The Great Big You Rode the Bike Lane now Buy the Book Bike Blog Roundup

This week, with Janette Sadik-Khan promoting her new book, there were plenty of reminders of what cities can do with a sufficiently ambitious leadership (although not everyone has got the memo that the bike wars are over. Bike Portland interviewed her about life in New York and after, while the Guardian pointed out, she went far beyond bike lanes in 'resetting the operating code' of a city's streets. And nor is she the only one; the man behind the transformation of Atlanta also has a book out on repurposing our cities for the 21st Century (and no, that doesn't mean flying cars)

Revisiting cities

But where are our true cities of the future to be found? Bicycle Dutch finds that Groningen is tending to rest on its laurels although it has some interesting plans. After a few years away, Brew City Bike finds that San Francisco has quietly been getting on with transforming itself - while New Orleans is rebuilding itself with bike lanes. Cycling Christchurch considers the impact of Auckland's Cycleways programme and finds it's making a start, albeit from a low base - certainly one young family is taking full advantage of the cycleway on their doorstep - while the city is now tackling its inner suburbs with what look quite like Mini-Holland type approaches. Cardiff is revisiting its bike hire scheme a few years after the original attempt folded things have moved on somewhat since then (or perhaps e-bikes will be the answer). Meanwhile, Subversive Suburbanite is heartened by a spot of tactical urbanism, Glasgow style.

Lacking ambition

Sadik-Khan might have been visionary, but elsewhere it seems that some cities are content to aim for 'least mediocre' status. In Belfast, while the consultants looking at the Linen Quarter almost understood the problem, they failed to reach the obvious conclusion and propose removing on-street parking. Salford's light segregation approach doesn't impress Mad Cycle Lanes of Manchester, five years of Local Sustainable Transport Funding hasn't done much for Birmingham, and Lancashire is trying again to develop a cycling and walking strategy. Even London, for all the transformation that has been taking place recently, is still not a fit place for kids to cycle in, say the most important people to convince, their parents. Elsewhere, it's a sad truth that, when first starting to cycle in a UK city, the most important advice is when in doubt, get off and push - even on our National Cycle Network routes. At least Singapore is starting to imagine a different city, with its inaugural car-free Sunday

From Saddik-Khan to Sadiq Khan

Meanwhile in London, Sustrans is heartened by Janette's near-namesake's cycle-friendly manifesto. The London Cycle Campaign's Sign For Cycling campaign for the mayoral election will imagine a better London for everyone - and Caroline Pidgeon is the first to sign up as Boris looks back at his legacy and wishes he'd started building segregated routes earlier. Nationally, Chris Boardman is disappointed in the government's record so far - perhaps Wiggo might care to join him in campaigning for more cycling infrastructure. Elsewhere, another frame-by-frame analysis of the Northern Ireland election broadcasts takes on the SDLP while Cardiff Cycle City asks what has changed one year after it delivered its cycling manifesto. In Edinburgh, the new leader of the SNP group in the council isn't quite with the programme yet when it comes to cycling. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Bike Portland interviews another mayoral candidate for the city.

Rearguard actions

If Sadik-Khan is right that the bike wars are over - and a quietway consultation in Wandsworth suggests she might be right - there are still plenty of confused soldiers out there in the jungle (or the hills of Hampstead) who haven't heard the news and are fighting on, even if the thing they're protesting about would restore Regent's Park to its original glory (or, elsewhere, didn't actually happen). Despite overall support in two polls, Reading's Broad Street won't be open to cycling after hostile letters and emails (although to be fair there are pros and cons to opening a busy shopping street to bikes). A veteran of Enfield's pro-Mini Holland campaign offers sound advice on how to fight back - and research shows you can reach many of the naysayers if you frame the question right while Streets.MN is surprised to learn how easily columnists are apparently swayed by emails from their readers and suggests we fire off a few ourselves in that case.

Elswhere, Buffalo Bill argues that it's perfectly possible to campaign on many fronts and that sometimes you have to start with an unreasonable demand in order to make progress - as long as you know what it will be worth settling for if you don't get what you want. And Spokes Lothian reminds us to keep up the pressure if we don't want to lose bike spaces on some of Scotland's key tourist train routes.

Design matters

As ambitions for cycling infrastructure rise, Irish Cycle wants feedback from readers on what makes for good-quality infrastructure standards. That might help Toronto, which has opted for protected bike lanes on a key route, which represents a major step forward even if it's not perfect as the consultation evening showed. The last winter has shown that well-designed protected cycle lanes can be cleared of snow, and make winter cycling much easier even in Minnesota. In what amounts to high praise indeed, Buffalo Bill welcomes London's new cycling infrastructure even though it's not for him - and we suppose, on balance, it's a good sign that here in the UK we finally have separated bike lanes wide enough to park a police car in. However it's worrying that the successor to Belfast's bin lane (which apparently lives on in Sacramento) won't have enough bollards to keep out a moderately determined police car - perhaps we need a bike-lane version of Peatónito? But what would he do about road works?

Signs and wonders

Bike Auckland considers what measures other than segregation can make streets more bike friendly. We should beware the one-size fits all application of 'shared space' - certainly if Oxford's experience is anything to go by it won't do much for the Lower Clapton Road in Hackney. Nor will switching off all the traffic lights to ease congestion or continuing to put bike lanes in the door zone when there's plenty of room to do things properly - or sending cyclists into a wall of buses in Manchester. The Bicycle story podcast gives us a brief history of the sharrow. Meanwhile in Lancaster they wonder how drivers are supposed to notice a tiny sign when they clearly can't see an actual cyclist - and in Belfast the signs actively make things worse by confusing matters.


It seems the one thing bike bloggers like better than being on the Strava leaderboard is playing with Strava heatmaps - with Cargobike Dad reading the tea leaves for signs of Belfast's cycling revolution and Cardiff by Bike finding that it shows cyclists want routes that are fast and direct. London's East West superhighway isn't even due to open until the end of April and cycling rates have already shot up on the route. Crash data is slightly less cheering to look at but it can tell us about safety in Salzburg and priorities in Toronto. And if you are taking to bike share, at least in Washington, you're actually safer than the average US cyclist although there's no sign of the fabled safety in numbers effect.

Equality for all

It was International Women's Day on Tuesday (the chaps get the other 364, before you ask), celebrated with a suffragettes' bike ride to highlight the gender gap in cycling - something that is marginally easier to close than all the other gender gaps we suffer from. The Incidental cyclist asked what bikes have ever done for women (quite a lot, as it happens). Victoria Hazael was inspired by a day of women and cycling in Oxford - and if that's whetted your appetite, mark your diaries for the second national women and cycling conference in May, and remember to pack your bilegular garments if you plan on doing any cycling. Not that the gender gap is the only one to worry about - there shouldn't be any reason why grandparents as well as grandchildren shouldn't enjoy that 'kid on Christmas morning' feeling of getting a new bike (and now that he's considering retiring Fabian Cancellara wants one that will help him keep up with his wife on her shopping trips around town). More seriously, we need to remember that food delivery cyclists are people too, and deserving of safety as much as anyone else on a bike.

That vision thing

Road safety remains high on the agenda - but what makes Vision Zero different from other road safety approaches, and what will it take to make it a reality in a city like Portland - and can it be compatible with unbiased policing or will it make racial inequality worse? Presumably it doesn't start by blaming pedestrians based on no evidence at all or consist of stickers on lorries that tell cyclists to stay back even as they overtake bikes themselves. Ranty Highwayman considers the implications of autonomous cars which might prove an improvement on the motorway given the standards of driving by the ones with actual people at the wheel but probably won't cope in the more complex environment of the city. Anti cycling feeling dressed up as safety concerns may be nothing new but as attitudes to drink driving show things can be turned around, and surprisingly quickly. Meanwhile, some people have gone beyond being careless around cyclists to actively attacking them - from barbed wire strung across cycle paths in Kent to drivers getting pushy in Bristol and a whole gang of attackers in West London.

Although the police are seeking out the Bristol driver, lack of action on a near miss led Martin Porter to try a private prosecution for dangerous driving, to no avail, but the police should be taking apparently unimportant 'bingles' more seriously (the Australians really do have all the best slang). Instead, drivers are using Australia's new close passing laws to give cyclists more grief, not less - as politicians consider scrapping the new laws altogether.

And finally...

... for a little light relief, Jimmy Phoenix discovers he really is ... ah no, I'll let him give you the punchline himself.