Tag: London

The Joy of Night Riding

On By OlafIn Cycling in London, Leisure Rides8 Comments

My German friends frequently ask me how I like living in London. My answers are highly dependent on my current mood and my recent experiences. One thing is for sure: In certain respects it’s definitely better to be a tourist in London than an inhabitant.

The Friday Night Ride to the Coast

However, even when I’m completely fed up, there is one thing I always praise. It’s the FNRttC.

The what?

The “Friday Night Ride to the Coast”. That`s probably one of the weirdest bike rides in the world. And most definitely one of the greatest.

Between March and November, on a Friday night, once a month a group of cyclists meet at Hyde Park Corner at midnight and ride to the coast. (Technically, the ride should be labeled “Saturday Morning right to the Coast” because it starts on Friday, 12pm.)

Today (March 18th, 2011), the night riding season finally starts again . Around 11.30pm, more than 100 cyclists will meet at Hyde Park Corner. At 12pm sharp the group is going to leave – we’ll be heading towards Southend on Sea (around 55 miles). Southend is the shortest and most easiest ride but perfect for this time of the year.

I’ve been looking forward to this for several months.

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Cycling in London – How dangerous is it?

On By OlafIn Cycling in London, Cycling Safety13 Comments

“Isn’t it dangerous?” This is the ultimate question regarding cycling in London. Almost everyone asks me this when I tell them that I get around here almost exclusively by bike. I know a significant number of people who do not cycle in London because they consider it utterly unsafe.

My standard  reply to questions on cycling safety is: “Of course it’s dangerous. As life is in general.” I then explain that if you respect certain rules (“Never ever get on the left side of  lorry” being the most important one), safety is not an issue.

Afterwards I usually rave for five minutes about the benefits of cycling. I never forget to mention that, according to studies frequently cited by the CTC, the health benefits of cycling massively outweigh the risks.

Deep inside, however, I always feel a little bit queasy because I ask myself if I’m talking  somebody into cycling who might  end up under a car….

Hence I wanted to get a deeper understanding of cycling safety in London. This is why I’ve started to collect data on severe and fatal cycling accidents in London since 2006. The results are this spreadsheet on Google Docs and this map. Currently they list 59 fatal cycling accidents that have happened in Greater London since  2006.

Collecting this information was heartbreaking and a very emotional thing. I got sad, angry and frustrated by the carelessness and ruthlessness of some drivers; the errors and callousness of city planners  and the verdicts of coroners who were at least sometimes showing an astonishing degree of leniency.

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CCC – a note on cars, carbon and cycles

On By OlafIn Uncategorized5 Comments

How much carbon emissions could be saved if we could convince more people to cycle instead of using their car?

This question  came to my mind after reading a blog post by Felix Salmon. Felix runs a very good financial blog for Reuters and took issue with John Cassidy’s silly rant against bike lanes in New York City (as I did) . However, one point Felix raised in his blog really surprised me. He wrote:

The amount of pollution emitted by today’s cars is actually pretty low, while the amount of congestion they cause is enormous. I’d be happy to introduce Cassidy to Charlie Komanoff one day, the guy who’s actually done all the hard empirical math on this question. The pollution-related negative externalities associated with Cassidy’s drives into Manhattan are tiny, while the congestion-related ones are enormous — well over $100 per trip.

Can this really be true? Is pollution not an issue anymore with regard to cars? Unfortunately I was not able to open Komanoffs’ Excel file Felix is referring to on his blog. This is why I tried to answer this question myself doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations. I only focused on carbon emissions and took London as an example.

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In defence of Boris bikes – a reply to David Hembrow

On By OlafIn Cycling in London4 Comments

I’ve  just stumbled upon an interesting blog post by David Hembrow on the Boris Bike scheme in London. He’s rather critical with regard to the PR by Transport for London:

They’re continuing with the same style of writing that they established a while back. This can be summed up as trying to baffle the reader by quoting what sounds like huge numbers.

Oliver O'Brien's ingenious visualization of the Bloris bike scheme

TfL recently announced that 2.5 million journey’s have been made since the launch of the scheme in August 2010. David writes:

The numbers sound great, but actually if you look closely at them you quickly see that this is not actually very impressive at all. London has a population of 8 M people. Between them, they make around 20 million journeys per day. If these journeys had all been made on just one day (requiring each bike to be used an impossible 416 times), then even that would make up only 12% of total journeys in the city. However, actually it took half a year, 182 days, for this many journeys to be made. The total usage equates to only around 0.07% of the total journeys in the city. On average, Londoners are using these bikes not once per day, not once per week or once per month, but about once every 18 months.

David has a point, of course. There is a lot of sales patter in the communication of TfL and, no doubt,  they are trying to  baffle people with big numbers.

However, I think his calculations are partly misleading because he is comparing apples to oranges.

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5 facts about Boris bikes – and one example of unfair journalism

On By OlafIn Cycling in London2 Comments

“The Independent” has recently published some interesting facts about London’s Barclay’s Cycle Hire scheme. Unfortunately, my dear colleagues did a rather poor job interpreting those figures.

Boris Bikes at Southwark Street in London (Photo by Green Lane from Wikimedia Commons)

According to the Independent, which draws on figures from Transport for London (TfL) since the launch of the “Boris Bikes” in August 2010:

  • seven million miles have been cycled
  • 100000 people have signed up (I’m one of them, BTW)
  • 3566 bikes (30 per day) have had to be repaired
  • 180 bikes have been vandalised
  • 10 bikes have been stolen

To me, these figures underscore the huge success of the scheme given that here had been widespread concerns about theft and vandalism prior to the launch of the cycling hire scheme. But since only bad news are good news, my dear colleagues at the “Independent” are trying to give a negative spin to those figures:

Two-thirds of London’s “Boris bikes” have had to undergo repairs in their first six months of operation. (…) Critics claimed that the high rate of repairs was a result of TfL opting for “unwieldy machines” over more sophisticated bikes.

I think this is quite an unfair and distorted interpretation of those numbers. Are  3566 repairs since August 2010 really resembling a “high rate of repairs”?  As we have also learned by the TfL figures, the Boris bikes have been done 7 million miles since August. This means there are on average  0.0005 repairs per mile traveled (In fact the real figure is much lower because we’re only talking about the bikes which actually had an issues).

I’ve done around 1500 miles on my Brompton since August 2010 and had four punctures which equals 0.0027 repairs per mile. Perhaps I should use the Boris bikes more often…