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Cycling, Environment, Life and style, UK news - August 5, 2019

Carpe noctem! The joy of cycling through the night

Friday Night Ride to the Coast has been spreading the joy of night riding for almost 15 years

If you missed this year’s Dunwich Dynamo, or feel that it’s a little too big, chaotic or (whisper it) competitive, you might trying catching the next Friday Night Ride to the Coast.

This is a carefully organised event run by “the Fridays”, a club devoted to the singular cause of safely delivering you at a conversational pace from the Smoke to the sea. They do this every month from spring through autumn, requiring only third party insurance and an annual membership fee of £2.

This government is neglecting cycling – Labour would change that | Andy McDonald

MPs must stop prioritising cars over people if we are to stand a chance of meeting climate goals

The UK is among the worst countries in Europe for cycling participation, and the government is predicted to achieve just a third of the 800m extra cycling trips by 2025 it had aimed for. What’s more, much of the growth so far has been restricted to London.

This is why Tuesday’s debate among MPs on government support for cycling and walking – or rather, the lack thereof – is so important.

Channel 5's nonsense will make me and other cyclists less safe

Cyclists: Scourge of the Roads? isn’t just as bad as the title indicates – it’s irresponsible

On Wednesday morning, I’ll be a little bit more wary when I cycle into work. I’m always hugely careful, anyway – the trip involves sharing space with tonne-plus lumps of speeding metal – but this time I’ll be particularly on my guard. Why? Because Channel 5 are putting me, and others, at risk.

At 9.15pm on Tuesday, a reasonably sizeable number of people, the majority of whom probably drive motor vehicles, will sit down to watch what is undoubtedly the worst, most scaremongering, inaccurate, downright irresponsible programme on cycling I’ve ever seen.

Many motorists see cyclists as scum of the roads – speeding through crossings, riding where they shouldn’t, and generally hogging the roads.

For many drivers in the capital, cyclists have become public enemy number one.

What really winds motorists up is the feeling that cyclists are allowed to pedal outside of the law.

It’s not just in cities that some riders are on a right old rampage.

The pastoral dream – or it was until the cyclists came.

Cyclists sure can be a pain in the rear end, and some are a danger on the roads.

Ten common myths about bike lanes – and why they're wrong

From congestion to cost, there are many entirely misguided arguments in circulation

Cycle lanes have been in the news recently, as have the many often entirely misguided arguments that opponents use against them.

For all the (slight) progress in some UK cities over mass cycling, we are still at a stage where a leaflet from a local branch of the party of government (see below) will state falsehoods about bike lanes as if they were the undoubted truth.

An official leaflet from the Conservative party. pic.twitter.com/465FkKMw9P

What £1.4bn buys: 1,800 miles of cycle lanes or one big roundabout

What happened to Chris Boardman’s plans for the UK’s biggest cycle route network in Greater Manchester?

Almost exactly a year ago, Chris Boardman – the Olympic champion turned walking and cycling czar – revealed a bold vision: Greater Manchester was to turn itself into a Dutch-style cycling paradise by building a huge, joined-up 1,000-mile network of walking and biking routes called Beelines, after Manchester’s civic symbol, the worker bee.

A year on, the network has changed its name to the Bee Network after a rather embarrassing copyright infringement, and has now expanded to cover 1,800 miles. Yet so far, only only one tiny section – a bit of towpath in Wigan known as the “muddy mile” – has actually been started, and the first wodge of money has already gone.

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Carpe noctem! The joy of cycling through the night

This government is neglecting cycling – Labour would change that | Andy McDonald

Channel 5's nonsense will make me and other cyclists less safe

Ten common myths about bike lanes – and why they're wrong

What £1.4bn buys: 1,800 miles of cycle lanes or one big roundabout

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