Well done carbuzz.co.uk

With some cool pictures of sports cars and sporting cyclists, not quite the cyclechic image that many of us subscribe to but it helps to promote an idea of stylish equality.

I’ve been very critical about some of the very poor investments that my city, Sheffield, has made in cycle facilities so you might think that when they create a long section of wide, well-surfaced separate cycle track alongside the city’s inner ring road, giving access to important buildings including the railway station I would be very pleased.

Sadly it’s a mixed blessing and while the cycle track has done some good, weak insensitive design has created new problems and put cyclists into conflict with pedestrians, just the thing that a separate cycle track should avoid.

In the photo above, the track is  the pink paving, with lots of separate space for pedestrians on the cream coloured paving alongside. We’ll ignore (for today) the slight problem that there is no signage to tell pedestrians which bit is which, at least there is plenty of room for all. But here’s the pinch point:

Very large numbers of people use the pedestrian crossing from the station on the left to head towards the university and city centre on the right, the track and footpath are narrower. But the big problem is that cyclists don’t have a place in the planners’ traffic-light scheme. This next photo shows what happens when the motor traffic is stopped by a red light:

Pedestrians crossing the road are walking across the cycle path, oblivious to the possibility that cyclists might be coming, you can see that in the  body language of the couple walking towards us.

Then the lights change and pedestrians have to wait:

And of course they wait in the most obvious place, on the cycle track, while more pedestrians are emerging from behind the hoarding on the left (An empty site that might be built on one day). When the lights change again a new danger is apparent:

People are setting out across the lights leaving a space on the left where a cyclist can pass, but frequently people coming from the hidden area on the left will notice that the light has changed and run to cross the road (I’ve done it often myself). There’s a strong chance that they might emerge suddenly from the left just as a cyclist crosses their path. So that’s an accident waiting to happen.

The problem seems to be that planners don’t see cyclists as traffic but as a tricky kind of pedestrian. If the cycletrack was thought of as part of the road rather than part of the footway, separate but similar like a bus lane, then it could be included in the traffic light scheme and cyclists could flow past when the cars were flowing. If the plan was to keep the cyclists firmly apart from the road then the track would have to be routed to allow a proper place for pedestrians to wait and cross the road. As it is neither happens, planners seem unaware that cycling as transport doesn’t work if cyclists have to behave like pedestrians half the time, and schemes like this develop dangers for all and potential for antagonism between two groups who are equally victims of our obsession with the car.

Incidentally, the photos were taken during the day so a higher proportion of older people. During the commuter peaks times there is a larger number of people, many in a hurry and they are of working age

The first part is uphill so I tend to take it easy while I warm up. A roadie caught me sleeping but he wasn’t going very fast so I tucked in behind for a couple of hundred metres (yep we can do miles and metres in almost metrificated Britain)

The next bit is a gentle downhill towards a crossroads where you give way but I know that the major road is one way and you have clear sight of it for about 100m to the left where the traffic is coming from. To the right your view is obstructed so if you thought there might be traffic coming that way you would have to slow right down. (Actually I once had a narrow shave with a vehicle coming illegally from that direction but what the heck)

My man starts to coast and I think he might not have the confidence or local knowledge to shoot the junction so around 50m short of the stop line I give it all I’ve got, go past him and use the incline to get up to max speed, no traffic coming from the left so I hold my speed across the give way and that gives me a lot of momentum for the level section beyond, check the mirror and he’s stopped at the give way.

I make good time over the next section and through a couple of traffic lights and he’s nowhere so I assume he went another way. Then about half way home he’s behind me coming up fast. There’s a lucky bit of traffic jamming going on so he can’t pass me and I thread through a gap inside a blocked car to gain a few yards. I give it max again and hold him off. He seems to drop back.

A bit further on he’s after me again so I pick up speed and give it my best effort up a long moderate incline, he’s gaining  but I keep the pressure on and decide that if I can hold him off to the tee junction 400m ahead that’s probably as good as I can do, after that it’s more serious uphill and I’m feeling the strain. At the tee he’s right on my tail and I decide that I’ve finished, the next section is steeper and if he’s as young and fit as he looks he’ll have me.

So I coast through the right turn and set off up the hill at a gentle pace and HE DOESN’T TRY TO PASS! Either he’s shattered or he thinks I’m playing with him and will just accelerate again if he tries it on but anyway he just sits on my tail. I let my speed build up a little just to keep him thinking and in 100m it’s my turnoff and I’m home. Who needs a gym?

It’s already done 7 train changes, one rural and one urban ride and so far pretty good.

7am in Beijing, it’s a clear chilly morning and I’ve been travelling for16 hours. My body clock thinks it’s 11pm. I could stay in the airport for 3 hours and take a local flight to my destination in Shenyang 430 miles to the north-east but when planning the trip I decided that a 20 mile bike ride and a train to Shenyang would probably be better for my general wellbeing.

Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital Airport is a stunning piece of award winning Grand Architecture with a swirl of multi-level expressways to match. Not friendly for cycling but thanks to Google maps and a trawl through online photos from architectural journals, advertising and people’s snapshots from seeing off auntie, I have a plan. Here’s my route in Google Maps.

Down to the ground level where the shuttle bus services pick up passengers. Unpack my Brompton and re-organise my luggage, ride gently across the polished marble and on to the roadway. Curving to the left it merges with streams of fast traffic from the top deck departures, the main car park, and the underground taxi rank but just before it gets exciting there is a slip road off to the right.

Coast down there and you are in the local road system on a broad straight highway with light traffic and a wide cycle lane at each side. There’s a big secure cycle parking compound for airport employees and a steady trickle of bicycles, electric scooters and cargo trikes.

It’s 20 miles to the city centre and while there are a couple of rough spots it is possible to cycle the whole way on local roads, generally with wide separate cycle lanes and lots of other people doing the same. Part of the route is on older 2-lane roads which were probably fine before the airport was extended but are now struggling with the rush hour traffic. But there is generally at least a footpath you can use in the busiest parts, plenty of other cyclists who seem to cope without any stress and once you get into the more built-up parts of the city there is always a bike lane that’s generally as wide as the ones for cars and trucks. I found my Mirrycle mirror very useful as I could keep my eye on the waves of traffic coming up behind from traffic lights, nip on to the sidewalk if it was looking heavy, and back on the road for a faster smoother ride when it quietened down.

The local style of road use is quite informal, so don’t be surprised if a taxi decides to take a short cut down the bike lane but it isn’t like Britain where cyclists are generally invisible. Nobody does anything sudden or unpredictable so good road sense and watching how other cyclists behave will get you by.

Half way to town I stop to pick up my train tickets from local colleagues who have bought them in advance for me. The Chinese train system handles a huge number of passengers but demand always exceeds supply so you have to book in advance and you have to buy your ticket from the station you depart from.

It’s a big office block which I have not visited before so I decided to fold the bike, although it’s much easier to let it carry my two heavy bags. However there is a smartly dressed young doorman who is intrigued by the Brompton and insists on carrying it for me, even taking me by the goods lift as there’s a bit of a crowd at the passenger lifts. That’s a general reaction in China, people know bikes and quickly recognise that the Brompton is unusual and love it when they see it folded so small. A security guard at Shenyang station held up his hand to stop me as I came through the ticket barrier and I thought “here we go,” but he just wanted to give me a thumbs up for having a bike.

The second stage of the ride is more urban along a dual carriageway road. It goes through a couple of big flyover type junctions but there is always a cycle track such as the separate brick track above. When stopped at a junction along this section I had quite a surprise. Urban cyclists in China tend to wear normal clothes and ride functional bikes, often old and rusty. But out of the blue here were two guys in full western-style sporting cycling gear, including helmets, riding a very sharp road bike and a bright red Dahon

Probably the scariest part, for a newcomer to the city, is the big roundabout over the Inner ring road but having navigated a few of those on a previous trip I felt quite relaxed as I threaded my way through the traffic, which is rarely aggressive or unpredictable.

There’s a quieter road parallel to the ring road heading towards the railway station but it’s all glittering high rise offices and apartments. Then not far from the station, as central as it gets in this sprawling metropolis, you take a right turn and back 50 years into a traditional ‘hutong’ with a narrow lane threading between tiny shops, homes and factories, glimpses of courtyards and alleys on either side. This where real life goes on for ordinary people who are not chasing the profits from factories selling cheap gadgets or the booming construction industry.

Outside the station the crowds are quite oppressive, with huge numbers milling around being marshalled into groups. But it wasn’t too difficult to make my way to the main entrance where I had to fold the bike to feed it and my bags through a security X-ray. Once inside it was quiet and calm in the great entrance hall. I had some time so I re-assembled the Brompton and wheeled it to a cafe where I was served the best meal of the trip, spicy beef and rice with salad and lemon tea.

The trick to navigating a big Chinese station is to know your train number, printed on your ticket, in my case it was D9, the ‘D’ indicates that it’s a modern high speed train like the one below. Each waiting room had a list of trains by the entrance and luckily my train went from Platform 1 so no need to climb the steps over the bridge.

The huge waiting room was full of people and baggage so when a team of smartly uniformed young women arrived to check the tickets I hung back and waited for the crush to die down. Eventually I boarded coach 9 of the 16 car express to find that a man had decided to sit in the large luggage rack just inside the entrance to the”soft class” coach. As there was plenty of space I left the Brompton in the corridor and took my other bags to my seat where there was plenty of room in the overhead racks. Later on I went back and found that the man had been moved and my bike placed in the rack which would accommodate several folded Bromptons.

Shenyang is very different from Beijing, grittier, less shiny. It’s a city of 8 million people and most of them seemed to be coming and going from the huge railway station. I threaded my way through the crowds to the road, along the busy cycle track and after a short distance turned right into a backstreet that took me all the way to my hotel, a mile or so away. Once again Google Maps and the satellite view had given me enough information to plot a route. The only incident was when a huge shiny Range Rover coming the other way suddenly swung out across the road in front of me and roared past another car, pulling in front of it forcing it to stop. The Range Rover driver leaped out shouting.

Whether it was road rage, a Mafia dispute or he was just catching up with his mum to say she’d left her shopping behind was difficult to say but there was a strong whiff of aggression about the affair, even discounting the fact that Chinese conversations often sound argumentative. I decided I didn’t want to stay and watch the outcome.

My hotel was 5 miles from the University where I was working for three days. On the first day I allowed my hosts to collect me by car (they were very anxious about me cycling from the station) but after that I cycled. The route was along a big main road, almost dead straight but as usual there was a wide cycle lane and plenty of other cyclists to keep me company. When the road vaulted over a big junction the bicycles went underneath through a peaceful network of small roads lined with bookstalls taking advantage of the shelter from the flyovers above. Practical work bikes and trikes were everywhere, the road maintenance crews had bright yellow cargo trikes and this food stall was parked outside the university gate.

When we went to visit a new building under construction my Brompton made the acquaintance of another trike belonging to a scrap metal scavenger.

Finally I returned to Beijing, with a colleague, by sleeper train, in preference to flying and staying in an airport hotel. Shenyang North station was huge and confusing because it’s being rebuilt, but the main confusion was our driver from the university, who had been told to ensure we caught the train but actually we would have done much better making our own way as he seemed totally unable to cope with the unexpected “under construction” chaos, quite familiar to us Brits.

While he was running round in a panic trying to find somebody who knew what to do, we checked the train number on our tickets and followed the signs, no problem despite the almost total lack of non-Chinese signage. It was all actually very well organised despite the need to walk a long way round to reach the temporary waiting room. In Britain a waiting room is where you go if you have time to kill. In China it’s the place you wait in before the ticket barrier opens. Once you know that it’s quite straightforward, and you can always show your ticket to somebody if you are lost. Next time I’ll insist on cycling to the station on my own.

The “soft class” sleeper was smart and new but not soft – the bed was very hard and I didn’t sleep much at all. Also the new coach may have been poorly built since it seemed to vibrate with an unpleasant and really unnecessary buzz, a railway coach with no engine under the floor should be pretty quiet. China may be making great strides but some basic lessons of industrial quality, second nature in Japan, have yet to be learned. The big positive was a reasonable amount of luggage space and the Brompton fitted easily under the lower bunk.

All in all a good experience, showing that multi-mode travel in China is very possible and the cities are still basically cycle-friendly if you take a little trouble to learn how it all works (see my post on cycling in Hangzhou) and use your observation.

Russ “gate-checked” his Brompton. Not sure whether anybody could do that in Europe where we seem to be much more strict on security if more relaxed about bicycles. Not sure also whether most people could come up with the emotional toughness exhibited in Ross’s blog post on the subject but it was a very interesting experiment which shows how far somebody can go if they are determined to sidestep mindless authority. Just don’t try it in Helsinki airport where I had a little lightweight cable lock confiscated at the x-rays because it might be a lethal weapon.

Then Pentti posted a video clip of an excellent piece of thoughtful driving by a TNT driver who noticed he was being put in danger by a car driver.

Photographed in Sydney Street, Sheffield, 16 February 2011

Sydney Street is a one-way street with a contra-flow cycle lane. This delivery driver chose to block the cycle lane and ignore the double yellow line even though there were plenty of parking spaces on the other side of the road directly opposite.

He was making a delivery nearby, you can see from this photo that it was only a small parcel so carrying it across the road would have been no inconvenience.

Is this TNT Driver Breaking the Law?

As I mentioned in connection with a similar incident, it’s not against the law for a delivery driver to stop on a double yellow line for loading or unloading. However in this case the Highway code makes it clear:

HWC rule 243: Do not stop or park opposite or within 10 metres of a junction, except in an authorised parking space. Do not stop or park where you would obstruct cyclists’ use of cycle facilities.

This seems to apply. The van is clearly obstructing the cyclists’ use of the cycle lane, forcing them into the path of oncoming traffic which includes buses which tend to swing wide as they come round the bend at the far end of the street to avoid the parked cars then follow a line close to the bike lane while being hidden from the cyclists view by the van.

HWC rule 242: You MUST NOT leave your vehicle or trailer in a dangerous position or where it causes any unnecessary obstruction of the road.

In this case the obstruction is unnecessary because there is a parking bay very close. He was just lazy.

And it’s demonstrably a “dangerous position” as it forces cyclists into a dangerous manoeuvre.

So he’s breaking the law on three counts and putting us in danger. It’s worth noting that the white van in the top photo was also making a delivery and seemed to find no problem in using the marked parking bays.

Postscript 28 February 2011
I contacted TNT via the comment box on their website and had a very prompt reply, followed by a message from the local depot manager who said that the driver had been disciplined. So another transport company hat takes our opinions seriously.

The new setup with riserbars, ergon grips and a standard Rohloff shifter at the end of the bar.

I had a difficult time with my wrists and hands on our 7-day tour of Argyllshire as reported earlier. My wrists ached and after three days I suffered from pins and needles in my hands.

This all seemed to be down to the rather unusual handlebar setup on the Pino which gives little chance to vary your grip, badly angled hand grips which force my wrists into an over-extended position and a less upright riding position than I have on other bikes which puts more weight on my wrists. Plus the rather basic hand grips cannot be replaced with more ergonomic ones because they rotate with the gear shift.

The original handlebar arrangement that made my wrists ache

There is not much that can be done with the basic Pino handlebar arrangement so the question was whether I could modify the detail to solve this problem. Having looked around and thought about the various ways I might adapt it I came up with this prescription as reported in the previous post:

1. Buy a pair of the (expensive) Hase Ergo Riserbars designed to give a second, more upright position on the Pino. I had not really understood how these might work before but we met another Pino rider with these bars in Scotland, just when my wrists were really aching, and the penny dropped. A side-benefit is that having a higher position allows me to move the normal bars forward into a lower position which will give a more natural wrist angle – removing the over-extension problem
2. Rotate the Rohloff Gear shifter so the shifter mechanism is at the end of the bars, by my fingertips, rather than under the heel of my palm
3. Replace the Hase special long Rohloff shifter (which has a full-length rotating handgrip) with a normal short Rohloff Shifter, so the main part of the handgrip stays in one position
4. Buy a pair of Ergon grips, the special Rohloff version which has a short right-hand grip to allow space for the shifter. Ergon grips are really designed for flat bars so in theory they would not help with the Pino bars, which are more like giant bar-ends at 90 deg to the normal position. However some experiments on my Brompton Ergons showed that putting them in the Pino position gave similar support to the hand as the conventional setup so I felt it was worth a try.

All this cost as much as a half-decent new bike so I was worried whether it would pay me back. However I was also very worried that, if I did not solve this problem, the Pino would not do the job we bought it for (ie change our lives!). So I felt it was worth the risk.

Luckily all the parts arrived in time for our second one-week trip, in Snowdonia (Thanks to JD Cycles for help getting the Hase bars and SJSCycles for their excellent online Rohloff Shop). I was not sure whether swapping the Rohloff shifter would be complicated and require refitting cables but it proved very simple to swap, I just had to carry over the two small cable entry units from the old shifter as the cable was threaded through these.

Hase told me it was not possible to alter their shifter to the shorter length. When I took it apart I found this was not true – they had done quite a lot of engineering to modify it (misguided effort in my view) but actually it would be possible to take a hacksaw to their expensively added extension tube and end up with a more complicated but perfectly functional shifter that would look externally just like the proper one. So in theory I didn’t need the new standard Rohloff shifter.

Everything else fitted very neatly although I had to shorten the already short right hand Ergon to make it all fit. I rode it around locally to fine tune the positions and it all felt very encouraging. I moved the main handlebars forward making them lower but with a better wrist position, while the riserbars gave a much more upright position with a completely different position for the wrists. In both positions the wrist was in a “natural” unstrained position The Ergons felt right despite their “wrong” orientation. The “shortie” shifter worked fine, twisting with my fingers rather then the wrist with the bonus that I could at last see what gear I was in, especially once I had picked out the moulded rubber numbers with a little silver paint (gold to show where the 7-8 change was)

But the proof of the pudding was whether the setup would work for several day’s cycling. On the Snowdonia Beano we cycled for several hours a day for 5 days. After a couple of days I had slight pins and needles in my right hand but I noticed that the right hand Ergon was at a slightly different angle from the left. Once I had adjusted that I had no more buzzing. One of the nice things about Ergons is the way you can fit, adjust and remove them at any time by undoing the clamping screw. Quite different from traditional grips that usually must be destroyed to remove them and can’t be moved once in place.

The riserbars give a very comfortable, completely different position with less weight on the wrists. No brakes to hand so only usable on uphills and very clear roads (or a fast stretch of tarmac cycle track we used a couple of times) but that was enough to make the difference I needed. There was a bonus that I seemed to have more power available in the upright position, the bars being quite close to the body seemed to allow me to pull up in opposition to the downstroke and often sitting up and changing bars led to an increase in uphill speed.

So a successful, if expensive, experiment. The cost is worth it if it means we can continue to ride long distances in comfort.

One of the questions raised by all this is why Hase go to all that trouble to fit an expensively modified Rohloff changer in an ergonomically unsatisfactory way. The standard setup is not only uncomfortable but it prevents you from seeing the gear indicator, which can be crucial when selecting a gear for a hill start or knowing when you are approaching the tricky 7-8 shift.

Having seen the custom modifications that they have done to the shifter: reducing the external diameter of the main tube to become the inner tube of a new setup, reducing the internal diameter of part of the new long outer tube to fit over it and glueing the grip/winder unit onto the new tube, I can begin to see why Hase charge a lot more than the cost of a basic  Rohloff  unit for the gear upgrade, despite saving the cost of the original Shimano gears.

Hase say that it is not possible to fit the Rohloff in the way I have done. Clearly they are wrong in general terms, it all fits and works perfectly well without changing the cables, but they are probably taking a very conservative approach to having control cables waving about in mid-air rather than nicely controlled and close to the bars. However in taking that perfectionist engineering approach they are ignoring serious ergonomic problems as my experience indicates. Rotating the Rohloff is the starting point for a lot of beneficial changes as well as saving the high cost of the custom gear shifter.

Finally, you may be wondering whether this success is a result of the combination of effects from the different changes or is one particular improvement the main one? I could not say although my instinct is that it is a whole solution and all parts are worthwhile. Certainly both the Ergons and the Riserbars feel good in use. I also bought a more expensive pair of gloves with anatomical support designed to keep pressure away from the ulnar nerve so I expect that helped too.

I’m not prepared to subject myself to some sort of clinical trial to find out more precisely and I don’t have a lot of faith in the clinical trial as a method for solving complex questions, I’m inclined to the view that they create as many practical and ethical problems as they solve, even if they are conducted with proper rigour which is not always the case.

In any event each of us is an individual and your problems will be different from mine so a solution that is just right for me, or an average solution that gives the best results across a population, will not be the ideal for you. You have to work out your own answer. stillpoint link

Image from the Savannah Bicycle Campaign, click on the photo to go to their website

the Sheffield City Cycle Forum takes place at the Town Hall on these dates:

15th March 2011 | 17th May 2011 | 19th July 2011
20th September 2011 | 15th November 2011

The meetings are at 4:30pm. They would like advance notice of who is coming so email transport@sheffield.gov.uk to tell them you want to take part.

Thanks to Simon Geller for the heads-up

Zorro had his reasons but hiding your identity online is not acceptable if you expect people to trust you.

One of my posts, criticising my home city for some of the cycling infrastructure, has attracted a few people to express their opinions. It was even used by another blogger, who calls herself Freewheeler, as evidence in a critical post about Simon Geller, one of the contributors to that small debate.

Simon and I do not see things completely the same way, and he can be an awkward person to deal with sometimes, but he works hard to support cycling development and our local cycling community would be less interesting without him. However that’s not what I wanted to focus on here.

Jobst Brandt, an iconic cycling veteran and early adopter of online forums, has been very harsh about people who express opinions behind a screen of anonymity. He feels that it is just rude but I believe that it’s worse than that. If you hide behind an alias you can say what you like and nobody can take you to task. You may be a distinguished and respected member of your community but on the web you can lie, cheat, malign innocent people or just spout idiocy and you suffer no consequences.

Maybe that’s acceptable in a virtual environment with no connections to the real world but, if you present yourself as offering opinions of value in real life, especially if you seek to influence others in a public arena such as transport policy, then anonymity is unacceptable.

Freewheeler, the author of Crap Cycling and Walking in Waltham Forest sets out to reveal poor transport planning in her part of the world. She is quite assiduous in gathering photographs and writing critical and seemingly well-reasoned posts about some of the foolish things that she observes. What can be wrong with that? I must say I enjoy and agree with many of the observations she makes but it all grinds to a halt when you see that, not only does she give no clue about who she is but she does not allow anybody to respond to any of her critical musings. No comments are allowed.

So she floats free. Nobody can question what she says, and actually when Simon Geller made a very moderate comment in another location, in response to something that Crap Cycling and Walking had said, she accused him of having a “hissy fit” and launched into a tirade which used his participation in the comment discussion on my own post as evidence that he is an unsatisfactory human being.

When I wrote this originally I said Actually Simon is not completely satisfactory because, although he uses his first name in his own blog and a lot of people know exactly who he is, he is reticent about his full identity and also does not allow comments. however I think his response below indicates that he is actually open to comment and has thought about how to handle that in the various web contexts.

Why am I annoyed about all this? Maybe it’s because my work as an academic has drawn me into a culture that prizes rigour and honesty and requires its members to justify their beliefs with evidence, be open to criticism and prepared to be judged for what they say. Of course academia is full of fools and charlatans like anywhere else, but the academic system is geared to not letting you get away with sloppy thinking, you have to be sure of your evidence and arguments because there is always somebody looking out to see if you have slipped up. That’s why I feel comments on a blog are a great form of insurance.

If somebody wants to influence a community then they owe it to themselves and their community to be open and democratic, to welcome critical discussion.

That’s why I use my own name, and why I allow comments. I don’t always accept a comment for inclusion but I have clear rules and always explain to somebody why I have not included their message. I explain all that in my Blog Policy page.

Now, where did I put that asbestos suit?