Scotland’s Transport Minister Keith Brown has unveiled a “ground-breaking” new campaign aimed at road users. The £500,000 promotional campaign for the ‘Niceway Code’ launches on 5th August and will use posters and TV ads to ask motorists, cyclists and pedestrians […]
Continue ReadingLondon. Late evening of July 16th, 1898. “We’re nearing Millbank Penitentiary, at last,” said Sherlock Holmes. Dr Watson, familiar with his friend’s powers of deduction nevertheless expressed his surprise. “How the deuce do you know that?” he said. “I can’t […]
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 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 ReadingThe cartoon below is from a light-hearted book on road safety, first published in 1935, You Have Been Warned: A Complete Guide to the Road by Fougasse and McCullough. The line drawings were split across a number of pages; I’ve […]
Continue ReadingJohn Galsworthy, the Nobel Prize-winning author, was brought up in Kingston upon Thames, close to the start of the “most famous cycling highway in the world.” Born in 1867, he would have been in his mid-twenties when the Ripley Road […]
Continue Reading“Our weather is such that for at least one quarter of the year we must cycle at home or not at all,” stated a correspondent to the short-lived The Rambler weekly cycling magazine in 1897. “Most of us do not […]
Continue ReadingTransport academics tend to credit the discovery of ‘induced demand in transport’ to J.J. Leeming, a British road-traffic engineer and county surveyor, writing in 1969. He observed that the more roads are built, the more traffic there is to fill […]
Continue ReadingPresumed liability won’t Get Britain Cycling. Cycle training won’t Get Britain Cycling. Separated cycle tracks won’t Get Britain Cycling. Subjective safety won’t Get Britain Cycling. Health messages won’t Get Britain Cycling. Better cycle security won’t Get Britain Cycling. ‘Go Dutch’ […]
Continue ReadingIf the Second World War hadn’t intervened, Britain might now have a dense network of Dutch-style segregated bike paths. Or, at least, such a segregated network was the ardent desire of motoring organisations, leading police officers, the Ministry of Transport, […]
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