Alongside the ‘all cyclists blow through red lights’* canard from motorists there’s the classic ‘we pay road tax, cyclists don’t.’ This is an objection voiced the world over. This morning on Twitter, Nick Bertrand said: “I pay road tax/VED for the car I rarely drive. Should I wear a copy of the tax disk on my [...]

I use Issuu.com to store and display the Bike to Work Book samplers (and will use it to store the full book when it’s ready, which is getting closer) and am loving this new feature: personalised bookshelves. Top work. And there’s even an RSS feed for seeing when the list gets updated.

Check the calendar. It’s NOT April 1st. The comments below from a former roads minister in Australia defy belief. Carl Scully - now, thankfully, out of Government so out of harm’s way - was roads minister in New South Wales from 1996 to 2005. In a frank, forthright - and frightening - article in the [...]

Bike Across Italy with Ciclismo Classico from Quickrelease.tv on Vimeo. A couple of weeks back I was in Italy with Ciclismo Classico, a US-based bike holiday company that’s been showing guests the dolce vita since 1988. I produced the six minute video above as a record of the trip. It’s different to the YouTube version I [...]

The following text comes from my Spokesman column in the November issue of BikeBiz (click on the document above to flick through the whole mag). The nascent electric bike industry needs to take care. If it continues to sell illegal products; laugh at current EU e-bike regulations; and push for higher and higher power outputs, it [...]

Mayors around the world are falling over themselves to offer urban bike-sharing schemes, such has been the success of Vélib’ in Paris. Montreal, Dublin, Berlin, Rome, Bristol, Barcelona and lots of other cities already operate such schemes, as chronicled by the brilliant Bike Sharing blog. London will have a bike sharing scheme next year. Melbourne [...]

This year’s Cycle Show was extra special for Digi Foo-Kune. She was taken to the show by her husband and, to her surprise, she was presented with a custom-built titanium bike, personalised with inset diamonds and 18ct gold parts and trim. Foo-Kune Elle, you could say. Digi’s trin-mad husband Lee had promised her an Enigma frame [...]

The new X170 from Drift Innovations: A rugged all-in-one bike-cam with a small screen. Could this be it, could this be the perfect extreme sports video camera? The X170 from Drift Innovations is so called because of its 170 degree wide angle lens. The screen lets you line up your shot - a brilliant feature for [...]

I’m all for ridding the world of stabilisers (US = training wheels). They prevent children from learning how to ride their bikes. The Gyrowheel wants to change all that. I can’t say that it will. Learner ‘running bikes’ are much more fit for the purpose, of which the Like-a-Bike is still the cream of the crop [...]

From 1624 to 1664, New York was known as New Amsterdam. Take a look at the video below for a glimpse of how the modern New York could - given the will and the cash - become as bicycle-friendly as old Amsterdam: This is an inspiring film on so many levels. The ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots [...]

Hopefully, the day will come when all cars, vans, and trucks are fitted with ‘Total Event Data Recording’ cameras. Footage of driving is looped over and over on SD cards: when there’s a smash the driver has to hand over the SD card. Sometimes the driver will be exhonerated. Other times the fault will be [...]

Edmund King, 50, is President of the Automobile Association. He was formerly the executive director of the RAC Foundation. Earlier in his career he worked in the Californian motor industry and was a campaigns coordinator for the British Road Federation. He’s a regular in the media, wheeled out to put the motorists’ case on such [...]

Bike Cam Commute from Quickrelease.tv on Vimeo. There are a ton of ‘here’s my commute’ helmet-cam videos on YouTube. Some feature extreme examples of SMIDSY, sorry-mate-I-didn’t-see-you. If your commute is often spiced up with bad driving, consider fitting a small video camera. It’s what I did in the video above (also available on YouTube). Of course, fitting [...]

In July, the blazers of FINA, swimming’s governing body, banned Speedo’s polyurethane swimming suits despite having okayed them in June. Cycling’s UCI also has a slew of rules on go-faster clothing but, despite being poked and prodded in the above ‘weapons of mass acceleration’ spoof from Pearl Izumi, the gnomes of Aigle have yet to [...]

Of course, the charger on the new Dahon IOS can power almost any mobile device, phones and GPS units included but the PR pix feature an iPhone only. The new Dahon folder will be unveiled at Eurobike. I’ll be there and will report on the bike’s ability to keep my iPhone juiced. For now here’s some [...]

In 1895, Albert Einstein’s teacher said to his father: “It doesn’t matter what he does, he will never amount to anything.” In 1911, Marshal Ferdinand Foch said: “Airplanes are interesting toys, but they have no military value.” In 1949, Popular Mechanics magazine said: “Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” And in 1987, [...]

Ah, the wonders of the internets. On his blog page, Reuters correspondent Erik Kirschbaum mentioned a 1979 movie called ‘Americathon’. I’d never heard of it but it sounded interesting because it featured an America that had run out of gas, forcing people to either jog or bike to get around. I searched on YouTube and, true [...]

Bike helmets are great. They can prevent some injuries. I wear mine whenever on a bike but I don’t fool myself into thinking the darn thing will save my life should I be hit by a speeding car. Bike lids just aren’t designed for that sort of crash. But stories about amazing escapes continue to pollute [...]

Ice-cream sellers the world over are known to be great marketeers - and often great rivals, sometimes even deadly – so it was no surprise to find that cooled dairy product vendors in Umag, Istria, used every trick up their rolled-up sleeves to entice passers-by to choose their chilled wares over those of their neigbours. The [...]

We’re not really beach-holiday fanatics. We like the seaside and swimming pools but only after some geographical exertions. I say ‘we’; that means the heads of the Reid household. The kids would love to stay in one place, soaking up the sun and bleaching from over exposure to chlorine. Being born to active parents might be [...]