A significant majority

There was an interesting comment nestling in a report of an inquest into a cyclist’s death, from road.cc yesterday –

Police Constable Ian Clark said it was “likely” the cyclist had been wearing earphones at the time of the collision – the implication being he may not have heard the vehicle behind him – adding: “I think a significant majority of motorists would have done as Mr Coggon [the driver] did,” he said.

It seems the cyclist was moving out to turn right, and was hit by a car that happened to be overtaking him. Obviously a tragic incident. Given that there are sparse details about what actually happened, it’s hard to say whether the verdict of accidental death is a reasonable one.

My concern here, however, is specifically the highlighted statement from Constable Clark. You can see that Mr Coggon is being defended in terms of how ‘the majority of motorists’ would behave. Put simply, Constable Clark is suggesting that Mr Coggon wasn’t doing anything wrong – couldn’t have been doing anything wrong – because he was driving like everyone else. The standards of driving set not by what is objectively safe, or proper, but by how ‘the majority of motorists’ would behave.  

Is that appropriate?

In my experience, ‘the majority of motorists’ do not pass me with anything like the recommended passing distance covered in the Highway Code – Rule 163. ‘The majority of motorists’ do not overtake me in a way that gives me the maximum amount of safety while I am cycling.

Equally, the ‘majority of motorists’ seem quite happy to overtake me around junctions, in plain contravention of Rule 167 –

DO NOT overtake where you might come into conflict with other road users. For example… approaching or at a road junction on either side of the road

This happens to me each and every day, and I’m sure (anecdotally, of course) that any person who rides a bike can report that it happens to them too, with remarkable frequency.

Now of course we don’t know the extent to which Mr Coggon flouted these rules of the Highway Code. He may well have been driving perfectly, and the cyclist was entirely to blame, swerving out randomly into the middle of the road.

The issue here, rather, is a police constable appearing to believe that the way ‘the majority of motorists’ behave is a reasonable and sound guide to what constitutes good driving, when in reality a ‘significant majority of motorists’ will quite happily overtake a cyclist, at close proximity, through junctions. The way the majority behaves is obviously not a sound guide to good driving.

The unspoken assumption behind a statement like this is that everyone behind the wheel is intrinsically well-behaved and reasonable; an assumption quite naturally shared by the general public, who make most day-to-day trips in their motor vehicles. If an individual crashes their car, news reports will describe how a ‘car crashed’ (even, bizarrely, that a ‘car lost control’), as if something unspecified went wrong with it, rather than a human being making an error. Likewise, if we get caught breaking a law, then it is the law that is wrong, and sneaky, and not our behaviour, which is obviously reasonable, because everyone else is behaving the same way.  See how speed cameras are described as ‘traps’ that unfairly catch out ‘otherwise law-abiding’ motorists, snaring them in a moment of weakness. ‘Ordinary’ drivers are good; circumstances, or the government, conspire to make them momentarily ‘bad’.

This logic is reflected in this remarkable statement from Ken Clarke, the former Justice Secretary, made in the House of Commons –

In the case of ordinary dangerous driving without any serious consequences, although I deplore all dangerous driving we cannot start imposing heavy prison sentences on everybody who might otherwise be a blameless citizen and then behaves in an absolutely reprehensible way when driving his car.

In the first place, we have the description of dangerous driving as ‘ordinary’ merely because the person behind the wheel had the good fortune – or blind luck – not to maim or seriously injure someone. A ‘blameless citizen’ who blasts through a zebra crossing at speed, while someone is on it, would only be engaging in ‘ordinary’ dangerous driving, not the kind with ‘serious consequences’.

In the second place, we can see that behaving ‘in an absolutely reprehensible way’ in a car is a completely different kind of reprehensible behaviour than the kind which might pose an identical – or even lesser – amount of danger, but doesn’t involve a car. It’s almost as if we expect people to behave badly in cars, that there’s something about a car that can turn ‘blameless citizens’ into ‘reprehensible drivers’, and we should make an accommodation for that kind of behaviour. Indeed, there appear to be so many of these ‘blameless citizens’ behaving reprehensibly in cars that we couldn’t possibly lock them all up!

I suppose it is natural that in a motorised society ‘reasonable behaviour’ is defined by how the majority behaves, even if the consequences of that majority behaviour could turn out to be appalling for who happen to be travelling by minority modes of transport. A jury apparently considered that a lorry driver who failed to spot Mary Bowers, clearly visible in front of him while stationary for at least ten seconds, could not possibly have been behaving dangerously, despite a catalogue of other offences. These kinds of extraordinary lapses are presumably not quite so extraordinary for these juries. A strange form of moral majority, that I hope will begin to dissolve, and soon.

Don’t misunderstand the Fietsstraat

The Times’ excellent correspondent, Kaya Burgess, is currently in the Netherlands on a fact-finding mission, along with London’s Cycling Commisioner Andrew Gilligan, Scotland’s Minister for Transport Keith Brown, and others. I hope they like what they are seeing (it’s impossible not to). However, I think it is important that they fully understand the context and application of the interventions for cycling they are looking at.

Just one example – on Monday Kaya tweeted this picture of the ‘Fietsstraat’ sign –

Writing that it ‘gives cycles priority’ on Dutch residential streets.

Well, yes and no. Literally, the sign suggests that cars are ‘guests’ on this particular street. But it was immediately misunderstood by several people who responded to Kaya’s tweet – one wrote that

Every cyclist [should] make one and put it in their street

Another

THIS is what we need to back up the 20’s plenty campaign

And another

On every road cyclist are protected by law, and cars take second place. If there is a acident its by law the cardrivers fault.

Every single aspect of that last tweet being completely wrong.

Here’s what the Dutch CROW manual has to say about one particular version of the Fietsstraat –

I have highlighted that this particular Fietsstraat treatment (combined profile, i.e. motor vehicles and cyclists travel on the same ‘red’ cycle surface) should only be applied on access roads, where, as you can see, motor vehicles should not number more than 500 per day, or just 20 per hour (likely to be rather higher at peak times, of course, but probably only amounting to around just one or two vehicles every minute).

The same is true for other versions of the Fietsstraat. They are intended for use only in these very low motor traffic environments; places where motor vehicles are only using the Fietsstraat to access a deliberately small number of properties. The cars are ‘guests’ only because they are using the cycle street to access their own houses; they’re not being told to be ‘guests’ in a ‘please play nicely’ kind of way, which is likely to be completely ineffective.

Here’s a different version of the Fietsstraat – one with cycle tracks to the side, and central divider.

Again, this route will only be used by motor vehicles accessing a limited number of properties, and in very small numbers.

Simply plonking up ‘cyclists have priority’ signs on a typical UK residential street, which will have much higher levels of motor vehicle usage, will almost certainly achieve nothing, and may even be a recipe for conflict (I have pointed this out before).

The key ingredient of the Fietsstraat is the removal of motor traffic; the signs are merely the icing on the cake.

The environment and legality

There’s an interesting piece by London’s Cycling Commissioner, Andrew Gilligan, in today’s Evening Standard. It’s actually pretty good. The focus of the article is, broadly, compliance with the law by cyclists, and by motorists. It has a silly headline about women being nice, and men being full of testosterone, which doesn’t correspond at all to what he has written, and I think can only be explained by the Standard’s keenness to get some pictures of young women on bikes at the top of the article.

I do think he is overstating the issue of bad behaviour by cyclists somewhat. I have pointed out here, many times before, that this is an issue of perception – frequent bad behaviour by motorists goes largely unnoticed, because is habitual, common and background, while bad behaviour by cyclists is more glaring, and observable. Motorists speeding around London, or parking on double yellow lines, or failing to yield while turning into side roads, is so common that we don’t even notice it; someone on a bike moving along a pavement, or passing through a red light while you have a green man to cross, is something we observe far more readily, and contributes to the perception of cyclists, as a group, being somehow ‘lawless’.

However, unlike most articles on this subject, Gilligan is careful to avoid suggesting that that offences by motorists and cyclists are somehow equivalent; indeed, he quite rightly points out that the very reason we don’t impose such strict controls on the use of a bicycle is directly because the user of a bicycle has far less potential to harm others than the driver of a motor vehicle.

We can’t enforce against cyclists jumping red lights and pavement riding in the same way as we can with motor vehicles, because bikes don’t carry numberplates. The reason they don’t, and motor vehicles do, is that when a motor vehicle disobeys the law, the consequences are usually more severe than when a bicycle does.

Gilligan subsequently makes an even more important point, and one which I wish to expand on here.

We also think the new infrastructure we’re putting in will improve cyclist behaviour. Removing one-way streets and gyratories will cut the incidence of cyclists riding the wrong way or on pavements. Giving cyclists defined space of their own will reduce conflict between them and pedestrians. One of the best ways of stopping people cycling on the pavement is to give them better places to cycle on the road.

That is exactly right; and I think this point can be framed even more broadly.

British roads and streets are designed, and set out, in a way that rewards and prioritises driving, and simultaneously penalises cycling and walking. We should not be surprised, therefore, that the people flouting the rules are those whose journeys have been made unnecessarily arduous, circuitous or dangerous, and that the people who are apparently obeying the rules are those for whom the rules have been written.

By contrast, when it is driving that is made difficult, and cycling and walking the obvious and easy thing to do, the only lawbreaking is carried out by motorists. East Street in Horsham provides a textbook example of this kind of environment. It’s a ‘shared space’ street, which it is illegal to drive down, or park on, unless you are loading on the street (and using the bays for that purpose), or if you are parking on the street (again in the marked bays) with a disabled blue badge. You can only drive in one direction; cycling (and of course walking) is allowed in both directions.

There is no lawbreaking by cyclists on this street, because there aren’t any laws for them to break. There is, however, an awful lot of lawbreaking by motorists, because the rules are not in their favour.

 

These two cars were parked in a loading bay at about 8pm in the evening recently. They’re plainly not loading; the owners have simply decided to flout the rules, driving illegally onto the street, and parking illegally, because they can’t be bothered to walk from further away.

Similarly, on another evening, only one of these cars was legally on the street.

Another example. Because the street is only one-way for motor vehicles, accessing it is  difficult from the town centre – it involves driving some distance around a one-way system. So you will often find drivers flouting the rules, going the wrong way up a one-way street.

You even see HGVs doing this, as another Horsham cyclist discovered.

And the bollards at the eastern end mean delivery drivers have to find somewhere to park, so they can load in. Usually that means blocking the pavement, rather than walking from somewhere less obstructive further away.

All this bad behaviour is a simple consequence of the rules not working for motor vehicles any more. There is absolutely no lawbreaking by cyclists in this location, however, because the rules work in their favour. There are no rules for them to break.

This is, by and large, how urban environments designed for cycling work. I rarely see lawbreaking by cyclists when I visit the Netherlands, because there’s no real incentive to do so. The system works for them. This video, by Mark Wagenbuur, illustrates this quite well.

Hundreds of bicycles passing through a signal-controlled crossing, in just four minutes, yet only a handful of people jump the lights. Why is compliance so much greater? I don’t think it can be explained by any cultural difference, or by greater enforcement. Anyone on  a bike in the Netherlands knows that their journey is safe, easy and convenient, and that jumping lights purchases no extra safety, or advantage in time or comfort. The road system is designed around their needs.

There’s no cycling the wrong way up one-way streets, either, because these streets are always designed to allow two-way cycling. And to make a blindingly obvious point, there’s no pavement cycling in the Netherlands, at all, because there’s always a far better alternative for cycling than the pavement.

By contrast, pavement cycling is very often the only way of reasonably making a journey by bike in Britain. 

Sometimes its explicitly allowed, sometimes its explicitly forbidden, and sometimes it falls into the middle ground of being quietly tolerated. At the recent Hackney Cycling Conference, I was told by a London Borough Cycling Officer that some cycle lanes along a notoriously cycling-hostile busy road in his borough did not need to be of a better standard (they are currently awful) because the police were quite happy to allow people to cycle on the pavement.

The problem in a microcosm.

When people demonstrate they don’t want to cycle with traffic, why don’t we listen?

Over the recent bank holiday weekend I went out for a brief ride up and down the Downs Link in Sussex. This is the old railway line that used to run between Guildford and Shoreham, and now – like so many other lines removed in the late 1960s – a ‘rail trail’, a combined walking and cycling leisure route.

I was struck not just by the numbers of people out on bikes in the Bank Holiday weather, but by the demographics – the young, the elderly, families, couples cycling with dogs. I even saw a boy on a unicycle.

These are precisely the same kinds of people you would encounter on similar leisure rides in the Netherlands; Dutch riders might not be on mountain bikes, or wearing as many helmets, but the resemblance was striking.

A Dutch leisure ride

The pub car parks along the Downs Link served to demonstrate vividly the demand for this kind of cycling.

There are cycle racks here, but they are completely swamped by the huge numbers of bikes, both of adults and children.

The thesis that Britons just don’t like to ride bikes, or don’t like the idea of cycling, doesn’t strike me as being particularly plausible. Not only are there periods in our history when the bicycle was used to an incredible extent – in 1949 more miles were travelled by bicycle in Britain than by car – but there’s plenty of current evidence to suggest that, if conditions are right, there’s nothing stopping people from riding bikes. Skyrides up and down the country prove to be incredibly popular.

Picture courtesy of Crap Waltham Forest

As Joe Dunckley has written

The high turnout at Skyrides can not be explained by fantastic advertising alone: the advertising merely alerts people to the existence of an event for which there is already vast but stifled demand. A day of conspicuously safe, quiet, unintimidating and unpolluted car-free streets almost advertises itself.

Rail trails, and seafront paths, are the everyday equivalent of Skyrides; places where people can ride bikes in comfort, away from traffic. Demand is high for these routes, even if their quality is sometimes dubious.

People like riding bikes; they just need the right conditions, and at present, very few places in Britain provide those conditions.

The pavement is, of course, a place where people can cycle away from motor traffic, and we should not be surprised that people opt for it in such great numbers. In one of the villages along the Downs Link route, I saw this scene –

A family of four had just exited a pub on the left, heading back towards the old railway line. The father is happy to cycle on the road through the village, but the mother and the two children went straight across onto the pavement, going out of their way to access it. Longer, slower, and more inconvenient, but – unlike the father – they just didn’t want to ride on the road.

On the recent Cycling Embassy trip to Newcastle, we saw plenty of people riding bikes, but on the pavement, just like the family above.

Even on roads largely free of motor traffic, we still saw families opting for the pavement, because they didn’t feel comfortable cycling with it. In this example, it was the pinchpoint that seemed to push the child onto the pavement –

And in the case below – despite this being a bus- and cycle-only road – the family opted for the pavement. The cycle lanes did not offer them the comfort they needed from approaching buses.

We have mountains of evidence, beyond this kind of  anecdote, to demonstrate that  people do not like cycling with motor traffic. If we are to build mass cycling in this country, to achieve a situation where cycling is the norm for short urban trips, and not the exception, we have to start recognising this evidence, and building policy around it.

Yet there is a strange and persistent attitude in cycle campaigning that ‘sharing’ and ‘integration’ remains the way forward; that we just need to tame and reduce traffic, and people will be happy to cycle with it. Guidance for cycle provision, encapsulated in the Hierarchy of Provision, epitomises this inverted thinking, that somehow it is better to integrate than to separate. This ignores both the reasons people repeatedly give for their refusal to ride bicycles, and also the behaviour of people when they do ride bikes, as we can see in the photographs above. Reduced and tamed traffic is not enough to convince people to ‘share’.

This preference for cycling in isolation from motor traffic is confirmed not just by the people who only ride on rail trails, or on seafront paths, but even by the behaviour of the ‘hardened’ cyclist like me, who will always seek out a quieter, traffic-free route in preference to a busier one, if it is not too compromised on either directness or time grounds.

I attended a lecture two weeks ago given by Philip Darnton (the former chair of Cycling England) as part of the excellent Cycling for Transport lecture series. Some of his slides were slightly worrying, to me, because they seemed to demonstrate the same willingness to ignore how people behave, and what they prefer. The slide pictured below went so far as to suggest that ‘sharing the road’ is an ‘ideal solution’.

I’m at a loss to ascertain how sharing the road can possibly be ‘ideal’ when nobody wants to share; when children coming out of a pub car park will head straight across the road onto a pavement; when the greatest demand for cycling is on traffic-free routes; when on a bus-only road, a family will still opt for the pavement, in preference to the road; when countries which have the highest levels of cycling have the least amount of sharing.

The following slide was also presented for discussion –

Darnton went on to say that, obviously, we can’t possibly build segregated lanes everywhere; we can’t build a path directly from your home, to your bank, he said, so what people really mean when they say they won’t cycle without cycle paths is that they don’t really want to cycle at all.

I didn’t get a chance to respond to this argument after the lecture – there were lots of questions, and I didn’t get a go – but I think it is misguided. When people say they don’t want to cycle because it is dangerous, or because it feels dangerous, or because they’re scared of traffic, they really mean it. They’re not coming up with excuses, and I wish we would stop disparaging them, and actually start listening to them.

Now of course we can’t build cycle paths everywhere. But to use this fact (or canard) to suggest that people need to overcome their perceptions of danger about cycling with motor traffic demonstrates a failure to understand the totality of the Dutch cycling experience. The Dutch couldn’t build cycle paths everywhere – they only form a relatively small percentage of their overall road network – and yet the emphasis in Dutch cycle infrastructure planning is placed overwhelmingly on separation, not on sharing.

This road in Assen is ‘shared’ with motor traffic in a conventional sense – what motor traffic there is shares the same space as any cyclist – but the whole network is configured in such a way that there is practically no motor traffic on this road at all. It is a dead end, and serves only as an access road for the properties along it. By contrast, it is a direct, continuous route for bicycles out of the city. It is separation, not integration, that governs the design of this road, because separation is what cyclists prefer. Dutch planning for cycling starts, entirely sensibly, from the preferences of the end user. That’s precisely why it is so incredibly successful – it listens to the customer.

On the road on the other side of this canal, which carries substantially more motor traffic, there is separation of a more conventional kind.

Both routes are pleasant, safe and easy to use by bike, and involve next to no interaction with motor traffic.

Separation, not integration, is the key to Dutch success in fostering such high cycling levels. As Dutch human beings are in almost all probability very similar to British human beings, we should adopt precisely the same strategies if we wish to increase our cycling levels. We should use the evidence, not just from the Netherlands, but from the way we can see people in Britain behaving already. Focus on separation – however you wish to achieve it – not on integration.

Angela Lee – anti-cycling campaigner

Angela Lee of the Bicycle Helmet Initiative Trust is a helmet zealot. She believes that all people should wear helmets at all times when they are riding a bike, regardless of how fast they are riding, regardless of how they are riding, or regardless of where they are riding. She believes that helmets should be compulsory. As has been astutely observed

she genuinely must believe that wearing a helmet is the first, best thing a cyclist can do for their safety, and since any attempt to inform her otherwise is apparently met with a tirade, it is unlikely that she will ever learn any better.

The extent to which her group is so single-mindedly focused on putting polystyrene on cyclists’ heads, rather than on actually keeping them from harm in the first place, becomes apparent from a recent comment in response to Mikael Colville-Andersen’s observations about how helmets influence the perception of cycling as a safe activity.

Ms Lee evidently does not believe that ludicrous safety gear presents cycling – any kind of cycling – as a dangerous activity. Instead she argues that

“[What’s] putting [cyclists] off is people talking about changing road structures, making roundabouts safer – that is what makes people feel at risk because you’re making people think there are other fundamental points that need changing. Asking a cyclist to put a helmet on their head is a common sense approach.”

Truly remarkable. Apparently the mere act of talking about making roads safer is what is discouraging cyclists from using them.

I was thinking about cycling here, but now they’re talking about making it safer, I’m suddenly put off

What leads me to believe Ms Lee to be an anti-cycling campaigner – and not just a well-meaning but deluded single-issue campaigner – is her opinion that discussing the improvement of roads for cycling is

making people think there are other fundamental points that need changing

As if this is a bad thing; as if making the environment safer was some kind of misguided policy; as if anything other than putting polystyrene hats on heads is muddle-headed and wrong. Heaven forbid we should make the mistake of convincing people that anything needs changing – that huge roundabouts and dangerous junctions should be made safe and accessible for all. No – that would be to make people think that there is something ‘fundamental’ about cycling safety that needs changing, beyond bicycle helmets.

Staggering.

Thanks to Sally Hinchcliffe for spotting the quote

A lane unfit for cycling

Bar Lane is a beautiful country road just to the south of Horsham, in West Sussex. 

It meanders southwards from the village of Copsale through the gently rolling Sussex countryside, besides fields, and past a handful of small cottages. With very little motor traffic, it’s a lovely place to ride a bike.
However, despite the fact that I’ve lived in Horsham most of my life, I’ve only ever ridden down this lane once, and that was to take these pictures, over the weekend.

And that’s for one simple reason – it doesn’t go anywhere. At least, not anywhere I want to ride a bike.

The southern end of Bar Lane meets the A24, a fast dual carriageway which typically carries a high volume of motor traffic. There is no cycle track or pavement here – not even a verge. This is not a place I have ever ridden a bike, because I don’t want to.

So while Bar Lane is useful for driving, if you are on a bike, it effectively has a brick wall built at one end.

I probably won’t cycle down it again, which makes me a bit sad.

A letter from Zohra

I recently chanced upon this amazing letter, written to the British Medical Journal, almost exactly 13 years ago.

Why do school children cycle on the continent, but not in the UK?

Dear Editor,

I have been reading the responses to Douglas Carnall’s Editorial on cycling. None of your correspondents mention the factor I believe to be most important in encouraging my age group to cycle – separate cycle carriageways. I have just returned from an exchange trip to Munich, with a mixed group of eighteen Leeds 15 year olds. None of the Leeds students currently dare use their bicycles to travel to school, to friends’ houses or into town. However, when in Munich we all had lots of opportunities to cycle. All of the roads had segregated cycle paths, separate from both cars and pedestrians. I have also seen this sort of provision for cyclists in Denmark.

The German teenagers’ parents had no problems letting them take their bikes out for the day, knowing they would be safe on their journeys. This gives my age group much-wanted freedom AND EXERCISE !

Even if speed limits were reduced to 20 miles per hour (enforced at 27 mph) would you let your teenager out for the day on a bike in the majority of cities and towns in the UK ? I can only see a significant increase in teenagers wanting to (and being allowed to) use their bikes for transport if separate carriageways are introduced. These do not include the pathetic painted cyclepaths currently offered in Leeds where the roads are reasonably wide, which inevitably disappear when you really need them.

Could we send our transport planners and John Prescott to Denmark or Germany to see how its done?

Yours sincerely

Zohra Chiheb

I like to imagine that Zohra’s group looked like this.

A group of teenagers cycling in comfort and security; something that she and her friends wouldn’t dare to do back in Leeds, even if their parents had let them.

The letter is, almost paradoxically, both incredibly insightful and a statement of the blindingly obvious. Children do not like to cycle in motor traffic. Create the conditions that separate them from that motor traffic, and they will happily do so. Zohra and her friends were, unintentionally or otherwise, an experiment, and she was perceptive enough to realise what had made the difference. Nobody else was writing letters to the BMJ pointing out what was actually needed to make her choose to ride a bike; she obviously felt compelled to write in herself.

But direct evidence from children, stating in plain and simple terms what is required for them to feel happy about cycling to school, or to friends’ houses, or into town, simply could not do for a certain kind of cycle campaigner. Within five days, a response had appeared in the BMJ.

Segregating cyclists is not the answer

It is welcome and valuable to receive the viewpoint of a young cyclist such as Zohra Chiheb, who has sampled, and obviously appreciated, the situation of her contemporaries on the Continent. I am certainly glad she was able to experience the freedom of two wheels, a pleasure (and birthright, in my view) that has been denied young people in this country for more than a decade. I was lucky; I was a teenager back in the Seventies, when no one thought twice about allowing teenagers to roam the neighbourhood and even further afield on their bikes, if they so wished.

Contrary to what common sense would suggest, there are in fact problems with the German/Dutch/Danish solution of providing separate routes for cyclists. Studies repeatedly show that segregating cyclists increases their risks. For instance, in Milton Keynes during the last 11 years, 7 cyclists have been killed using the cycle paths, only 1 has been killed on the roads (1). In Berlin, cyclists were found to be four times more likely to crash off-road than on the road with the traffic (1). Cycle paths are invariably poorly engineered, they are narrow, also used by pedestrians, many cyclists ride too fast on them and junctions are anarchic. Also, where cycle routes encounter the road system, cyclists invariably lose all rights of way. High skill levels are not fostered by such arrangements.

“Cyclists fair [sic] best when they are treated as vehicular traffic”. So says American cycling safety expert John Forrester and so also says British expert John Franklin. To the inexperienced cyclist, such opinions appear nonsensical. But in fact, cycling with the traffic is not dangerous compared to other means of transport. One mile of cycling is significantly less dangerous than a mile of walking. The death rate of regular road cyclists is no higher than the death rate of car users (about 1 in 25,000 per year). And that is average cycling – there is plenty of bad cycling out there! Skilful cyclists face much better odds. An hour of skilful cycling is probably not much more dangerous than an hour of average driving.

Keeping cyclists in the traffic is the best solution for a number of reasons:

1) Cyclists have access to the same direct, well-surfaced routes as drivers;

2) Drivers get accustomed to dealing with cyclists;

3) Cyclists get accustomed to dealing with drivers;

4) Cycling skilfully in the traffic is the safest, fastest way to get about town on a bicycle;

Young people today are the victims of a decade of bucket-loads of negative propaganda being tipped over cycling; by the medical profession (until lately), by “safety campaigners”, by the media, by cyclists themselves (it cannot be denied). Young people now believe cycling is only “safe” away from traffic, and thus they lose most of the potential utility and enjoyment of riding. Young people must be taught skilful riding techniques and drivers must be made to understand that in years to come they will be expected to be tolerant of an increasing number of cyclists on the roads. This latter point is less of a problem than it might seem. In my experience, the overwhelming majority of drivers will return the courtesy of a courteously handled bike. But lower speed limits and proper recognition of cyclists’ right to safety will make the roads more inviting places for young cyclists (and older ones who have given up). Dropping the use of such words as “danger”, “accident” and “safe” is vital; try “convenient”, “healthy” and “quick”.

Ms Chiheb asks whether I would allow teenagers out to ride on today’s roads. That is a tough question, because the attitude today is that if you get hurt, you are in the wrong, especially pursuing a “dangerous” activity such as road cycling. The parents of a damaged teenager will attract the opprobrium of decent-thinking people for having been so “irresponsible” as to allow their offspring freedom. But if she and her friends are prepared to face that nonsense down and do what they actually want to do in the face of political correctness, I would suggest the following (at the risk of appearing presumptuous):

1) Dump the MTB and get a proper road bike. Since you cannot buy a practical road bike in a shop nowadays, I suggest you look about for a good second-hand 10-speed with a “male” frame. You should be able to get something quite smart for £60-£100. Make sure it has mudguards, a carrier rack, a good bell, and it must have good lights, ideally dynamo-powered with a rear light that remains on when you stop. These are expensive, but well worth it. You may need to put a female saddle on it.

2) Buy “Cyclecraft” by John Franklin (HMSO) or “Effective Cycling” by John Forrester. Read, absorb;

3) Start cautiously on quiet suburban backstreets and work up slowly. Be prepared to take 12 to 18 months to work up to a good skill level, and don’t be deterred if you have a crash – that’s the most important lesson you’ll ever have!

4) Always bear in mind that it’s fast traffic that is dangerous, not heavy traffic. One fast idiot every half hour is far more dangerous than a whole stream of slow-moving traffic. Congestion has slowed urban traffic and made it safer. British traffic is far more benign, orderly and predictable than it is usually made out to be;

5) Trust your own judgement; don’t listen to the hysterical claptrap about cycling being “dangerous”. Bear in mind what I said above – a mile of walking is more dangerous than a mile of cycling, but neither is really all that dangerous if you keep your wits about you.

So don’t be put off by political correctness. There’s a wonderful world of exploration out there. Just do it!

1. “Enabling and encouraging people to cycle”. Paper presented by John Franklin to the Cambridge Cycling Campaign. See his home pagehttp://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/quinze/cycling.htm

Competing interests: None declared

Frankly this makes my blood boil. Maybe it would be wrong to single out one letter in particular, but this one typifies everything that was (and still is) so desperately wrong with cycle campaigning in this country.

The evidence was there in Zohra’s letter, but it just gets dismissed. Extraordinarily, the stated preferences of a child were completely ignored, and instead a futile attempt is made to persuade her that ‘cycling in traffic’ is the best way forward.

A whole paragraph is devoted to misinformation about the safety of cycle paths, and their quality. We now know that John Franklin misled a nation’s cycle campaigners, and his statistics about the Milton Keynes Redways (which are undeniably of dubious quality) were shoddy and essentially useless. Dutch cyclists are safer – far far safer – than their British counterparts.

We also know that cycle paths need not be ‘narrow’, or ‘anarchic’ at junctions, or ‘used by pedestrians’, or that ‘cyclists lose all rights of way’ when they encounter the road system. Bad cycle paths are like that, but even in the year 2000 there was plenty of evidence that cycle paths across the Netherlands did not conform to this shabby stereotype. Deliciously, there’s also a Forester- and Franklin-esque reference to the ‘skill levels’ of cyclists being diminished by cycling infrastructure. We should remember that John Franklin thought Dutch cyclists turned around and went home when they arrived at Harwich due to their ‘low skill levels’ –

Sustrans has often cited the fact that Dutch cyclists sometimes leave the ferry at Harwich and find traffic so difficult to deal with that they go back home! Interestingly, this problem is not experienced by cyclists arriving from France, Spain or the USA. Proficiency in using roads on a regular basis is essential to maximise safety, and to maximise one’s cycling horizons. I would not like to see Britain on the slope down to Dutch levels of cycling competence.

It apparently didn’t occur to Franklin that the reason Dutch cyclists were abandoning their cycling holidays in Britain before they’d even started was simply because cycling on roads full of heavy traffic is an unpleasant experience, and one they were not expecting. Their abandonment had nothing to do with ‘cycling competence’, and everything to do with the brute reality of cycling in Britain.

But Wardlaw – so obviously an acolyte of Franklin – makes precisely the same mistake in response to Zohra. He evidently thinks statistics claiming that cycling (or rather, ‘skilful cycling’) is as as safe as walking, or as driving, are any kind of substitute for the subjective quality of the cycling environment, when all the evidence shows that it is that subjective experience that matters. It’s even there in the child’s letter he’s just responded to, but he is so blinkered he cannot even see it.

As David Hembrow pointed out in his recent interview with The Bike Show, many activities are statistically safe, but that doesn’t mean they will automatically be attractive to the general population. Sky diving might be relatively safe, but not many people will be prepared to hurl themselves out of a plane, because it is quite a scary experience. You have to engage with people’s perceptions as you find them, otherwise you are sunk; yet that is precisely what Wardlaw, Franklin and a host of other cycling campaigners were unwilling or unable to do.

This astonishing inability to account for subjective safety explains why Wardlaw thinks a mass cycling culture can be built on removing the use of the words ‘safety’ and ‘danger’ from the discourse. Even if this were theoretically possible, and cycling was never again referred to by anyone as an unsafe or dangerous activity, that wouldn’t suddenly transform the experience of cycling on roads, where you have to continually negotiate with motor traffic flowing all around you, into a pleasant one. A cycle campaigning strategy built on attempting to remove the perception of danger by words rather than by action – an actual adjustment of the cycling environment – is plainly doomed to failure.

The real problem with Wardlaw, Franklin and others is their refusal to acknowledge that other people are not like them; that other people might not like cycling in motor traffic; that other people might not be able or willing to cycle as fast as them; that other people don’t want to be persuaded that cycling is safe, they just want it to feel safe.

This refusal to acknowledge that other people might be different is epitomised by Wardlaw advising a teenage girl to buy a ‘proper road bike’ with ‘a “male” frame’. That is, the kind of bike he would buy.

A small part of me hopes that Zohra emigrated to the Netherlands and – now in her late 20s – is trundling around with her friends in perfect comfort and safety on the kind of bicycle she wanted to own, not the kind that someone told her to get so she could fit into his particular vision of cycling in Britain.

The sound of silence

I’m in the midst of reading the fascinating Noise – A Human History of Sound and Listening, by David Hendy.

Towards the end of the book, in a discussion of our recent ‘search for silence’ – how silence is increasingly valuable in our noisy world – Hendy turns to the soundproofing of buildings, and why it probably isn’t an adequate response to noise.

This passage leapt out at me –

[Writer] George Prochnik says, ‘ Soundproofing is terrific like bulletproof flak jackets are terrific.’ But, he adds, ‘wouldn’t it be better still if we didn’t have to worry about getting shot all the time?’

The answer has to be a resounding yes, for noise can only be successfully addressed if we engage with it in the public arena as a whole.

The comparison with bulletproof jackets reminded me of Chris Boardman’s frequently-used (and excellent) analogy between cycle helmets and bulletproof vests. When civilians start getting shot, we quite rightly focus on stopping people from being shot in the first place. Fitting civilians with bulletproof clothing would be a bizarre response to the danger of death. But precisely the same logic applies (or should apply) with cycle helmets. If people are receiving serious head injuries as a result of a dangerous environment, we should reduce the danger posed by the environment, at source. Fitting protective clothing, rather than dealing with the danger directly, is a retrograde step.

In the same way, we should ask why we even need to soundproof buildings. Doing so represents a ducking of the issue; the environment outside the building will remain noisy, and only the people inside the building will benefit. Noise should, ideally, be addressed at source, just like danger.

Hendy then describes the effect of reducing the need for soundproofing, by the method of making cities ‘silent’ places.

When we have done this in the recent past, the change has sometimes been dramatic. In Dutch cities such as Amsterdam, Utrecht or Masstricht, for instance, pedestrians and bicycles have long been given priority over motor traffic as a matter of policy. As a result the soundscape in their streets and piazzas and arcades is strikingly different from Britain’s car-ravaged town centres.

Far from being deafeningly loud – or, indeed, totally silent – these Dutch cities provide their citizens with a vivid spectrum of sounds that have been smothered elsewhere: street vendors, footsteps on cobbles, church clocks and bells, conversation, laughter.

That’s a particularly accurate description. Rather than silence, Dutch cities are actually filled with noise; lots of different noises, mingling with each other. The low level of each noise creates a palette of sound, unlike London or other British cities, where one noise – roaring motor traffic – tends to dominate (or even drown out completely) all others.

By contrast, a Dutch city centre typically has a far more diverse range of sounds. Motor vehicles form just a part of the broader spectrum of sound.

On the David Hembrow field trip back in 2011, organised by the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, I vividly remember cycling back into the centre of Assen with a handful other members of our party, at about 9pm in the evening, from a meeting about 2-3 miles outside the city. You can see and hear a small bit of that trip through the city centre below. Most of the noise is actually coming from my (poorly held) camera, and from the wind.

I remember being struck, at the time, by how beautifully quiet the city was. Not silent, but with a gentle and harmonious mix of the occasional car, bicycles, and people chatting. These kinds of noises are necessary. As Hendy writes,

Reining in the oppressive noises of industry or traffic has not put silence in their place instead. This is not only because it would be unrealistic to do so; it’s also because we don’t actually like it. Total silence sets our subconscious alarm bells ringing.

In many ways the Dutch approach has made cities sound like villages; places where everyday noises like conversation can be heard, and where no single noise is dominant, or oppressively loud.

Noise, or the lack of it, is just another aspect of what makes a town or a city a pleasant place, and I should really have mentioned it as another aspect of the value of reducing motor traffic, in my previous post about the amenity of urban areas.

Hendy concludes by writing

… The Dutch had a slogan during a noise-reduction campaign back in the 1970s, and maybe it’s time to revive it. It simply said, ‘Let’s be gentle with each other.’ That might sound a little wishy-washy to contemporary ears, bruised and bloodied as they are by all our disputes and anxieties and suspicions. Yet it reminds us that even today sound has to be managed not by technology or force but by ethics. It requires a world where none of us is noticeably louder than anyone else, and where none of us is cowed into deathly silence, but where all of us can hum and whistle and talk to each other – and hear others doing the same – as we go about our daily lives.

It’s interesting that the Dutch 1970s anti-noise campaign appears to have coincided with their campaign against danger on the streets. In many ways noise and danger go together, and it’s perhaps not all that surprising that the two issues were tackled at the same time; they were both symptoms of the broader problem of an excess of motor vehicles in towns and cities.

Indeed, the more intimidating and hostile streets to cycle on in London are precisely those places where it is all but impossible to have a conversation with someone cycling next to you (or, more likely, behind you). Not only is motor traffic so loud conversation is difficult, but that same motor traffic makes it hard to even cycle in a way such that conversation would be possible at all.

So – let’s have streets safe for cycling, but also safe for talking. Even safe for doing both at the same time.

Accessibility versus amenity – how the bicycle can solve the dilemma

Yesterday I gave a brief presentation at a Town Centre Opportunities event in London; the theme of the conference was on revitalising urban space and keeping ‘The High Street’ thriving.

I was invited to talk in a supposedly provocative capacity, forming part of a panel debate (along with John Dales, and others) designed to stimulate discussion about alternatives. Pleasingly, however, it seemed that what I had to say (namely, we need to focus much less on the car and car parking when we think about reinvigorating towns, and focus more on enabling different modes of urban transport, and the bicycle in particular) was actually part of something approaching a consensus.

This might have had something to do with the fact that representatives of motoring organisations, for instance the AA and the RAC, were not in attendance, despite having been invited. (Nor was Mary Portas). But it was encouraging nonetheless.

I started by talking about the difficulty town centres currently have in attempting to compete with out of town shopping centres, which are usually easy to access by car, and almost always free to park at. Indeed, one of the speakers before me mentioned how in the mid-1990s, the great majority of new urban development in Britain was out of town – she referred to this period as the beginning of the ‘great death’ of town centres.

Out of town land is cheap, and consequently it is relatively easy to accommodate huge areas of parking at low cost.

It’s also relatively easy to build big access roads to these shopping centres, so you can funnel huge numbers of motor cars into them. Conversely, it’s much more difficult to push motor vehicles around in towns and cities – although unfortunately that still doesn’t stop us trying to do so.

In addition, land is much more expensive in towns and cities, so inevitably storing cars becomes more expensive. Monstrous multi-storey car parks are required.

Cars can also be stored on the street, but this isn’t cheap either – there is a finite supply, and so it has to be charged for.

So, out of town centres are usually very easy to get to by car (without the congestion and stress involved in navigating town centres), and are free to visit. Town centres are at a competitive disadvantage.

The Portas Review [pdf] recommends a number of measures to redress the balance, including a presumption in favour of town centre, rather than out of town, development. But on the subject of access to towns, the Portas strategy is rather unimaginative – namely, to attempt to make high streets as cheap and easy to access by car as out of town centres.

In essence, the Review calls for

• free car parking;
• cheaper car parking generally;
• car parking in more convenient locations (presumably closer to shops);
• and a parking ‘league table’, showing which authorities are charging the most (doubtless in an attempt to encourage them to charge less).

There’s even an attractive illustration of someone happily shopping, thanks to free parking.

But there is a problem with this Portas vision. Make parking free, or cheap, and allow it close to where people actually want to go, and the end result is streets like this –

Cluttered, congested and unpleasant.

And, of course, more car parking in towns means more driving, which means streets are noisier, less pleasant, and less safe.

(Second picture by Joe Dunckley)

But amenity is obviously important, and we shouldn’t sacrifice it just so people can get into towns more easily. Indeed, the Portas Review recognises this, stating that

“High streets… need to be spaces and places that people want to be in.”

“…small and cluttered pavements, as well as busy roads, can make high streets unsafe for family shopping [indeed, surely for any type of shopping].”

“our high streets need to offer a safe and pleasant place to shop and socialise.”

But making it cheaper and easier to park in town centres will inevitably result in the opposite – busier roads, less pleasant streets, and less safety. A worse environment for the people you actually want to visit towns, and to stick around in them. Places that you don’t want to be in.

We already know that attractive, convivial streets are usually low traffic environments, often without car parking.

(This is the southern section of Exhibition Road – only a matter of yards from the street in the previous photograph).

So – we know that town centre streets need cheap and easy access if they are to successfully compete with out of town shopping. But unfortunately too much cheap and easy access by car can ruin these places as destinations. For example, nobody wanted to hang around on the southern section of Exhibition Road when it looked like this.

Courtesy of Google Streetview, acting as a handy time machine

So what’s the solution to this conflict between accessibility and amenity?

The answer is, of course, the bicycle.

Picture by the Alternative Department for Transport

At least 50 bicycles parked in front of a Dutch supermarket. Right in front of it. But no congestion, no difficulty in finding a spot to park, no noise, and very little danger. The street remains a pleasant place.

70% of Dutch supermarket shopping is carried out on foot, or by bike, and for very good reason – because the Dutch want things this way. Walking and cycling have been made the obvious way to get about for short urban trips. And as a consequence their town and city centres are calm, beautiful and attractive places.

This hasn’t happened by accident; making the bicycle easy to use has been designed into the streetscape.

 In Britain, by contrast, using a bicycle to get about town is probably the very last mode of transport most people would contemplate using. Conditions for cycling are intimidating and hostile.

But, as I said during my presentation, there is no reason why we cannot change. 66% of all British trips are less than 5 miles; 38% are less than 2 miles.

Graph courtesy of Joe Dunckley

A considerable proportion of these trips could easily be cycled by most people if the conditions were right. Of course the Netherlands is flatter than the UK, but most short trips in British towns and cities are, to all intents and purposes, pretty flat. Topography is no excuse for our dismal failure to realise a sane urban transport policy. 56% – that’s over half – of all trips between 1-2 miles long in Britain are driven, which is both a consequence and an explanation of why our towns and cities are so often unpleasant, traffic-dominated places.

From the DfT’s Creating Growth, Cutting Carbon 

Just 2% of British trips under 3 miles are cycled; the equivalent figure for the Netherlands is 39%. That doesn’t mean that the Dutch have simply abandoned cars; they own more of them per capita than the UK. It just means that Dutch urban areas are designed in such a way that the bicycle – a brilliant mode of transport in its own right – naturally comes to the fore.

My final point in the presentation was that reducing car use in urban areas does not mean reducing trade. Not only are Dutch towns thriving, bustling places (at least, the ones I have visited), we already know that the amount of spending in towns corresponds poorly to motor vehicle use.

Even under current British conditions – with walking and cycling relatively unattractive, compared to driving – research consistently shows that people arriving on foot, by bike, or by public transport spend more over the long term than those arriving by car. They may not be filling up their large boot with goods (unfortunately, so easy to visualise), but they will be making more visits, and spending more overall.

People arriving in a town centre on foot or by bike are more likely to stop spontaneously. They are not committed to finding a parking space; if they see something (or someone) interesting, they can stop where they like. They can also stay around as long as they want, with no concerns about retrieving their vehicle. It’s also easier (and cheaper) for them to come and go more frequently – anecdotally, I am much more inclined to pop into town for a trivial purpose if it’s by bike, than by car, simply because it’s much less hassle.

And finally – and probably most importantly – if most trips into a town are by bike, or by foot, the town itself becomes an attractive place where people will want to be.

It’s a great pity that the Portas Review had nothing at all to say about how we get into our towns beyond the use of the car, and equally that it did not seem to appreciate how making it easier to drive into and park in them can destroy the very attractiveness that the Review itself recognises as important.

Thankfully, going by the discussion yesterday, I’m not the only one who was disappointed with the Review, and who appreciates that there is more to urban transport than the motor car.

The AGM of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain

Just over two years ago, around 40 people gathered in a cafe in central London. The meeting, which had arisen organically and informally out of discussion on a number of blogs, involved the founding the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain.

Picture by Mark Ames

In attendance were founder/chairman Jim Davis, secretary Sally Hinchcliffe, Joe Dunckley of War on the Motorist, Danny of Cyclists in the City, Paul of Pedestrianise London, Mark Ames of I Bike London, Karl McCracken, and many others who plainly felt that things needed to change.

My own particular motivation for attending arose out of a sense of frustration; frustration that the strategies so obviously necessary to increase cycling levels in this country were seemingly being deliberately ignored, disparaged or marginalised, not just by those hostile to cycling as a mode of transport, but by those who represented cyclists.

A bit of background. Since my teenage days I had always been a stereotypical ‘keen cyclist’; short trips were almost always undertaken by bike, on top of leisure riding (including a trip from John O’Groats to Lands End in the late 90s). The bicycle always struck me as such an obvious way to get about, and my spare time was spent trying to persuade friends and colleagues to come around to my point of view; that although it seemed ‘dangerous’ it really wasn’t that bad once you got used to it, and the funny kit I wore (helmet, ‘special shoes’, hi-viz flashes, lycra for longer trips) was necessary, and  ‘odd’ only because a tiny minority of people wore it. If everyone started cycling, then everyone would look like a cyclist, and it wouldn’t be so odd. Although slightly laughable with hindsight, I suppose I was trying to normalise cycling by trying to get everyone else to be like me, even if the feeling, lurking at the back of my mind, that what I did wasn’t actually going to have mass appeal never really disappeared. But I didn’t know any different.

From about 2005-8, one of my best friends lived in Amsterdam, and I frequently went out to visit him, crashing on his floor after nights out drinking in the Jordaan. I was dimly aware that there were lots of people cycling around us as we walked the streets, but I had no real awareness of why, beyond a vague assumption that the Dutch just ‘loved’ bicycles, and that the narrow, dense street patterns in the city centre made it difficult to get around by car. I had no understanding, at all, of the overall Dutch strategy of mode separation; that is, keeping motor vehicles and bicycles apart from one another.

So when I chanced upon David Hembrow’s blog (it’s hard to pin down exactly when, but probably in 2009) it was completely revelatory. I couldn’t quite understand why someone like me, who (as my friends will attest) was basically obsessed with cycling as a mode of transport, and who had frequently visited Amsterdam, could be so in the dark about Dutch practice, and the quality of their cycling environment.

It wasn’t quite as strong a feeling as the sense of having been lied to, but it certainly felt as if something had been kept from me. I had a vague idea of how a ‘cycle path’ might work, but it always seemed to me to be something that was for slow trundling at little more than walking speed, with inconvenient and dangerous passages across junctions. Part of my attitude was undoubtedly coloured by the fact that most off-carriageway infrastructure in the UK is actually like this, but by the same token I had no real knowledge of how things could be different.

Why hadn’t Dutch infrastructure appeared on my radar before I found David Hembrow’s blog? The simplest answer is that nobody was talking about it. While plenty of effort was (rightly) being put in to disparage UK attempts at ‘infrastructure’, there was seemingly no effort being made, at all, to communicate best Dutch practice, and how it made cycling a comfortable and traffic-free experience. It didn’t appear in cycling magazines, nobody was taking pictures, or presenting it to a UK audience, and showing how it worked. The only exception, I think, was a small group of activists in Camden, but the internet was not as pervasive as it is now, and their ideas foundered on local political opposition and hostility from the wider cycling community.

Cycling campaigns showed no apparent interest in Dutch and Danish infrastructure, and this continued in the period after I discovered David Hembrow’s blog. Even as late as 2010, just a few months before the Embassy was founded, the Dutch and Danish approach was still being disparaged.

There is a long running debate among cycling protagonists about the pros and cons of segregated cycle facilities. They are often hailed as the solution for getting more people cycling. CTC and most local cycle campaign groups are sceptical.

… would [the Danish] approach work in Britain? Are there differences in UK driving culture or law which would need to be addressed before we could embrace continental-style segregation? Or is segregation – leaving most of the roadspace available for motor traffic – quite simply the wrong answer in principle, at a time of growing awareness of the need for drastic cuts in CO2 emissions?

(a passage that is, incidentally, indicative of the problematic attitude of a great deal of UK cycle campaigning; preoccupied with fighting motor traffic even at the expense of the quality of the cycling experience). And – remarkably, given subsequent events – Mark Ames was having to ask whether the London Cycling Campaign was actually in favour of segregation, or not.

It was precisely this sniffiness and wariness about the Dutch approach – a reluctance to come straight out and saying that mass cycling requires the separation of cycling from motor traffic – that meant that the Embassy needed to be founded. ‘Going Dutch’ – an approach that has now risen to prominence in Britain – was not even on the radar.

Of course the cycling landscape has started to change dramatically since early 2011, in a way that I suspect many of us at the first meeting would not have imagined. The London Cycling Campaign chose ‘Go Dutch’ as their campaigning strategy for the 2012 mayoral elections, and their excellent work appears to have led Boris Johnson (and Transport for London) to have a damascene conversion with regard to the way cycling is catered for as a mode of transport.

A tragic event in London brought a national newspaper into the cycle campaigning fold, fuelled by incomprehension that one of their own could be so seriously and arbitrarily injured, right on their own doorstep. Driven by the Times’ editor, the Cities Fit for Cycling campaign evolved brilliantly from an angry plea to keep people riding bikes safe from harm into a much broader strategy of making our towns and cities humane and attractive places, both for cycling and for people in general. Indeed, the recent Get Britain Cycling Inquiry has emerged out of the Times’ campaign, with News International providing funding for the evidence sessions and the report. On top of all that our own Sally has become involved in another excellent campaign, in Scotland – Pedal On Parliament, which goes from strength to strength.

What role should the Embassy play in this new cycle campaigning landscape? Our AGM in Newcastle on the weekend of June 1st-2nd is the perfect opportunity to discuss these issues. It won’t be all talk – there will be plenty of time out on the bike, as we get shown around the city by our hosts, Newcastle Cycling Campaign, and there will, of course, be an inevitable night out on the town. Anyone is welcome to attend and to help shape our future. Do come if you can.