A view from the cycle path

Unfortunately David Hembrow has deleted from the net his famous blog A view from the cycle path. This breaks many links within this blog, so I apologise for that, but it will probably not be possible to fix them. It would not make much sense to try, as I referenced his writings so often, so good were they, that trying to expunge the references would reduce the sense of past posts.

David's explanation for his action is here. It is, however, extremely hard to see what he expects to achieve with the deletion of a blog which was widely referenced by cycling websites worldwide. Far better would have been to simply end work on it, close it to comments and leave it on line – as was done to another famous cycling blog, Crap Cycling and Walking in Waltham Forest, when its author decided to give it up.

All on-line content runs a risk of plagiarism, mis-quoting and malicious distortion. This is a fact of the net with which we have to live. But it is a marginal fact of the net. Most re-use of material on blogs like this is done respectfully, with acknowledgement, and in a constructive spirit. It is particularly sad that A view was deleted just as the ideas in it were gaining a wide acceptance and understanding amongst cyclists, non-cycling opinion-formers, and even some policy-makers in the English-speaking world, as shown in The Times's Cities fit for cycling campaign, and last week's parliamentary debate – of which more anon – and also shown by many smaller snippets all the time, for example, this one from the Southern Daily Echo, where the editor of a provincial newspaper has picked up on A view and treated it as an authoritative source on cycling in the Netherlands – which is was. Few blogs attain this status. It attained this status because it was so well-written, so concise, and presented the issues so clearly and logically, and it was so well-researched and factually accurate.

The good news is that Mark Wagenbuur, who contributed quite a bit of material to A view in recent times, has set up an new blog, Bicycledutch, and reinstated some of his also excellent and enlightening material, originally published on A view, there. Unfortunately, though, Wagenbuur's contribution was only a small one, the vast bulk of the material on A view was David Hembrow's, which is now unavailable unless he decides to re-publish it in some other form.

I would still like to appeal to David publicly, here, for him to reconsider, and reinstate A view from the cycle path as a an open resource, even one that is never updated again.

If he does not, well, I will continue to campaign for Dutch-style, high-quality cycle infrastructure in the UK, as I, and others, did long before A view form the cycle path appeared, and made our job a bit easier. The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, in particular, will continue with this work. It was in large part inspired by A view, and I am sure it will continue to grow as a campaign and gain more influence. The current London Cycling Campaign Go Dutch campaign for the mayoral election was also strongly influenced by A view, and though we can all argue until the (Friesian) cows come home about the details of exactly what cycle engineering we are promoting, and I will continue to discuss these details here, and criticise LCC where I think it sensible to do so, the fact is, this campaign is on the right lines, as are other, smaller local campaigns around the country, in a way that such campaigns were not a few years ago. Much of this is down to A view from the cycle path.

So we continue to work away at it.  I think it is not necessary for cycling campaigners, or those for more liveable cities, to constantly set their cause back by falling out amongst one another. It is not necessary for successful campaigns to self-destruct, and it is not necessary for the promoters of more and better cycling in the UK, or anywhere, just as they are winning the battle for public opinion, to seize defeat from the jaws of victory.

Inverted snobbery, "dangerising", and change at the CTC

The Times Cities fit for Cycling Campaign grows more impressive. You can still read all the stories relating to the campaign, without paying, via this link. I think it is absolutely admirable that The Times has removed their paywall for so much material, to conduct this campaign, and I hope they get some more subscriptions out of it. And do pledge your support, if you have not already done so.

There was some disapproval by cycling campaigners on Sunday of a graphic about "dressing to be seen" in specialised cycling clothes in bright colours. I think it is easy to get too worked up about this kind of thing. There have always been specialised cycling clothes, more or less since the invention of the bike. Making cycling practical in ordinary clothes is a great idea, and must be an objective, part of the Dutch-style mass culture of everyday cycling to be worked towards, and the article accompanying the graphic does make this point, but there is a danger of an "inverted snobbery" which says that you can't be part of a transport cycling revolution and still wear lycra. This would be silly. We have to face the fact that, as the UK environment is configured, many commuting cycling distances are going to be quite long, and some rides a bit hilly, and dressing for a 10 mile ride in such a way that you do not get overheated, and remain comfortable and unencumbered, is quite sensible, and there is nothing wrong with The Times featuring and advertising this garb.

The focus of The Times campaign remains bang-on, in my view, firmly on the subjects of lower speeds, safer road infrastructure, and how it should be paid for. Though some of the infrastructure they have suggested is on the whacky side, with futuristic cycle highways in tubes, how about their interactive graphic of suggested infrastructure at a roundabout? Here is thinking far ahead of that of Transport for London or other UK highway authorities, demonstrating continuity of networks, segregation on busy roads, cycle paths away from roads, and a cycle flyover – most of what you could want to "Go Dutch", in fact. The same graphic also shows the hazards resulting from the typical unsafe arrangement we have at the moment. Brilliant!

And they do keep banging on about the need for a dedicated fund to pay for cycling infrastructure. They have hit the nail totally on the head here, in my view.

Last year, funding for infrastructure in 12 Cycling City and Towns members was also stopped. Withdrawal of the £43 million came before final analysis could be made on whether the scheme was encouraging more cycling.

Critics argue that there is no central fund to build cycle schemes. Local authorities have access to a £560 million Local Sustainable Transport Fund until 2015, but early schemes appear to have prioritised improvements to bus and railway stations, smart-card ticketing and park-and-ride schemes, as much as cycling.

Mike Penning, the Roads Minister, said that 38 of 39 successful bids to the fund contain a cycling element. He was wary of calls for a new funding mechanism harnessing the Highways Agency budget. “Most cycling will be on local government roads so you are taking the budget out of national infrastructure into local government roads,” he said. “But like anything, if anybody has ideas they can be looked at.”

Penning isn't getting it yet. Until recently he seemed to think that cyclists were not allowed on the national roads infrastructure (trunk roads) at all. He is still not understanding the problem that there are not direct, efficient, and safe cycling alternatives, in general, to the big roads, and that this is a problem with the national infrastructure, which is his responsibility.

So The Times is plugging away at the real, core issues, and they have even got the AA to support almost blanket 20 mph in towns. Nobody seems to want to argue with this campaign! Nobody half sensible, anyway.

There has been the usual complaint from a few old-style cycling campaigners about The Times "dangerising" cycling. This is idiotic. The Times campaign is overwhelmingly a force for achieving the changes cyclists want. The Times did not dangerise cycling, just as I did not dangerise cycling when I wrote my piece Cycling is dangerous. The policies of successive governments dangerised cycling. A lot of people involved with cycling on a day to day basis seem to loose a basic grip on this danger issue, and I can see why. If you spend an hour or more a day in the saddle, on the streets of a major British city, and you (hopefully) do not come to any harm, you may easily start to believe that cycling in this environment is not dangerous.

This is an illusion borne of use, and there are a few ways to get back to reality. One is to spend some time cycling in an environment which is much safer. The best option is to go an a study tour with David Hembrow. If you do not have the time or money to do this, you can look at at some videos on YouTube. One of the best is this one from David's Hembrow's collaborator, Mark Wagenbuur: What defines Dutch cycling?



The point here is absolutely clear. This is a video of people doing daft things on bikes: things that they could only do in a really safe environment. You don't see British cyclists going along with umbrellas open, or cycling with dogs in tow, or people leaping on and off the back of their friend's bike, or people having conversations while riding side by side on city streets. Not often anyway. As Mark says, these are habits that only become normal in an environment which is really safe, where the constant anxiety arising from the need to share the road space with potentially lethal motor traffic is gone. Seeing how far were, generally, in the UK from the environment that allows these habits, gives you the measuring stick for how much underlying danger we are really coping with, despite the truth that UK cyclists are not being killed left, right, and centre.

The CTC, largest cycling organisation in the UK, have traditionally been prone to the "Don't dangerise cycling" tack, disliking ghost bikes and anything else of a publicity or campaigning nature that they feel might frighten people (as if they haven't noticed that what really frightens people is being passed with inches to spare by huge lorries). Blogger Cycalogical recently labelled this practice danger denial.

This brings me on to the fact that CTC have a new Chief Executive. This is a big change in the UK cycling world, as the last Chief Executive, Kevin Mayne, was in post for 14 years. Kevin Mayne was without doubt a hard worker for the interests of UK cycling, as he saw them, and without doubt a significant influence on the policies of CTC over a long period. In 2003 he told me that he didn't think that segregated cycle tracks on roads were a good idea. His argument was that you could never have them everywhere, and, because of that, if you introduced them anywhere, you would put cyclists elsewhere, on the normal roads, more at risk. He thought that creating tracks would attract cyclists to them (which I agree with), and that this would lessen the density of cyclists on other roads, which would make those roads more dangerous for the cyclists who chose not to use the tracks, in part, because they would get more harried and disrespected by motorists who thought they should not be on the roads.

Like many of the CTC's policy positions down the decades, unfortunately, this was just an argument for "no change". If you can never start to build a segregated cycle network, for fear of those consequences, then you are just stuck with the road network as we have it, possibly with the addition of a few bits of different-coloured paint, Boris-style. You remain in the situation of having only a tiny minority of people cycling, and with cycling in a politically very weak position. The very persecution of cyclists on the roads of the UK that Mayne worried about happened already, as things were, because of that political weakness. Inaction on the infrastructure issue was a prescription to keep that weakness permanent. Andreas Rohl, the bike chief of Copenhagen, drums the point home, in perhaps the most important words in all The Times's coverage:

From A to B there has to be quality before you can expect people to get on a bike. If you want to make cycling mainstream you have to separate bikes from cars and buses. It’s essential.

Ironically, Kevin is going on to a job with the European Cyclists' Federation, based in Brussels. I wonder if daily experience of that city, which does have a developing segregated cycle network, will cause him to modify his opinions. Anyway, I wish him well there. I wonder if the new CTC Chief Executive, Gordon Seabright, will be able to take advantage of the fair wind of The Times campaign to re-position his organisation as a more positive participant in debate about good cycling infrastructure and how to achieve it. My feeling is that if he did, a great many of his membership would back him.

Hundredth post: support The Times Cities Fit for Cycling campaign

This is the one hundredth post to be published on this blog. It has had about 64,000 page views since September 2010, but it only started concentrating on cycling issues in May 2011. In that time, less than a year, the cycle campaigning landscape in the UK has transformed. I'll refer below to a few of my earlier posts which now seem prescient.

Today sees one of the most important events to have occurred for UK cycling in that time. The Times, the UK's "establishment" newspaper, if there can be said to be such a thing, has launched a major campaign on cycle safety. This is called Cities Fit for Cycling, and I urge everyone to support it. (On Twitter, use the hashtag #cyclesafe). It comes directly out of the critical injuring of Times journalist Mary Bowers in a cycle-lorry crash on 4 November. But it has also been boiling up for a long time. It has become hard for anyone living or working in London to ignore the jump in cyclist deaths in London to 16 last year, so many of them under the wheels of lorries.

The Times does a huge splash on this campaign today, and they have made all the relevant pages free to view through the link above – an extraordinary move which shows the personal commitment of the staff involved. Their coverage of the issue is, for a generally Conservative-supporting newspaper, striking critical of the Government, and also of the Mayor of London. Some choice quotes:

As a point of comparison: since 2001, 576 British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq; 1,275 cyclists died on British streets. The latest data shows there were 1,850 deaths or serious injuries in the first half of 2011, a 12 per cent rise on the year before. Britain leads the world in competitive cycling; it is time that we did the same for the cyclists on our streets.

......

“As a trauma surgeon — and as a cyclist — I can see that asking cyclists to share the Embankment with heavy goods vehicles on a cold, rainy night is going to end in horrible mistakes. London is a city where one tiny mistake as a cyclist can cost you your life because cyclists are given so little room.”

......

A cyclist in Britain is three times more likely to be killed than one in the Netherlands and twice as likely as a cyclist in Denmark or Germany. 

.....

Jenny Jones, the Green Party’s mayoral candidate, said: “The truth is uncomfortable for all of us who want London to be a cycling-friendly city. The mayor has failed to make roads safer for vulnerable road users and he is fast becoming the big barrier to the future expansion of cycling in London.”

.....

As one Whitehall source put it: “One of the reasons we have had quite good results on cycle safety is because people are too scared to get on their bikes.”

.....

Critics argue that coalition policies including cuts to road safety budgets, an end to casualty reduction targets, reduced funds for speed cameras and hints of a rise in motorway speed limits have created an environment that is hostile to road safety. The Government abolished Cycling England, the body charged with enticing millions of motorists to take up cycling, along with its £60 million annual funding for cycle schemes. Cuts to police and highways maintenance budgets are putting lives at risk, campaigners say. 

I think it is great that The Times has come out saying these things, and I really hope the Government sharply takes notice. These are all points that have been made amongst campaigners, and in the left-wing press, many times, but here we have a real shift of these issue to the centre-ground of British politics. Here is The Times's 8-point manifesto for cities to be made fit for cycling:

1. Trucks entering a city centre should be required by law to fit sensors, audible truck-turning alarms, extra mirrors and safety bars to stop cyclists being thrown under the wheels.
2. The 500 most dangerous road junctions must be identified, redesigned or fitted with priority traffic lights for cyclists and Trixi mirrors that allow lorry drivers to see cyclists on their near-side.
3. A national audit of cycling to find out how many people cycle in Britain and how cyclists are killed or injured should be held to underpin effective cycle safety.
4. Two per cent of the Highways Agency budget should be earmarked for next generation cycle routes, providing £100 million a year towards world-class cycling infrastructure. Each year cities should be graded on the quality of cycling provision.
5. The training of cyclists and drivers must improve and cycle safety should become a core part of the driving test.
6. 20mph should become the default speed limit in residential areas where there are no cycle lanes.
7. Businesses should be invited to sponsor cycleways and cycling super-highways, mirroring the Barclays-backed bicycle hire scheme in London.
8. Every city, even those without an elected mayor, should appoint a cycling commissioner to push home reforms.

I'll write some more on these points in a future post, but at the moment, I will just say that I fully support the manifesto, and urge everybody to do so too by signing up on the campaign page, and also writing to their MP about it. I'll even urge you to by the paper itself, as the campaign will be continuing over the next few editions.

.....

Many of the one hundred posts I have published on this blog have been very long, so that number of posts represents an awful lot of words. One of the longest posts, and the most popular of all, was 1934: The moment it all went wrong for cycling in the UK. There, I said this, comparing the post-war histories of cycling in the UK and the Netherlands:

Belisha's truce [the pre-war road safety measures introduced by Conservative transport minister Leslie Hore-Belisha] meant the safety pressures were not so strong in the UK as they became in the Netherlands. There was never, at any particular moment, the same conjunction of social forces in the UK as there was in the Netherlands in the early 1970s, where the oil price shocks, the Kindermoord campaign, the setting up of the Fietersbond, and the beginnings of the green movement, with the realisation that motor-dominated transport was unsustainable, all came together to push the government to start re-planning the Dutch environment to prioritise cycling.

and later:

The interests of the few, hardy, mostly adult male, remaining cyclists [in the UK] were never seen as coinciding strongly enough with an imperative to make the roads safer for all, particularly children, for there to be the kind of street design revolution that occurred in the Netherlands, and, to a lesser extent, in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

Maybe The Times mainstreaming of the cycle safety issue is a sign that we now do have an appropriate "conjunction of social forces" in the UK to push through a revolution in the cycling (and walking) environment – a conjunction of greater numbers cycling (particularly women, who always attract more sympathy than men), pushing cycle safety up the political priority list, a recognition that something needs to be done about the obesity epidemic, a recognition that children need to be freed from car-borne dependence on their parents (which people across the political spectrum can agree on), and the need to reduce fossil-fuel dependence and reduce pollution-related deaths – all of which feed into an economic imperative to make the economy more efficient in a time of economic crisis.

The Times campaign talks, rightly, a lot about the unacceptable danger faced by cyclists on our streets. The rhetorical framework in which the danger of cycling is discussed by many existing cyclists seems to have transformed in the short time that I have been writing this blog (though I had been writing in a similar vein in other places long before that) and I claim some credit for this happening. When I wrote my piece Cycling is Dangerous last July, I attracted a huge amount of abuse for, as some in the cycling world often put it, "dangerising" cycling. But I have no apologies over this or similar pieces. I have not "dangerised" cycling, our road environment has none that. I have merely told the truth about the danger – as The Times is now doing.

It never did cycle campaigning any good, I have kept saying, to downplay the danger issue. It just made cyclists seem more like a species apart from ordinary people, who would never dare to ride on our roads as they stand. It just marginalised cyclists more within the psychology of our nation. Within the London Cycling Campaign I used to be reviled for talking in this way. An edict at one stage went out in the LCC for campaigners "not to used the D word", lest we put potential new cyclists off. I never saw it that way. 

Since I wrote Cycling is Dangerous, others have written in similar vein, such as MCR Cycling and As Easy As Riding A Bike, we have had an LCC-supported Tour du Danger of the most dangerous junctions in London, numerous other protests explicitly about danger, and now few in the LCC seem to bat an eyelid at using talk of the danger of cycling, particularly in reference to blackspots such as Bow, Blackfriars and Kings Cross, as a campaigning tool. This is a real change, one for which I claim some credit. There is a widespread recognition of a point I have always maintained, that the "Whitehall source" quoted in The Times puts as:

One of the reasons we have had quite good results on cycle safety is because people are too scared to get on their bikes.

Or to put it more precisely, the nature of the dangerous environment on our roads for cyclists limits cycling to a tiny demographic slice who can mitigate the danger by their own efforts. That doesn't make cycling in the UK genuinely "safe", either relatively or absolutely.

But let's come back to the topic of the press, and, specifically, the Murdoch press. I wrote a post in June on The press and political will, which was prompted by some articles in The Sunday Times, one very pro-cycling, one anti, in the same edition. I wrote:

The writers in a given newspaper do not all have to have the same outlook on a particular subject, but they usually do. This is therefore interesting as it shows The Sunday Times, and probably therefore the whole Murdoch stable of papers, which are very influential, at a turning point in their attitude to cycling.

I pointed to a huge change in attitude to cycling that had occurred in the London Evening Standard as cycling levels had risen in London, and said:

Because it is the habit of the press to simplify issues, it is characteristic of their attitude to a particular issue or group that when it shifts, it tends not to shift slightly, it flips totally, almost overnight.

And I leave you with a final point from that blogpost:

In the internet age the influence of the printed news media is not as great as it was. But the attitudes of the papers are still a good bellwether of wider opinion, and of political will. Here I come to the point of my post. As cycle campaigners, we are constantly wondering, "How can we generate the political will to put into place the measures that we know will achieve a mass cycling culture?" In the UK at the moment, this seems a world away. But, like the attitudes of the papers, political will tends to be all-or-nothing. Like trying to push a vast ship down a slipway into the water, once it goes, it goes.

Support Cities Fit for Cycling.

The News of the World

I have to say that have found much of the coverage of The News of the World scandal to be fantastically disingenuous. Yesterday, when it was announced the paper was to close, BBC Radio 4 news did about a 5 minute report detailing the history of the paper. The reporter told us of its original lofty Victorian intentions, its takeover by Murdoch in the 1960s, its subsequent dubious journalistic methods including entrapment of celebrities, how Max Mosely fought back in the courts and won, etc. But never was it mentioned what the most famous thing about The News of the World was, and a major, or maybe the major, contributory reason why many people (of the male sex) bought it. It was full of pictures of naked women.

So now Andy Coulson has been arrested, surprise, surprise, and David Cameron has been defending his decision to employ him as a spin doctor and to keep him on for a long time after allegations against him became widespread. One could argue for a long time about how much evidence there was at what time about the role of Coulson. In July 2009 the former editor of another Murdoch paper, The Times, Andrew Neill, said of The Guardian's revelations about phone-hacking:

It suggests that rather than being a one off journalist or rogue private investigator, it was systemic throughout the News of the World, and to a lesser extent the Sun.

Particularly in the News of the World, this was a newsroom out of control … Everyone who knows the News of the World, everybody knows this was going on. But it did no good to talk about it. One News of the World journalist said to me … it was dangerous to talk about it.

If a journalist comes to you with a great story, one of the first questions you ask is how did you get it. How you got it is relevant to judging its accuracy and preparing yourself for any legal challenge.

If this behaviour was systemic in the newsroom, why would you not know about it, why would you of all people, not know about it? Either you're incompetent or complicit.

At this stage, Cameron continued to give Coulson the benefit of the doubt. But hang on. Let's ignore the whole phone-hacking thing for a moment, which was only an accusation in July 2009, though one coming from very authoritative sources like Neill. Let's get back to the theme of "disingenuousness". Let's get back to the boobs, and all their associated apparatus, that the BBC so delicately overlooked.

What were our leading politicians, Labour and Conservative, ever doing getting into bed with, hobnobbing with, employing in their staff, having anything to do with, a bunch of women-debasing porn merchants, trivial but damaging and public debate-debasing celebrity tittle-tattle scandal mongers, and libellous, scurrilous, contemptible, shabby entrappers? Which it was always totally manifest to all that the editors of The Sun and The News of the World were? What were our politicians doing sucking-up to these miserable specimens of humanity, who any self-respecting person would have crossed the street (even a street run by TfL) to avoid ? That is the real scandal, and a bigger one than parliamentary expenses, in my opinion.

The press and political will

The Sunday Times article which was the source of a brief quote in my last post, which was taken from the LCC blog, from the Corporation of London's Assistant Director for Planning and Transportation, Iain Simmons, on the high levels of cycling now found in the City of London, is now available more or less in full on Cyclists in the City. That blog also points to an anti-cycling rant in the same edition of the same paper penned by that "national treasure" Jeremy Clarkson. I think the first article talks its subject up, and I am not sure that all the statistics quoted are robust or say what is claimed; nevertheless, it is a basically sensible article on cycling, in the same edition of the same paper as a stupid article on cycling. The writers in a given newspaper do not all have to have the same outlook on a particular subject, but they usually do. This is therefore interesting as it shows The Sunday Times, and probably therefore the whole Murdoch stable of papers, which are very influential, at a turning point in their attitude to cycling.

Because it is the habit of the press to simplify issues, it is characteristic of their attitude to a particular issue or group that when it shifts, it tends not to shift slightly, it flips totally, almost overnight. The Sunday Times is the stable-mate of The Times, a paper that thought it a sensible idea to publish Matthew Parris' notorious article What's smug and deserves to be decapitated? during Christmas 2007, where Conservative MP turned funny-man Parris suggested, in a not very joking tone, that cyclists should be murdered by the stringing of wire across roads at neck height, not realising that similar incidents really have happened. Parris apologised after being engulfed in the storm of protest that he seems to have had no inkling would follow from this, and the Times published a counter-attack from Alison Steed four days later. The Murdoch papers have a history of being virulently anti-cycling. The Sun, I seem to remember, was a leader in attacking as "barmy" ideas for harmonising road crash liability regulations across the EU, proposed by the previous government, that would have helped cyclists. The campaign caused the government to back down.

Until about five years ago the London Evening Standard was also virulently anti-cycling. Cyclists were always "two-wheeled terrorists" who didn't pay "road tax", broke every law in the book, endangered other road users, and needed licensing, in the old Standard. Camden Cycling Campaign started a web-page entitled"four -wheeled terrorists" (now gone)  to try to counter. Then, as cycling in London inched to just a slightly higher level of prominence, particularly following the real terrorist incidents in London, the perspective of the Standard flipped totally and became, by, and large, gushingly positive about the contribution of cycling to London, supporting the bike hire scheme and most other pro-cycling moves.

A couple of examples from last week:

Evening Standard Tuesday 14 June 2011: Now even Lord Tebbit can get on his bike

Cabinet minister Sir George Young, the "Bicyling Baronet", urged parliamentarians to ditch their cars and taxis for two wheels.

"It's fantastic news that the Mayor is finally bringing his bikes to Parliament," said Sir George, Leader of the Commons. "I would encourage all MPs and peers to try them, and if they enjoy cycling, to go on to purchase their own bikes.

There's no faster, cheaper or greener way to get round."

And an editorial paragraph a few pages later commented wryly:

There's a new rack of Boris Bikes outside Westminster: an unrivalled opportunity, them, for MPs to lead the way in adopting this health, environmentally friendly means of getting to work. We look forward to seeing Communities Secretary Eric pickles leading the way.

[Pickles is famously obsese. He is also no friend of the environment: one of his first acts after being appointed to his current post was to nod through the appalling Brent Cross Cricklewood development proposals, against all the guidelines laid down by his own department. Mind you, anyone who is attacked by Alan Sugar* can't be all bad.]

And:

Evening Standard Thursday 16 June 2011: Cyclists using Olympic lanes risk £200 fine

Campaigners warned people could be discouraged from cycling to the Games. Jim Walker, chairman of the London 2012 active travel advisory group, said he wanted to see people encouraged to cycle or walk rather than having their memories soured by being stuck in traffic.

And, again, an editorial comment on the story over the page. The Standard thundered:

First it was black cabs; now we are told that cyclists too will be banned from using the Olympic lanes. This is a nonsense. The games were supposed to promote grassroots sport and exercise. International Olympic Committee bureaucrats might prefer near-empty roads. London doesn't work like that. We will get them to the Games on time. But they should share roads with cyclists.

Now here they have gone off a bit at a tangent, as the Olympic lanes are in the middle of the roads, so cyclists wouldn't generally want to use them anyway. But it's all part of the Standard's new found unstoppable enthusiasm for cycling in London, as any search of their website for "cycling" will show. Their past violent hostility to those on two wheels is totally effaced and forgotten.

In the internet age the influence of the printed news media is not as great as it was. But the attitudes of the papers are still a good bellwether of wider opinion, and of political will. Here I come to the point of my post. As cycle campaigners, we are constantly wondering, "How can we generate the political will to put into place the measures that we know will achieve a mass cycling culture?" In the UK at the moment, this seems a world away. But, like the attitudes of the papers, political will tends to be all-or-nothing. Like trying to push a vast ship down a slipway into the water, once it goes, it goes.

Enrique Peñalosa, former Mayor of Bogotá, is a man who knows a thing or two about politics. He said recently:

Politicians love to hear from constituents, especially if they think there are votes in it for them - even more so if they think there are lots of votes in it for them. Political will is like a tea spoon floating on a cup of coffee - cyclists, constituents, campaigning groups must lobby their politicians drop by drop by drop till that spoon sinks: until the political will to equalize the city is there.

So that's it. Political will is like a teaspoon floating in coffee. So put the pot on, and write a letter to your MP.

*Alan Sugar said Eric Pickles was "another pointless politician doing yet another menial administrative job that could be done by anyone that has been educated in any vague sort of half coherent English" – which Sugar clearly hasn't been, as it should be "anyone who has been educated..."

Social media, and Ed and the new politics

Why blog? Well, I've tried Facebook in the past and found it unsatisfactory, intrusive and too trivial. Lumping all the people in your life, of different interests and none, together in one place, and expecting them all to be interested in the same things, is plainly stupid and indeed potentially dangerous. Then there is the childish Facebook concept of "the friend" - including the way people want to be your "friend" when maybe they once had something slightly to do with you, and when you don't actually want to be in regular contact with them, but it seems rude to reject them. There are many people from my past, and I expect yours, for  whom it is true that, though we bear no animosity towards them, there is just no benefit in being in any way in contact with them again, for anyone. There is no reason to hear from them. Some people, of course, you would like to hear from, but I found it seems characteristic of Facebook that it leads to no action in the real world. It's all people who you knew once saying "Must get together some time" but there is no real strong urge there on anyone's part, and it doesn't happen, because the connections are typically too weak and things have moved on too much. Facebook tend to be all talk and trivia. For influencing action in the real world, interest forums and Yahoo! groups tend to be more effective, in my experience. Then there is the uncomfortable mixing in within the Facebook system of those who are just there to advertise whatever their thing is. No thanks.

I haven't actually tried Twitter, but it looks like a terrible idea to me. "One side of a disjointed phone conversation" someone described it to me as, and that's how it looks. It looks to be the ultimate in triviality and the degradation of proper English prose. The limitation on length would not suit how I think and write.

I have a blog in the Brent Cyclists website, but I think that is expected to be only about cycling, preferably in Brent, which is a pretty limited-interest area, so I thought I needed one to say whatever I wanted.

So what is there to say at the moment? There is the right-wing media all laying into Ed Miliband, calling him "Red Ed" and saying Labour has voted for a "generation in the wilderness". Parallels with the past, in particular with Michael Foot's period of Labour leadership, may be misleading, however. Everything could change with a new voting system. New systems for electing both the Commons and Lords are likely to be in place before the next General Election, and these are likely to cause a general realignment of British politics the like of which has not been seen, not just recently, but ever. Power is likely to start drifting from the three old, big parties to extremists on both the right and left, to other groups, such as Greens, and new parties of the centre. We have seen some of this in the Scottish and London Assemblies already, which are elected by PR. It will become fundamentally, institutionally, harder for the media to polarise, simplify and dumb-down British politics in the future. I have some time for Ed Miliband (as the only candidate for Labour leadership I have encountered personally). He was a progressive and appropriate Environment Secretary. I see it as eminently possible that, in five years time, in a wholly transformed political system and landscape, he could put together a Labour-led coalition of left-of-centre and liberal parties in the Commons with a majority to govern. This is because the British people always vote predominantly for left-of-centre parties. The Conservatives, of course, know this, which is why they have always tried to stop constitutional reform. If Nick Clegg's plan works, it is they who will have to change most to have a chance of power after 2015.