As the book pledge campaign is doing so well on Kickstarter (it blew through the £4000 target within 20 hours and the campaign still has another two weeks to run) I have to think of ‘stretch goals’. These are extra […]
Continue ReadingCollaborative mapping resource OpenStreetMap was created in 2004 as the ‘wikipedia of maps’. Much of the early digital mapping was crowdsourced by geek-cyclists. OpenCycleMap, Cyclestreets, and smartphone apps such as the one I commissioned for BikeHub, are initiatives that prove […]
Continue ReadingEast Grinstead in 1907 doesn’t look terribly swamped with motorcars and would have probably been even less so three years earlier. This was when Sir William Thomas Charley shuffled off this mortal coil. The 71-year old died on a hot […]
Continue ReadingAA President Edmund King is hot on dispelling the myth that motorists and cyclists come from different planets. In a ‘Two Tribes’ presentation given to a road safety conference he said: “We really must get past this dangerous ‘them and […]
Continue ReadingThe oil crisis of 1973 sent shockwaves around the world. Use of cars dropped; use of bicycles rose. Bicycle sales almost doubled, with adult bicycles being the biggest sellers, despite all the hype over the Raleigh Chopper. In the Netherlands, […]
Continue ReadingOn Thursday night I launched a Kickstarter campaign to see if there would be interest in the print and iPad and Kindle versions of Roads Were Not Built For Cars. Within an amazing 20 hours I had received enough pledges […]
Continue ReadingPortland Place in London is now crammed with cars and could be easily turned into a genuinely multi-use street. It’s certainly wide enough, and has been this wide since it was built in the 1770s. Lots of London’s streets are […]
Continue ReadingEE is trying to sell folks its 4G service by using fast athletes on slow modes of transport. “You wouldn’t put Steve Redgrave on a pedalo” is one of the treatments, the other is this take on “penny-farthings” (purists prefer […]
Continue ReadingMany of the things we consider ‘modern’ about cycling – even basic things such as anti-puncture gloop or hi-viz clothing – were available to Victorian cyclists. Below are a number of products from the 1890s which you may not not […]
Continue ReadingViewed from a windscreen, roads look as though they were built for cars and trucks. Britain’s motorways and the elevated arterial road systems of the 1960s and 1970s seem to bear this out but such car-centric highways are the exception […]
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