With Olympic cycling champions coming out of our ears it’s easy to forget that before Chris Boardman’s victory at the Barcelona Games, no Briton had cycled to gold since 1920. Boardman’s crushing pursuit victory kick-started a revolution that eventually made […]
Continue ReadingImagine, if you will, War of the Worlds in reverse. Imagine not a destructive alien invasion, but a constructive one. Imagine giant space-ships sucking up all of the wonderful bike paths in the Netherlands and depositing them in the UK, […]
Continue ReadingIn last week’s Sunday Times, the newspaper’s ‘motormouth’ correspondent Mike Rutherford wrote: “Parking is now officially, in my book at least, one of the undisputed rip-offs of the decade.” He claims he will no longer pay for “heinously expensive spaces” […]
Continue ReadingMore and more cities around the world are waking up to the fact that it’s people who shop, not cars. Designing streets for cars, and not people, can therefore reduce retail takings. Take Regent Street in London, for example. It’s […]
Continue ReadingWe tend to think of roads in the pre-motoring age as meandering rural backwaters. In some ways they were (and it was cycling organisations who first organised for improvements to roads) but these changing conduits were also conduits for change, […]
Continue ReadingThe Coalition Government’s “localism agenda” sounds like democracy in action: local decisions being made by local people. But, for roads other than motorways, it could spell disaster, with a steady decline in spending on non-strategic highways, which are the great […]
Continue ReadingThis is an advert for bicycle insurance contained on a cyclists’ map of New York State, from 1895. The “bike” is in inverted commas because bike is the relatively new word for bicycle. Most bicyclists of the day rode “wheels”, […]
Continue ReadingJudge Simon Tonking of Stafford Crown Court has today written to The Times urging for cyclists to be banned from riding on many A-roads. Sounds sensible, doesn’t it? What kind of crazy bicycle riders want to ride on quasi-motorways? (Er, […]
Continue ReadingOver on iPayRoadTax.com I dig down into the views of Richard Wellings, the Head of Transport at the libertarian think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs. Dr Wellings – his PhD is in transport and environmental policy – had tweeted his […]
Continue ReadingThe slow spread of motorcars after the 1896 London to Brighton Emanicipation Run (an event organised by a bicycle builder) wasn’t universally welcomed. Automobilists were “motor fiends”, opined the satirical magazine Punch in 1907, and the motorcar was “an ingenious […]
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