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An Oxford enterprise is seeking to resurrect the tradition of bicycling bakers by delivering a sourdough loaf to its customers every morning.
‘Ridden & Rise’ aims to deliver freshly baked bread every morning, between 6am and 7am. Their cargo bike will be covering the OX4 area – the postcode covering East Oxford, Cowley, Blackbird Leys, Sandford-on-Thames, and Iffley. Each loaf will cost £4, with a 50p discount for scheme members.
Two loaves will be on offer: ‘Town & Gown Sourdough’ and ‘Sunflower Seed Sourdough’. Croissants are under consideration, too, but the bakers are seeking feedback from a ‘taste test team’ on their recipe. Ridden & Rise aims to launch in spring 2014.
Find out more at their website, breadfolk.com.
“In Tower Hamlets there is actually a cycle path on the pavement with parking meters running through the centre. That’s a slalom, not a cycle route. We need to get much better.”
The words of an exasperated London cycle campaigner? No – this is the new Minister for Cycling, Robert Goodwill, speaking at a little-reported event this week.
Speaking at the ‘Cycling Networks Fit For Growth’ conference in Leeds, the Minister bemoaned the current state of Britain’s cycling infrastructure, and promised to do better. He said:
“Over the past 20 years or so a great deal of money has been spent on cycling infrastructure. But frankly a lot of it has been wasted. Poor quality infrastructure has been put in place which is inadequate to give people confidence to cycle. With apologies to Talking Heads, all too often we’ve built ‘the cycle path to nowhere’.”
And in a welcome departure from recent trends, he promises “to move beyond incremental improvement”.
Instead, he says the country should aim for “a continuous cycle network which will make cycling an easy choice for shorter journeys”.
“We have to move beyond thinking about transport in silos to planning transport networks. That means putting cycling provision in, designed by people who actually understand cycling, from the start.”
Safety, he said, was key to this.
“Most cyclists are still young men: two-thirds of women say the roads are too dangerous to cycle on. If we are to get real shifts in behaviour, we will also have to make cycling something everyone, particularly women, older people and children, can aspire to do as the easiest way of getting about locally.”
Goodwill also reiterated recent Government changes intended to make cycling easier, listing 20mph zones; contraflow cycle lanes and ‘no entry except cycles’ signs; and trials including shared-use zebra crossings, ‘elephant’s footprint’ markings at signalised junctions, better priority at junctions, and cycling filter traffic lights. But he conceded this was not enough, telling his local council audience, “working together, we need to do more”.
In one refreshing passage, he took a swipe at the BBC’s recent portrayal of driver-cyclist conflict.
“Only last week the BBC’s ‘One Show’ was describing it as a battle between drivers and cyclists on Britain’s streets. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“The average car trip is just 8.5 miles. That means a large number of car journeys will be far shorter, a distance most people could easily manage by bike. So we need a simple, consistent message: the more people cycling the fewer jams for everyone else. For if we do nothing, traffic jams will increase by around 30% in the period to 2025.”
He pointed to other car-dominated cities that had been tamed for bikes – not the usual suspects of Copenhagen and Amsterdam, but rather New York City, Nantes and Seville.
“These places have doubled or quadrupled cycling in the past decade by putting in place high quality cycling infrastructure. 10 years ago they had cycle rates lower than in most UK towns. We can make similar changes in UK cities.”
Concluding, he suggested that 2014 could become Britain’s year of cycling.
“Next year we will host the Tour de France. There will be a lot of attention on cycling over the next few months. Let’s use that opportunity to start a cycling revolution.
“Where there are barriers in your [local councils’] way, I want to help remove them. Where the Department for Transport can help you do more, we will.”
Robert Goodwill, of course, is a member of the Government that abolished Cycling England, is ploughing more money into new roads than at any time over the last 20 years, cancelled plans for an ‘Office of Active Travel’, and has this week announced a climb-down on charging tolls on the A14. Many will be sceptical that his words will be backed up with action. But this is arguably the most encouraging speech by a cycling minister since the Coalition came to power – and could anticipate better things to come in 2014.
London’s fleet of hire bikes is seeing an alarming fall in popularity – but the company that runs it, Serco, is set to pick up a two-year contract extension.
Transport for London has disclosed that 514,000 journeys were made in November 2013, a drop of 29% from the November 2012 figure (727,000). The record month was August 2012, when 1.16m journeys were made.
TfL publicly attributes the peak, and the subsequent fall-off, to the 2012 Olympics and Jubilee. However, critics have pointed to the doubling of charges in January 2013, with a day’s access rising from £1 to £2, and a year’s pass from £45 to £90. An internal TfL report corroborates this:
“There has been a significant increase in those saying they will not renew their membership when it runs out, mainly due to cost reasons and availability of bicycles and docking points”.
Assembly Member Darren Johnson, from the Green Party, said:
“TfL should be encouraging the greatest possible use of the scheme by keeping user fees affordable instead of doubling them. It may be that the drop in cycle hire usage reflects a dip in cycling more broadly across London but the Mayor can address both problems by working with TfL to address cyclists’ legitimate safety concerns and encouraging the uptake of cycling in our city, including on hire bikes.”
A spokesman for Boris Johnson denied that safety was a factor. “We are encouraged that, contrary to claims that cycling is falling in the wake of the recent tragic deaths, we have seen no evidence of this from the hire figures for November. The year-on-year fall in this month was less than the year-on-year fall for September.”
Despite the bad news, Serco, the outsourcing specialist which runs the scheme, is expected to be awarded a two-year extension. Its current contract runs until 2015; TfL is now recommending that it continues to 2017. Serco was criticised earlier in the year for failing to manage demand at docking stations, with potential hirers finding docks empty when they wanted to take a bike, or full when they wanted to return one.
Among my bad habits is looking at lines on the map, thinking “that looks like it might be cyclable”, and heading off to find out. When last year we took a week’s cottage holiday in Rhayader, mid-Wales, there was one line that immediately sprang to mind: the track past the Claerwen Reservoirs.
It was November, but one of those beautifully crisp, clear autumn days that remind you that there’s no finer place to be than on a bike. And the route was pretty special from the off, heading slowly uphill out of Rhayader. The cycleway (part of NCN 81, Lon Cambria) was built on the track of the construction railway for the Elan Valley Reservoirs. It’s a stunning ride all the way to the watershed and then down into Aberystwyth – but I wasn’t going that way.
Instead, I turned onto an even quieter road, signposted simply ‘Claerwen’ with a blue T sign to suggest a dead-end road. A dead end for cars, maybe, but not for bikes.
The road gives out at the start of the Claerwen Reservoir, becoming a gravel track. It’s clearly used by farm and estate vehicles, but a TRO (Traffic Regulation Order) has supposedly put paid to its usage by leisure 4x4ers and trail-bikers. I say “supposedly” because a couple of trail-bikers passed me going the other way. I’m pretty sure they weren’t meant to be there but…
…can you blame them?
The track was perfect for the Croix de Fer: bumpy, potholed and full of puddles, but firm and never muddy. A mountain bike would take it in its stride. It was hard work, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the knowledge that (trail-bikers aside) no-one else was seeing this glorious scenery on such a perfect autumn day… that’s something special.
The biggest challenge was this:
Ah. I hadn’t spotted that on the OS map. Still, it was wadeable.
A couple of miles on, the track became a tarmac road again at the Teifi Pools. For some unexplained reason, there was a lonely NCN 82 sign here, though this certainly isn’t part of the NCN.
But… perhaps it should be: the road from here down to Ffair Rhos was simply superb cycling. Unexplained humps and bumps gave it the feel of a lost land of Middle Earth. There aren’t many places in Britain where you can experience the wilderness with the comfort of tarmac under your wheels, but this is one.
(Though on the descent from the moorland, the alpaca farm seemed a little incongruous for rural Wales…)
I resisted the temptation to stop at the isolated, inviting Tafarn Cross Inn, and carried on to meet NCN 82 proper at Ystrad Meurig. An old railway track begins here across a wetland nature reserve, and the hides were busy with bird-watchers scouring the land and skies.
At the end of this, NCN 82 gives out onto a B road which it follows through Tregaron to Lampeter. This being rural Wales, it’s not exactly heaving cars, but still – the road’s a little wider, the traffic a little faster, than the NCN usually is. Tregaron is a pretty, tiny little town with a trade in tourist gold, a useful Spar for an afternoon snack, and best of all, a chemists which sold me some new, dry socks.
At Llandewi Brefi (yes, it really exists) you can make the usual jokes about “the only cyclist in the village” etc. I was briefly tempted by a sign promising ‘Mountain Road’:
A quick browse on Geograph suggests that this route could be every bit as dramatic… and there’s an independent youth hostel halfway along at Ty’n cornel. But I’d done enough rough stuff for one day. Next time!
Instead, I continued along NCN 82 which still follows the B road, even though there’s a smaller road on the other side of the valley. The most curious piece of routing, though, is in Lampeter, where the signs send you past car parks on a back-street route which entirely misses the town centre. I don’t often quibble with NCN routing decisions, but this one seems wrong.
It was pleasant enough, but rarely dramatic, from here to Llanybyther on a short undulating section which gives out to another B road. After Rhyddlan, though, the countryside began to feel remote again, as the road twisted and turned on the steep north side of the Teifi valley. By now the light was fading fast:
But even in the twilight, the last few miles were highly enjoyable, along shadowy lanes with sudden climbs followed by swoops down to the valley floor.
My lift back to Rhayader was waiting at Llandysul. The bike ride had been 54 miles; it was 64 slow miles back by car, and felt longer. But the glorious ride across from Rhayader to Ffair Rhos was worth it.
Portland, Oregon, is the undisputed cycling capital of the US – with bike lanes a-plenty. But how do cyclists in the rainy, windy Pacific Northwest deal with the autumn weather?
Easy – they buy a special sweeper for their cycle lanes. The city authorities are now keeping tracks clear with a purpose-built narrow sweeper, nimble enough to fit between kerbs, parked cars, plastic edging and planters.
Brought into service in October, it’s much in demand by the city’s riders, who say that a newly opened ‘world class’ bikeway has otherwise been unusable due to heavy leaf-fall. The RAVO sweeper is imported from the Netherlands (of course).
The city’s Diane Dulken told BikePortland.org that “This new sweeper allows us to get to hard to reach places, such as protected bikeways, so we’re pleased to have this addition to our fleet and to expand the tools available for street cleaning.”
If you’re thinking it still wouldn’t fit down a typical UK bike lane, you’re quite right. They do things differently over there. And by “differently” we mean “better”.
Meanwhile, we can’t let a mention of cycling in Portland pass without taking the opportunity to share this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvV8ugiSeaM
Made in the Cotswolds. Published by Éditions Système D Ltd.
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