Canberra trip

Canberra Bicycle Museum

The Canberra Bicycle Museum has a wonderful collection of bikes ranging from the pre-safety 'hobby horses' right through to today's carbon time trial bikes. There were also some amazing creations including an ice bike, tandem unicycle (yes it is possible) and war bike with spring tires. Its well worth a visit if your in Canberra. There is also a great collection of films and archive materials that you can go through in the library. Unfortunately its only open on Wednesdays.

Dreams on Wheels
(don't despair, its coming to Sydney and Melbourne!)

The Dreams on Wheels exhibition has been setup to celebrate the re-openning of the Danish Embassy, and what better way to celebrate Danish culture than the bicycle. The exhibition presents and excellent overview of how the bicycle is intergrated into everyday life within Denmark. The exhibition celebrates Danish bicycle manufactures, Danish urban planning (with the work of Jan Gehl), and the history of competitive cycling. On the night I was there, Stephen Hodge gave a wonderful lecture on the Paris-Roubaix giving a first hand account of the cobbles and the experience of being a domestique for riders such as Sean Kelly in the late 80s. We then watched the Danish doco "A Sunday in Hell" on the 1976 Paris-Roubaix which was the best cycling doco I've ever seen.

Australian National University's "Go Green, Get Lean" Program

ANU is a probably the best campus for cycling in Australia. While I was there I visited the university's sustainability office ANUGreen. There is an excellent set of facilities for bicycle parking across the uni. ANU also has a bicycle co-op giving students bicycles for $50. The bicycles can then can be sold back to the co-op for $30 once students have finished their degrees. The uni also runs a 'Go Green, Get Lean' program. I found out that 40% of students and staff travel to uni by either bicycle or public transport. I also found out that if you take your bike on a bus in Canberra, you don't have to pay a fair. It appears to be the complete opposite as to what we have in Sydney where you can't take a bike on the bus, and if you take one on the train you pay double. Clearly we're still in the Dark Ages.

Canberra is a great city to cycle around, however I noticed that the drivers were actually more aggressive that I thought. I think most people in Canberra use the footpaths and the off-road bicycle lanes. So, when a roadie like me turned up, the car drivers were probably less used to seeing someone take the lane. I took my fixie down on the bus. It worked out to be the perfect bike to travel with because if I was traveling with a bike with a dereailuer and gear-levers, they would probably be much more vulnerable to damage. It took only 5mins to pull my fixie out of its soft bike bag then put it back together. The flat terrain of the city also made it perfect for cycling with only one gear.

No gears, is no problem in Canberra.

Bypass: The Story of a Road

I’m heading to Canberra tomorrow to check out the Dreams on Wheels exhibition. I am lucky enough to convince myself that this activity is part of my ‘research’ when I should be cranking out the next paper or another interview transcript. To even further delude myself of scholarly productivity, I’ve taken to reading a novel called Bypass: The Story of a Road. Written by Michael McGirr, Bypass is the story about the Hume Highway as it runs from Sydney to Melbourne. McGirr, a 40yo washed out ex-priest, decides to ride his bike along the entirety of the Hume. As he goes from town to town, he weaves together a biography of the road with its history, local folk-law, personal observations and his own story of the journey. McGirr makes a lot of humorous comments. For instance:

Roads are political. Building them is a sign that somebody is the boss. Hitler built the autobahn to impress underlings. Osama Bin Laden built roads in Sudan in the early nineties after he had been exiled there, to let the people know he was a force to be reckoned with. There are men who concrete the driveway every time the daughter brings home a new boyfriend.

Furthermore, as McGirr rode through my old suburb of Ashfield, I had to crack up with laughter at the astuteness of his observations:

[I] had reached Ashfield where I turned onto the Hume Highway itself. There is a point in every city where the number of coffee shops and cafes is suddenly exceeded by the number of automotive businesses, a point where latte land gives a way to a fantasy of wheels. This is what delineates city from the suburbs and every year in Sydney the place moves a little further west. At the time I was riding it was easy to locate. It was marked by a hybrid business in Enfield where you could get your vehicle washed while you had a cappuccino.

So far, I’ve just rolled through Picton in the book and have learned the history of the Truckers blockade at the top of Razorback in 1979, which nearly bought Sydney to a standstill. I hope to read my way to Goulburn before my bus takes the Federal Hwy turn off to Canberra.

Jason and the broken kettle

In Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, there is a famous story in which he explores the problem of denial and unconscious thought processes. It goes like this:

.. the dream… reminded one vividly of a defence put forward by the man who was charged by one of his neighbours with having given him back a borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. The defendant asserted, first, that he had given it back undamaged; secondly that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and, thirdly, that he never borrowed a kettle from his neighbour at all. So much the better if only a single one of these three lines of defence were to be accepted as valid the man would have to be acquitted. (Vol 4, Pelican Freud Library, p197)

For Freud, unconscious thought processes involve no logic or contradiction. Acts of denial and disavowal involve processes whereby one projects certain ‘realities’ about the way things are, such ideas can comfort us from the psychic injuries incurred by recognising we may have done something wrong, stupid or cowardly. Of course, life and our relationships with others are full of such happenings, the challenge for all of us is to be aware of when we are ‘acting out’ in such ways. Bart Simpson’s “I didn’t do it, no body saw me do it, you can’t prove anything” is a modern day version of the broken kettle. The story of the broken kettle indicates that sometimes in our effort to protect our conceptions of ‘reality’, we go too far and start to construct contradictory justifications that only serve to reveal the work of fantasy within our minds. In fact sometimes we can come up with also sorts of horse-shit to convince ourselves that we did nothing wrong.

Enter Jason of Claymore.

My car stalled
(then it magically got better and I drove off from the scene of an accident)

My girlfriend said there's no damage, its not our fault, lets go...
(but neither driver nor passenger had anyway of checking for damage because they were both too scared to get out of the car with the angry group of cyclists).

AND WHY DIDN'T YOU GO THE POLICE?
Because I don't sorta, I'm intimidated by the police, I don't like the police, I don't really like them that much... some are good, some arn't, I'm intimidated by the police, and I choose not to do anything about it, cause... there is no damage to my car, there's a tiny scratch on my boot where a handle bar must of hit...
(????)

I think we'll leave this one for the jury to decide! Another Bonfire of the Vanities.

"Ban these elitist wankers from the road and give the car driver a medal."

Thank you Stephen (10:57am) from Quakers Hills

And hell gets hotter and hotter. Bad things comes in threes. Even our Olympic champions riding at up 60km/h have not been spared. Here is the story of today's horror in both the Telegraph and the SMH

Its going to take some time to digest all this. I've saved all the readers 187 comments from the Telegraph for little critical analysis. However, the 'buts', 'no regos' and the 'its their own fault for...' amass amongst the this pit of stupidity running (sorry, driving) through this city.

Go here to see Ben Kersten give a first hand account of the incident.

Your lucky day in hell

Today has not been a happy day in the land of bike love. It seems to be one of those times where idiocy rules supreme and one wonders if they are slowly falling into a world of paranoid delusional fantasies and developing a persecution complex. Remember bumping into fellow Howard-haters a few years ago and they’d start talking about moving to New Zealand if Howard won another election. Did they go? Of course not, but they enjoyed thinking about the idea of escaping to another place. Well I feel like that right now. Something is rotten in the State of NSW and I’m not talking about the developer contributions or the electricity sell off. To begin with, it was reported that the NSW State Government plans to use 3 billion dollars from the sale of the States electricity to part-fund none other than another friggin private motorway (the M4 East). We’ve only spent the last 20 years building more private motorways (M2, M5, M7, Cross City Tunnel, Lane Cove tunnel, Harbour Tunnel, Eastern Distributor etc), while we've keep a railway system that has barely improved since 1915. All the motorways seem to have resulted in is more traffic and longer commuting times. As this recent report revealed, Sydney’s traffic is ‘crawling, not commuting’. The fact that petrol prices are ticketed to go through the roof is just the icing on cake. What a joy it is to live in such truly unenlightened times.
In other news, a local resident group in Surry Hills has started a campaign against the new separated cycleway that is planned to be built on Bourke Street this year. The cycleway is meant to look like this. Note all the trees.

However, some ambiguity in the planners report, has lead some residents to claim that the entire street would be clear-felled.
Of course, we know that the evil cyclists are really out to destroy the trees. That’s the kinda thing cyclists like doing. This protest has nothing to do with the fact that the residents may lose a few on-street car parking spaces (of course not!). Why would residents covertly aim to protect car-parking spaces when they really love trees?

And so the legacy of the Rum Corps and the Emerald City goes on. If ‘Red Ken' is looking for a new job, please apply here.

Postscript
Hell is getting hotter. Today brings news that the only ‘actual existing’ bike lane in Sydney-town is about to disappear. Sure it will be a bus lane, great for 30km/h bike hoons like myself, but what about everyone else? The Boulevard of broken dreams – Park and William Sts – was meant to be the main east to west access way into the city. Then the state gov. got nervous facing a motorist revolt over congestion heading into the city and anger against the road changes brought about by the now-bankrupt Cross City Tunnel. So, they decided to take three blocks of bike lanes back to make one more westbound lane, leaving only a semblance of a cycleway in disconnected parts at the top of Park Street and the exit ramp head up to Kings Cross. In seems that the saga of bike planning in Sydney is moving from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Anamorphosis

I've ridden along this street for the last 3 months and somehow not noticed this sign above Scooterworld.



"Life's Better On A Bug"... Now where have I heard that before?

Is David Byrne the Mao Zedong of bike culture?

In a previous post, I flagged the idea that Talking Heads lead man – David Byrne – might provide something of a musical accompaniment to a post-automobile society. Little did I know that David Byrne is actually something of a cyclist and bicycle advocate (thanks to Michelle for tipping me off). In fact I’m now wondering if DB is actually the artistic mastermind behind the international development of bike culture. Reading his online diary, you can see that Bynre has become the doyen of bike culture as well offering his own artistic skills to designing New York's bicycle racks. In fact, all he seems to do in is life is to ride his bike, travel and go to gallery openings.

On Youtube, Byrne can also be found narrating his own journey as a NY cyclist.

While in a Streetsfilms video clip, he can be seen hanging out with cool NY cyclists as well as 'Subcomandante' Enrique Peñalosa, the Mayor of Bogota. A coincidence that these two men are together? I think not.



Could Byrne be the secret force spreading the velorution?
In the words of one fallen comrade, El socialismo purde llegar solo en biciceta

ANZAC Day Long Weekend Tour

Day One: Campbelltown to Moss Vale

Day Two: Moss Vale to Kiama via Fitzroy Falls

Day Three: Kiama to Wollongong

For the love of cars

Just saw this report in SBS news.


China is the world’s greatest cycling nation where most people are too poor own a car, but not for much longer it seems. Sure, its progress, right? Why let a hypocritical and privileged western mindset judge who can have what and what’s right and wrong in this new economy? Its communist-capitalism and equality by market forces. Then I wonder, what rights will Chinese cyclists have amongst this burgeoning car culture? Clearly I need to be better informed and not just imagine that they are in the process of being seriously screwed. Maybe it isn’t as bad as it is here. It’s probably a lot better, if were talking about a numbers game. I'm sure no cyclists in China gets accused of not paying rego! However, this report seems to reveal a certain truth about car culture. That is, it's not about mobility or getting from A to B. For many it’s about status, its a metallic peacock parade of sorts. Automotive frisson, the need for speed. Faster... faster. This is freedom, equality and liberty.

Abstract

After 5 years in the wilderness, I've decided to reconnect with the planning profession. Here is an abstract I've written for an upcoming planning conference (talkfest).

‘I want to ride my bicycle’: urban cycling and planning praxis.

Cycling for transport has widely been celebrated by planning professionals as a key policy objective in creating ‘healthy’ and ‘sustainable’ cities. However, despite much enthusiasm, cycling remains a very marginal mode of transportation, particularly within Sydney, which is regarded as Australia’s most ‘unfriendly’ cycling city. This paper argues that in order to advance the profile of urban cycling, planners need to recognise that cycling is a complex cultural and psychological issue, one that cannot be fixed by simply building more bicycle lanes. Firstly, it is argued that planners need to develop a far more collaborative approach to cycling policy and infrastructure, one that includes a more diverse understanding of different road users and mobility needs. Secondly, it is argued that cycling policies needs to promote a more ‘embodied’ understanding of cycling skills and competencies to engender a cycling ‘habitus’ within communities. Finally, it is argued that to successfully promote cycling for transport, planning students and educators need to be directly engaged in the experiential learning process of riding within urban environments. Effective policy-making can only be achieved with an intimate knowledge of cycling as a practice. Such learning can also facilitate critical perspectives on automobility as a far more malleable cultural norm.

Signs and wonders

I was quite amazed to come across this sign on Regent Street yesterday... amazed that cycling should be promoted in a prominent position in public space.
Sure, its nothing compared to the assault of automotive advertising that surrounds us in newspapers and on the television, but its a good start.

A themesong for post-automobility

Happy Birthday Dulwich Hill Bicycle Club!

I am very proud to be a member of Dulwich Hill Bicycle Club, which celebrated its 100th birthday on monday night. DHBC is the oldest continually running bicycle club within Sydney. Many people find competitive cycling to be a hot house of egos and yuppie cycling bling, but I think our club enjoys a spirit of cycling that encompasses the virtues of encouragement, sharing, competition, fun and community. But of course, I'm blindly patriotic and biased in my opinion of the club.

In today's edition of The Glebe, there is a little story on the amazing history of the club.

FROM penny-farthings to carbon frames, the Dulwich Hill Bicycle Club has experienced a centenary of bike history.

The club was founded on April 8, 1908, and in the early days was one of Australia's strongest clubs.

The past five years has seen a surge in membership and it now has 80 members. Its focus now is to boost its ranks of women and junior members.

Along with the Marrickville Bicycle Club, Dulwich Hill designed and operated a velodrome at Henson Park from 1937 to the late 1970s.

This was used to host the cycling events for the Empire Games in 1938.

In the second half of the last century, interest in cycling started to decline resulting in two clubs, Marrickville and Petersham, joining with Dulwich Hill.

Lionel Cox, originally from the Marrickville club, is still a member and helps run weekly training sessions.

Cox won a gold medal at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki in the tandem track event and a silver medal in the 1000m sprint scratch race.

In the late 1970s the Henson Park velodrome closed to make way for light towers so the Newtown Jets matches could be broadcast on television.

A velodrome was built in Camperdown, in what is now O'Dea Reserve, which operated until 1998.

The club now trains at the Canterbury Velodrome in Undercliffe.

Its link to the past is maintained through the work of Alan Sumner who builds penny-farthings and sells them throughout the country.

The club enters the National Penny Farthing Championships in Tasmania each year and the most recent title was won by Dulwich Hill rider Huw Morgan.

Urban PARKing Day

Last year I posted on how much I liked the idea of urban PARKing after watching a film at the Bicycle Film Festival. Well today i got to do it as an April 1 'Fossil Fools' day event. Thanks to some inspired minds from UNSW's enviro collective, we packed up some turf and trees and loaded them onto our bike trailers to take over one car parking space on King St, Newtown. We paid for the spot of course. We attracted a lot of attention and onlookers were very supportive. Urban spaces don't have to be made just for cars!

Highland fling

Day One: Campbelltown to Moss Vale

On Wednesday last week I had a wisdom tooth taken out. With nothing much to do I decided erratically to pack a few things and hit the road. My plan was to scout out the Southern Highlands. Not wishing to bash though Sydney’s traffic I took the train to Campbelltown then headed out along Menangle Road towards Picton. It was amazing to be riding in the middle of the country only a few minutes from Campbelltown. From Picton I followed the Old Hume Hwy down through Tahmoor and Bagro, then I accidentally turned onto Freeway at Catherine Hill before turning back on to the Old Hume to follow my way around the back on Mittagong and Borwal and onto Moss Vale. I had one flat and a weird defect with rear tire. A large air bubble emerged under one of the layers of the tire to the point that it was catching the break callipers. Eventually it popped and thankfully not the tube but I did get a puncture a few kilometres down the road. I was initially thinking of heading down to Bundanoon to stay at the Youth Hostel but it was getting dark so I pulled in at the Jemmy Moss Inn in Moss Vale. To my delight, the Inn was great value at $30 a night and the food and the atmosphere in the pub was excellent.

(Rail bridge near Menangle)

(Argyle Street, Picton)

(Rural scene from Remembrance Drive/Old Hume Hwy)

Day Two: Moss Vale to Gerringong
I started day 2 at the Il Pranzo café in the mall at Moss Vale. It's by far the best café in the town and they roast the coffee beans on site. I then headed over to Legend Cycles to buy a new rear tire. Eventually at 10am I headed out of town along the Illawarra Hwy then turned right onto Nowra Rd towards Fitzroy Falls. The morning was overcast and very cold and I was fully rugged up with my cycling jacket on. From Fitzroy Falls there was a sharp decent into Kangaroo Valley which involved a lot of breaking. Just before you enter the township of Kangaroo Valley, I passed the Barrengarry Old Store and Post Office that claims to be “The Home of the Worlds Best Pies”. I stopped to try this claim out and I wasn’t disappointed. I avoided stopping at Kangaroo Valley as it looked to be one of those towns that is just full of boring tourist shops. From then it was across the valley then to a sharp climb over Berry Mountain. Halfway up the climb there was fridge on the side of the road that contained a self service fudge shop. From then, there was a lot more climbing then eventually I started to roll down the hill and into the town of Berry. I stopped for a quick feed at the Bakery then pushed on. Berry also appeared to me as one of those charmless town full of various shops dedicated to over-priced kitchen utensils and antiques. I took right turn not far out of town past the hospital then headed directly east along Beach Road towards Gerroa. The road coming into Gerroa was the only part of my entire ride where the traffic was quiet heavy and there wasn’t a very good shoulder to ride on. Finally, there was a steep hill up to Gerringong and the I headed straight to the station to get train back to Sydney.

(Canal at Fitzroy Reservoir)

(View back up to Fitzroy Falls)

(Historic Bridge at Kangaroo Valley)

(Kangeroo Valley)

(Berry)

(Gerroa)

Each day was approximately 75km of riding which took around 3.5 hours to complete. I’d ended up rushing things because I had to get back to Sydney on Friday night, but I still had a most enjoyable 2 days of riding. Next time I hope to get the week off.

Tread Lightly

My touring aspirations have moved one step closer this week as the task of adapting my old road bike into a ‘light tourer’ is now complete. The first thing I did was put a ‘deore’ rear derailleur and cassette giving me much more hill climbing capabilities. Then there was the arrival of the new Carridice Super C Frontbag and to finish it off, I’ve bought a lovely new Brooks B-17 saddle. I’ve heard a lot of talk about the famous B-17. Some people swear by them, others hate em, or profess that the wearing in period is a very long and painful process. I strongly contest this argument. From just spending the whole day on the road, I found the B-17 comfortable from the very beginning. It’s a very smooth and well shaped saddle suited for a relaxed riding position.
I took the new rig out today for a meandering 65km ride from Windsor up to Sackville ferry and back via the Cattai National Park. Everything ran very smoothly although the derailleur is a little jumpy (perhaps a minor barrel adjustment?). I’m aiming to do quiet a few loaded rides around Sydney in the next week as I’m planning to go bush sometime next week. I’m thinking maybe Victoria?
To go with the cycle touring scheme, I’ve also recently purchased a cyclist flap-hat. Harking back to the late 80s when fluro flap-hats were all the rage, I’m now reliving my youth as a more sun-smart late 20 something.

Mellow Yellow

I have a new fixie and its yellow.
Its not really new but all the parts from my old Apollo have been swapped onto this frame. The the old bike has a slightly skewed rear triangle which made it impossible to straighten the rear wheel with good chain tension. The other advantage of the new frame is that its slightly smaller and fits me perfectly. I'm a big fan of the colour yellow. Its highly vissible on the road and has something upbeat and playful about it. As I was photographing the bike, my cat Augie decided to come and say hello... although he didn't seem to be too interested in the bike, only snoozing and having his belly scratched.
So, in honour of Augie, I think I'll name this bike:

Pedestrian psychopath ahead

I had a really freaky experience on Saturday working as a Route Marshall at the “Gear Up Girl” women’s cycling event. The event was the first all women’s bike ride to celebrate International Women’s Day. I spent a good part of the morning directing women cyclists along he shared cyclepath/ pedestrian walkway at Brighton Le Sands. As they passed, I asked them slow down and watch for pedestrians as they negotiated the shared part of the course. During the day a man with a pram walked up to me in a screaming rage and threatened to hit me. The altercation went something like this:
Crazy man: “Why aren’t these cyclists keeping to the left!”
Me: “Sir, I’m asking them to slow down and watch out for pedestrians as they pass”.
Crazy man: “This is dangerous, we have children walking along here… who is responsible for this?”
Me: “Sir, this is an event run by Bicycle NSW, we have a traffic management plan that is approved by the RTA and the police, we're trying to make this safe for everybody.”
[the crazy man then walks away then turns back towards me clenching his fists threatening to hit me]
Crazy man: “You fucking smart arse, I outta punch you in the head”.
[I stepped back away from him]
Crazy man; [Screaming] “You fucking cyclists, I’ve seen you in the city, you run the red lights, you break all the road rules, you’re fucking hypocrites... hypocrites."
[Crazy man finally walks away].

This altercation scared the crap out of me. I’ve had bad run-ins with motorists trying to run me off the road, but I’d never had a pedestrian abuse me in this way (and I wasn’t even on my bike). Now I know that the man had a pram and probably had some hard-wired nurturing instinct to protect his young from any real or perceived danger, but his reaction was completely over the top. There were signs everywhere saying there was a cycling event on, and the women were not exactly floggin it along the cycleway. I was astounded by the way the man quickly turned his line of reasoning from some moral indignation about safety to broad speaking hatred of all cyclists as “fucking hypocrites”. I wonder, does this man own a bike or have ever or have ridden one? Does anybody in his family own a bike? Do any of his work colleagues or friends consider themselves “cyclists”? If I was a real smart arse, I would have told him:
"Sir, do you think it is interesting that bicycles have outsold cars for the last 7 years in a row?"
To witness such pathological behaviour is understandable and I’ve felt similar outrage when I’ve felt like I was going to be killed by a motorist. I’ve wanted to blow my top, but I usually control my anger and not blow up. I do feel sorry for pedestrians who used shared cycleway/footpaths. They can be dangerous and not all cyclists are sensible they way they ride around on them. However there are risks everywhere in our society. It seems that cyclists find themselves to be “betwixt and between”. Somehow “we” find ourselves as illegitimate users of both spaces. Within some quasi-democratic-spatial imaginary, going for a walk and driving a car holds resonance as legitimate social activities, but supposedly cyclists go about their ways as vile law-breaking monsters.

Adaptive reuse for bicycles

Adaptive reuse is the design principle by which old structures take on new purposes.

What does this mean for bicycles? Well, the majority of urban spaces since the 1950s have been built around the idea that all forms of transportation would be undertaken by cars. Getting rid of this dogma allows one to see that old spaces can be recreated in new ways that suport cycling as an everyday form of transportation.

Consider the following picture of the "Cycle Central" facility at Manly Council. By taking 5 carparking spaces away from cars, the council was able to provide secure bike parking facilities for 72 cyclists. This ratio works at roughly 1 carparking space to every 14 bicycles meaning that the problem of traffic congestion may require less carparking rather than more.

Building cycleways can also be seen as a complex and expensive process. However, here at Hallstrome Reserve Willoughby, the council has simply moved the carparking spaces 1.5 metres across to facilitate a more direct cycleway access through the area.

Sometimes all you need is a bit of brain power and a can of paint.

Life's better with a bike trailer!

Mistress

Do not watch this if your offened by sexual imagery.

Club Song

Eight days a week

Talk bikes all week – Ride bikes all weekend.

AshBUG Troupers

Basket case

Smug Alert

Touring modifications

I've finally modified my (old) road bike in a way that suites my current riding which is mostly for travel and commuting. Of course, this has just been one big incentive to finally bite the bullet and get a new road bike for racing. The most important thing I've done was to put a slightly higher and shorter stem on the bike to encourage a more relaxed touring geometry. After that, I've rebuilt my rear wheel with a Velocity Deep V rim for strength and durability. My old rims had cracks from being trued one too many times. The next stage in the evolution was to get a Carridice SQR Tour Saddlebag – something that I've become very fond of. No more sweaty backpacks! For a full review of the saddlebag, check out my post at Sydney Cyclist. The road bike is not ideal for serious touring as the geometry is a bit twitchy and not really suited for heavy loads, but for light touring it works just fine.

Headstart For Happiness

Over the last week, Mr Alan Evans of the NRMA started an amazing debate with cyclists around the under-use of a cycleway facility that wasn't even completed. There were many letters replying in the Herald, some pro - cycling articles, Clover Moore got into the debate, then Lisa Prior described Alan's remarks as the 'cyclist's oyster... providing the grit for cultural change', then there was more media coverage on the news and on radio talkback, and suprise, suprise... most of it has been very positive for cyclists leaving the car lobby choking on its own fumes. Alan even tried to patch things up with a more considered reply in the Herald. According to Alan, the Epping Rd cycleway will not be a nirvana for cyclists. Thats ok Alan, cyclists don't need to go to nirvana, but the last time I rode along Epping Road it sure didn't look like a nirvana for motorists.

Anyway, yesterday I did something I havn't done for a while – I drove a car. As I'm moving houses I find them very useful sometimes. As I drove between Redfern and Burwood I saw cyclists everywhere in vast numbers. Seeing so many peddlers gave me a sense of joy and bliss. We're winning... Thanks Alan, this song is dedicated to you...

All the roads that lead to struggles
Bring you back to where you need
Some reassurance in your own depth,
Only you can see, but let others feel
Peace in my mind i'm so happy to find
As i get on my trek with a headstart back to you.