: you can do it online, or just at one of the terminals at every docking station (above right). You spend two minutes prodding the screen with a frown before you realise you should be pressing buttons on the numerical keypad below, but then all you need is a bank card and a few seconds.

A day-pass costs a token one euro (and you authorise a 150 euro deposit, but it's not taken from your account unless the bike is, say, stolen by a striking art gallery worker escaping the tourist mob). Then you can take a bike for free for up to half an hour, returning it to any of the very numerous docking stations across the centre.


The bikes (right) are chunky, solid, one-size-fits-all, with three hub gears. There are chain guards to protect those stylish Gallic trousers, and lights that stay on all the time, Volvo-like, some strobing nervously like a warning light. They're pretty front-heavy, especially if you plonk a daypack full of one-euro plonk in the front basket, but they run smoothly and are a pleasant ride.

Once you get the hang of it, like going on strike in the French public sector I imagine, you want to do it all the time. It's easy: you can take out and return a Velib' bike at the drop of a dog turd. (It's true what they say about French dog owners - a good reason not to cycle on the pavement. Or walk on one.)

To take one out, all you need is to key in your daypass subscriber number and a four-digit PIN of your choosing, and select your bike. To return it, you don't have to key in anything - you just slide your bike into a docking post where a bracket engages and a green light shows that it's safely docked. Yesterday I did seven journeys, all of them free.


The multilingual terminals at docking stations show locations of nearby stations, and show how many bikes and vacant posts are available (right).


This is valuable advance info: you can find some docking stations empty, with no bikes to be had (right), especially around popular start-points such as a rail terminus.


Even if there are bikes, you might find some are out of action through punctures (right) or other problems. Their posts show this with a red instead of green light, and the system knows they're en panne and won't let you take them out. Outside the Gare du Nord, one docking station had six bikes, five of which were unusable. There seems to be an additional informal system where duff bikes are left with their saddles the wrong way round as a kind of long-range-visible warning.


Conversely, some popular destination docking stations might be full of bikes (right) and have nowhere to dock your bike back into.

And, of course, the scheme's appetite for bikes - which get abused, trashed or stolen - is legendary. Each of the 21,000 bikes has been replaced already.


Navigating Paris's one-way system isn't always easy, and you often find your nice separated bike lanes suddenly throw you out onto a cobbled traffic bedlam. But it's great fun, a delightful way of getting from A to B to C-cedilla, a genuine must-do, and is popular with locals (right: she must be one). Every other cyclist you see is on a Velib' machine.

Just hope that, when you go, the public sector workers running Velib's electronic system aren't on strike instead. Otherwise you might have to spend all afternoon footslogging the Louvre's vast corridors. There's somewhere that could do with bikes to get around.

Some people cycle. Get over it

I've just been knocking together a magazine article on biking politicians. In the course of my extensive research I came across this fantastic quote from Labour MP and cabinet minister Ben Bradshaw's website. Unfortunately I just couldn't work into the article itself:

During my election campaign in Exeter in 1997 my Conservative opponent said memorably: “Ben Bradshaw is a homosexual, he works for the BBC, speaks German and rides a bicycle – he is everything about this country that is wrong.” He helped deliver me the biggest swing to Labour in the South West

It's reassuring to see that being a member of a minority occasionally targeted by prejudice and hate (for example, in an infamous column by Matthew Parris) has done Mr Bradshaw's political career no harm since being elected as an openly declared cyclist.

More cycle-rack art in Walworth Rd

Walworth Road in south London must have some of the most careless parkers in the capital. Last July I mentioned one artistically transformed by a delivery van, a problem since addressed by simply removing the stand.

Since then, every other cycle rack in the road has been dented, bumped, or twisted into exciting lexicon of rhombuses, trapezoids, parallelograms and quadrilaterals. It's a geometrical cabinet of curiosities.


Maybe the council could put archery-style targets on the remaining straight ones, to help drivers find the right contact point to create further new shapes? There's a Turner Prize waiting for someone.

On the saddle of Solsbury Hill

The rain scuppered our cycling weekend in the Peaks. (We looked for a replacement activity which might benefit from the introduction of water. So instead we had a whisky tasting weekend in the Peaks.) Meanwhile we entertained ourselves by compiling our Top Entries for the British Songbook. (I've discussed bike-related pop songs, like Elton John's Sprocket Man, in a previous post.)

One of the suggestions was Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill. I was delighted to see on the YouTube video of his 2003 World Tour that he performs the song by cycling round stage on a folding bike. (I see that kimbofo, whose London cycling diary is still alive, had spotted the video before.)


It looks like a Moulton to me. That would make sense given that it comes from Gabriel's stomping ground of Wiltshire. Solsbury Hill itself is between Bath and Box, his home town. The lanes round its east side, easily accessed from the Kennet and Avon canal (on which you can cycle all the way to Reading), are lovely cycling country. When it's not cascading with rain.

Anyway, as Mr Gabriel is riding in his normal clothes, without a helmet, and is clearly enjoying the whole thing enormously, we're happy to elevate him to the status of Real Cyclist.