Save the dates for our next Kidical Mass events, in Reading and Wokingham. No need to book: just turn up and enjoy a safe, family-friendly, joyful ride with us.
Last week’s ride took place at the University of Reading Community Festival. We had around 50 riders joining us, including one special and unexpected guest, Yuan Yang, MP for Woodley and Earley. I had a chance to speak briefly with her about Kidical Mass, and our aims to highlight the need for child friendly cycling infrastructure. Yuan Yang commented, “When it comes to urban planning, children are the canaries in the coal mine.” How wonderful it would be for everyone if all of our cities were designed to meet children’s needs! Clean air to breathe, public spaces to play and socialise, and cars tamed and contained so that people can travel safely on foot, or by bike or public transport.
It’s local government (our councillors) who decide where exactly in the borough to spend any money there is to spend on active travel. However, it’s central government (our MPs) who decide how much money that is and what the parameters are on how it’s spent. We asked Yuan Yang to be a voice asking for enough active travel funding to meet the clear need.
The ride itself was great fun and our marshals were rather more relaxed than usual – the university site has low speed limits on the road, and many car-free bike paths, which is great for small children. But we did venture onto the surrounding roads once or twice to demonstrate that you can cycle to nearby schools by venturing through campus – if, of course, you have a safe path to campus from your house.
Kidical Mass also had a stand at the festival, shared with our friends at Reading Cycle Campaign. We had a bracelet making activity for kids to do and a dot survey for cyclists (young and old) to express how they they feel about cycling in Reading. The results were interesting – the top two questions told a clear story that, although we have some nice cycle paths in Reading, what we don’t have is a safe and connected network of routes. You can find a place to go for a perfectly nice weekend afternoon ride, but if you want to go from home to school or work the infrastructure just isn’t there.
We could also see that poor driving is perceived as a problem, and the provision of bike parking is an issue for some. And (perhaps unsurprisingly given the people who will have stopped by our stall) almost everyone wanted to be able to ride their bikes more. Perhaps if we can build safe connections between the existing cycle paths we can make that dream a reality.
Especially for children, an entire route can be made unusable by a bad junction. Imagine as an adult going for a 50 mile bike ride on entirely segregated and beautiful bike paths, apart from one point where you have to cross a motorway on the carriageway. Which bit would you consider when deciding whether or not you could use that route?
Yuan Yang is one person who does insist on riding her bike around (you could tell that this was not just something she said because she thought we’d want to hear it – her team were joking with her about how this makes their lives rather more interesting!). I think it’s really great when people with decision making power are on the ground to see the infrastructure issues and pinch points for themselves. I hope in time we can have more focus on what tweaks and connections are needed to build a proper cycle network, as well as building standalone paths. To get there we will need more elected representatives who understand and care about the issues.
If you’d like to join your voice with ours to campaign for this future then please come and join us at our next rides:
We had a very sunny ride today, which was part of the Community Festival at the Reading University campus. There were about 40 of us at the beginning, but we recruited a few more on the way and ended up being 50. We also had a surprise guest you may well recognise on the pictures!
When we originally planned March’s Reading Kidical Mass ride we thought, somewhat nostalgically, that we’d return to the route of our first ever ride (from Palmer Park to Forbury Gardens). However, we set the date a little while ago, and we hadn’t realised it coincided with Reading half marathon. This was an interesting situation for two reasons:
The route we’d originally planned to use was closed for the runners…
… many of who were people who are part of our marshalling team. Apparently there’s a big overlap between overly keen cyclists and overly keen runners (though the Venn diagram is not a circle, I have personally never found the idea of a 13 mile run at all tempting).
No matter! The ride date and start time was published and so a ride we would run on that date from that place.
There was a flurry of activity of scribbled on maps exchanged in the KM WhatsApp group (all the cool kids are in it), proposing possible alternatives, and cross referencing the marathon route road closures. As ever, the constraints were tight: we want to offer an opportunity for a large group of children to ride safely on the roads – safely being the operative word – so some routes are just not possible.
The other side of the Kidical Mass operation is, of course, to engage with the council on all the places we feel we cannot take rides, explaining what makes those routes unsafe and pushing for better infrastructure.
We eventually settled on a circular route, which went from Palmer Park and down to the Kennet, over the zigzag bridge, along the Kennet in the direction of town, and then back over the Kennet to cut through the side streets back to Palmer Park. We were pleased it was a circular route as we know this allows families to bring their small children and bikes by car if riding independently to the start point isn’t yet possible.
The downside of this circular route is that we would have to cross London Road, in both directions, so we would need enough marshals to make that safe. We reached out to the wider community, and badgered friends and relations, and managed to find enough people willing to help that we were confident we could run the ride safely. As always, we are so grateful to the people who give up their time to get kids out of their bikes – especially as we never know in advance whether the ride will be well attended or not.
This time, however, despite the marathon 🏃, and despite the rain 🌧️, we had a great turnout, with over 50 riders joining us, including many new families who hadn’t ridden with us before. Welcome!
On the ride we saw some signs of progress in the infrastructure we used. Though the crossing back on London road was tricky, it was helped by the new bus and bike lane that runs alongside Palmer Park. The route we would have run (if not for the road closures) would have taken us through Blake’s Wharf, a safe route into town that didn’t previously exist. But we also saw evidence of where things can still get better – Gas Works Road is currently blocked to cars, but clearly bikes and people are still meant to have access – but only on one side is there a way for bikes to get safely round without going up a high curb (we brought our own ramps).
On the zigzag bridge we station marshals to make sure no child falls down the steps, and this time we were very glad we had. Campaigning for better infrastructure is a marathon, not a sprint, and I’m grateful to everyone who came along to add their voices to ours and say that it matters.
If you’d like to come along and join in, our next ride will be at 12pm at Reading University’s community festival on 17th May. Come along and make a day of the free event – our kids enjoyed seeing everything there was to do last year!
We had a very wet, but very well attended ride today, with more than 50 people of all ages joining us for a bike ride from the Palmer Park. Look at these smiles!
Challenge: find eight treats beTWIXt the text below. See underneath for answers, and join us for fun, free bikes rides in Reading on Sat 23 March and Sun 17 May.
To boost your cycling ambitions and acquire affordable cycling kit, Kat (Kidical Mass spokesperson), recommends the heroes at Reading Bicycle Kitchen who refurbish second hand bikes.
When teaching don’t worry that you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. It’s best to start with a balance bike (or take the pedals off a bigger bike) and practice scooting around like an aerodynamic star. Mix pedalling in after they have mastered steering the bike.
Get your school signed up to the bikeability program, teaching skills for on road cycling, via the smarties at Avanti Cycling Trust.
Bring your kid along to our rides to have fun and campaign for quality streets with safe cycling infrastructure.
Look at the answers! 🍬🍬🍬
Boost Kit kat Heroes Chewits Aero Starmix Smarties Quality street
We had a very cold but very successful ride today around the University of Reading campus today, with 50-ish brave people joining us. Gloves and woolly hats were de rigueur!
We had several falls when joining the bike lane on Shinfield road. The kerb is slightly raised there, enough to destabilise those with small wheels and little experience. We’ll have to be careful about this part next time.
Otherwise, it was a quiet and pleasant ride, as the campus is mostly empty of four-wheelers. There’s not many photos from the ride itself this time — have you every tried taking pictures with gloves? 🙂
The ride was be followed by our Annual General Meeting, at 4pm at the Park House on the campus, where we discussed what we did in 2024, and what we’re planning to do in 2025. Stay tuned for more!
In August 2024 Reading saw a significant change to its transport network. A lane for general traffic on London Road was converted into a bus lane. This caused a bit of a stir, with repeatedclaims that congestion at the newly introduced pinch point at the start of the bus lane (opposite Liverpool Road) would lead to increased air pollution.
As it happens, an air quality monitoring station is located right next to this supposed bottleneck, just inside Palmer Park. If you were to design an experiment to monitor the effect of the bus lane, you could hardly pick a better location to place a monitor.
The data from this station, as well as many other UK stations, is available from Defra’s website (or using the R package called openair). This means we can now have an in-depth look at the data and determine objectively what has happened at this site.
Air pollution and its causes
The station on London Road monitors PM10 and NOx concentrations. PM10 stands for particulate matter with a diameter of 10 micrometres or less. These are small particles in the air that can pass into the upper airways. They are associated with respiratory disease and cardiovascular effects. NOx stands for nitrogen oxides (NO and NO2). Exposure to NO2 is also linked to an increased risk of disease related mortality.
Both PM10 and NOx are generated in a wide range of human activity, including road transport, industry, energy production and domestic heating. Of the two measured pollutants, NOx is most sensitive to road traffic, with around 65 per cent of the NOx at the roadside originating from road transport.
We see this strong influence on London Road as well. The daily variations of NOx show a low of just above 20 μg/m3 at night, shooting up to 50 and higher at peak rush hour.
A look at the data
So what does the data look like in detail? The below image shows the measurements for November 2024.
The data gives a very detailed picture, with hourly values of NOx concentrations, wind speeds and air temperature. It is also clear that the data is noisy, showing a lot of variation. We therefore need to look at longer time periods (several months) to get a clear idea of any changes.
We also notice that the weather has a strong influence on pollution. For example, high wind speeds and warmer weather on the days before Nov 25 coincide with a sharp drop in pollution. This well-known influence of weather on air pollution muddies the water, making the influence of road transport less obvious. Is higher air pollution due to more traffic or due to a colder winter? Fortunately, we can use statistical models to estimate the influence of the weather and compensate for it. Here we have used a boosted regression tree approach, as implemented in the R package deweather.
Before and after
The bus lane was only introduced in August, so we’ll only consider the last four mounts of each year (September to December).
We see that, apart from a post-pandemic bounce-back in 2021, NOx concentrations are steadily declining, likely due to cleaner engines, more electric vehicles and decreasing background concentrations (because of cleaner or reduced industrial activity). A similar trend occurs at other nearby monitoring stations and across the UK. For example, yearly NOx concentrations at Oxford Road have dropped from around 80 μg/m3 in 2016 to 40 μg/m3 in 2024.
Most importantly, the graph shows absolutely no influence from the bus lane introduction in 2024.
It is possible that while air pollution has dropped at the bottleneck, congestion has extended onto the Sutton Seeds roundabout and thus caused air pollution to be more spread out. Google Maps traffic data certainly shows congestion there. It is, however, unclear to what extent this has changed since the bus lane was introduced. There certainly was heavy traffic there before as well (see the Reading Buses account on 𝕏 for past announcements of severe delays on the Orange routes). Reading Borough Council and Reading Buses should have more detailed traffic data on this, which we hope will be made public soon. It should also be noted that population density on the Wokingham side of London Road is a lot lower than on the Reading side and houses are further away from the road, reducing the health impacts of air pollution.
Conclusion
As in many important matters, it is difficult to gauge the impact of a change without good data. Humans are not very good at quantifying air pollution and are subject to all kinds of biases. Although more data would certainly be welcome, this investigation shows that, at least with respect to air quality, we’re certainly not seeing the catastrophic effects some had predicted.
While air quality in Reading is certainly improving, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Because of the strong impact on health, the World Health Organisation has produced air quality guidelines. Their recommendation is to keep yearly averaged NO2 concentrations below 10 μg/m3, PM10 below 15 μg/m3. For 2024, all three roadside monitoring sites in Reading exceeded both thresholds, with the worst offender at Caversham Rd measuring 23.3 μg/m3 for NO2 and 23.1 μg/m3 for PM10.
However, more needs to be done to reduce the air pollution that is affecting the health and development of our children. Census data shows that in Reading more than half of commutes between 2km and 5km are done by car and almost one in three commutes of less than 2km. Many of these journeys could be walked or cycled, but more carrots (cycling infrastructure, reliable public transport) and sticks (road pricing, lower speed limits, blocking through-traffic) should be considered to reclaim our streets.
Neither flood nor frost was going to stop Santa from keeping the most important event in his calendar (apart from Christmas Eve, of course) – the annual Kidical Mass Reading Christmas ride.
Our boys were super excited getting ready for the ride – this year I left plenty of time to duct tape the all important elf hat onto Mr 5’s helmet. These days Mr 5 prefers to ride his own bike on our rides – his grandfather usually comes along to ride next to him since his Dad leads the ride and I (his mother) am our back marker. However, this year as in previous years the boys’ grandfather was nowhere to be seen during the ride. He showed up too late, unfortunately just missing Father Christmas. So Mr 5 got to help lead the ride on the triplet with Dad and Father Christmas. And a very happy elf he made, with lots of waves and smiles for the people we passed.
And there were a lot of people that we passed. Though flood wasn’t going to stop Santa, it had a pretty good go. After days of heavy rain much of King’s Meadow was more than a foot underwater, and the river was fast and high and cold. Even more than usual we didn’t want to run the risk of a kid falling in so we changed our plan and routed the ride pretty much immediately away from the river and through the tunnel under the station, through town, along the Kennet by the Oracle (which has substantial fences and a much higher bank) before ending at Forbury Gardens. Going through the centre of town we got lots of smiles and waves from people out doing their Christmas shopping in the very festive town centre (made all the more festive, of course, by the presence of Santa on a bike and the jingling of bike bells).
It doesn’t escape my attention that watching for flooding on the route has become something of a feature of planning Kidical Mass rides – much of our child-friendly cycling infrastructure in Reading is river-adjacent, which can present a problem if you don’t have alternative routes for getting around. I felt for the family who showed up with wet socks because they came on bikes and had to cross through some rather deep puddles to get to the start of the ride! We will keep pushing for the day when the cycling network in Reading is more resilient to heavy rain and ice. We need to get there if we want cycling to be a viable primary transport option for meaningful numbers of people.
At Forbury Gardens the kids had a chance to mingle with Santa, who handed out presents to help make the kids more visible in poor lighting – many thanks to Reading Borough Council for their financial support of that project, which has also enabled us to provide lights to some secondary school children who were in need of them. Santa enjoyed congratulating the kids on their riding skills as he handed out the presents, and then slipped away just before the kid’s grandfather showed up to hear all about it.
We are all looking forward to the ride on Sunday 19th January, which will be on the university site and then followed by our Annual General Meeting, where we will reflect on what has been achieved last year and plan for what can be done next year. Until then, we hope you all stay safe and enjoy riding your bikes. From your Kidical Mass Reading team:
🎅🏻🎄🎁🌟
We wish you a Merry Christmas! Nous vous souhaitons de joyeuses fêtes! We wensen jullie een vrolijk kerstfeest! Поздравляем с Рождеством! Віншуем з Калядамі! Feliz Navidad Feliz Natal
