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.
Kidical Mass rides are fun, a lot of fun! They are meant to be an opportunity for families to enjoy themselves. We ride our bikes, we chat, have some cake, and we play. But sometimes, we need to get serious as well. This is the campaigning side of Kidical Mass. We write articles on this blog setting out our opinions, we run petitions and we sit on council meetings about active travel.
It is great to see some of the measures the council is taking already. There is the Clean Air Living Matters (CALM) project to raise awareness about air pollution, including the role of motorised traffic. The council is also implementing wonderful School Streets to protect children near their schools.
Obviously, children don’t teleport to these school streets, though. There are still many barriers to active travel. I cycle to school with my child every morning along Hemdean Road in Caversham, a road with two primary schools and a nursery. Morning traffic can be hectic on this bendy road, with parents driving children to school, buses coming through and traffic using the road as a rat run. The available space is severely restricted by parked cars on both sides. After enduring numerous close passes on myself and my child, I have recently helped the school campaign for extra safety measures. While the council has sympathised with the requests, two arguments were repeatedly mentioned. If you follow discussions around active travel in Reading, you will surely recognise these recurring themes.
Parking space
Firstly, we are told, whatever we do, to not impact any parking spaces. Indeed, across the country it is often said that UK streets are too narrow for cycle paths and other infrastructure. This is clearly nonsense. Many roads are more than wide enough, but almost all of the space is allocated to the movement and storage of motor vehicles. This is a political choice, not a law of nature that can’t be changed.
This situation is only becoming worse with the trend for unnecessarily large cars, with almost a third of new cars sold being SUVs. These cars make the roads more dangerous for other road users by restricting space and visibility. In case of a crash, their weight and shape strongly increases the severity of the consequences. They cause more air pollution (including the electric ones). A recent study showed that air pollution caused by cars could have dropped by over 30% if this car obesity had not occurred.
The lack of space means there’s also no room for other much needed measures that enable active travel, such as shared cars and on-street bike hangars. It means no space for more plants and trees, which will be sorely needed to combat the urban heat island effect during heatwaves of ever increasing severity and to combat the dramatic decline of biodiversity. We have no space for benches for people to rest and socialise.
Karl Jilg, commissioned by Claes Tingvall
Crucially, it means no space for children to play. UK children are said to be among the least active worldwide. Is this any wonder? Have you had a look outside recently? Our society values the convenience of its adults to leave their belongings lying around over the health and safety of its children.
Reclaim
We need to reclaim our public space now, before the situation becomes even worse.
The council even supports this aim, in principle. The Reading Transport Strategy 2040 says the council will re-allocate space to active travel. The reality can, however, be very different. An example: the council has recently voted through the Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP). Interestingly, this plan included a short new section of cycle lane on Oxford Road. Sadly, even this short section is interrupted halfway though. By what you ask? Parking spaces, of course. Meanwhile, under the same plan extra parking spaces are created just around the corner. How is this re-allocating space for active travel?
So, there are vague claims, but no concrete plans for how to implement them. Other boroughs, are taking actions. Some are charging higher parking permit fees for larger, more polluting vehicles. Other councils have much more extensive parking permit zones. What will RBC do? It is not enough to have lofty aims without a plan for implementing them. The council can not be taken serious about its ambitions in active travel unless it sets out a clear plan for how to tackle this blight on our public space.
Divide Cities into “Driving” and “Non-Driving” — Andy Singer
On some streets houses have no front garden where owners can park their vehicles, but many do have sufficient space. Parking a small vehicle on their own property is an option for many people, but most simple choose not to. Why would they if they are given extra space for free on the road? Let them convert part of their front garden if they really need to. If you look carefully, you will start to notice that some of those cars are almost permanently parked, sometimes with cobwebs on the tyres and a patch of dirt accumulated underneath the vehicle, even in front of houses with ample space, but owners can’t be bothered.
Money
The second oft-repeated argument is that their is no money for infrastructure. The council keeps a long list of requested changes to improve road safety that are awaiting funding. Many of these measures, no matter how small, will have to wait for many years for anything to happen. Yet at the same time the council is handing out huge subsidies to car owners by surrendering one of its prime assets: the public space. Most of this subsidy is going to owners of larger cars, often the wealthier residents of Reading. Meanwhile the poorest households often don’t own a car (30% of households across the UK don’t own a car) and miss out yet again.
Fixing it
Therefore, here are some of my personal suggestions to the council:
Introduce size based parking permit fees,
Significantly expand permit fee zones,
Increase all parking permit fees to represent the true cost of public space. Exemptions and reductions can be given to those who can’t afford it.
Set out a street-level plan and timeline for reducing parking space to make way for infrastructure for sustainable transport,
Keep in mind the needs of disabled persons and use part of the freed up space to improve blue badge parking
Increase space for shared cars and install bike hangars,
Ring fence proceeds for active travel and public transport.
When will the council make clear that parking on our roads is a privilege, not a right? That children’s health, safety and future are more important than storing metal boxes?
A warm and sunny day, finally! Around 60 riders and one dog turned up at the Bikeathon for the Kidical Mass ride. Our stand stood among others supporting the Bikeathon – everything we took with us reached the site by bike.
After a briefing and donning Kidical Mass stickers on our t-shirts amongst a plethora of stickers from other stalls our group headed off around the park.
Some of the smaller balance bikers continued round the park to find the finish, whilst the rest headed out onto the roads, ringing our bells and donning smiles as we cycled.
Most Wokingham children are walking around with credit cards – they are Beat the Street and encourage travelling by walking or bike to touch beat boxes. We had two on our route and one had double points for the ride! We regrouped and most climbed off their bikes and touched the boxes.
Before we knew it we were cycling through the Bikeathon finishing line to ringing cow bells and lots of cheer with 2.5 miles behind us.
Cake and tattoos were waiting!
Thank you to everyone who joined us, I was very impressed by the skills, confidence and how sensible some of the littlest riders were – my 3 year old pedalled a Kidical Mass ride for the first time which I am extremely proud of.
See you next time:
in Reading for our Summer ride ☀️ Sun 7th July, 2pm from Tutu’s in Palmer Park
in Wokingham for our Summer picnic ride 🧺 Sat 10th August, 2pm from Elms Fields (check the Facebook event)
One of the things about being responsible for small people, and liking a quiet life, is that I have become a lot more conscious of what a human body needs in order to function. All of us need sufficient food, drink, sleep and movement. Nine times out of ten when one of the kids has a meltdown and we run through this basic needs checklist, there’s a contributing factor. The kids are even starting to be able to recognise this in themselves, which makes conversations about early nights after difficult days a lot smoother.
If I’m honest, I’m much better at managing this for the kids than I am for myself. When the kids were small and waking up several times in the night, the biggest challenge was sleep (for everyone, but especially the grown ups!). At least as babies they could always be relied upon to nap in a bike seat, a fact we made copious use of during lockdown when we needed to get the baby to nap three times a day, manage our own exercise, and make time to play with the preschooler. It was a constant multitasking exercise in trying to make sure that the ways we were spending our time were meeting different needs for different people simultaneously.
Thankfully now they are older sleep is much less of an issue. In a packed week, the first thing that slips is movement for me. Given a choice between clean clothes for everyone the following day or a walk in the sunshine it often doesn’t feel like much of a choice. This is one of the reasons I’m glad that we are a family that cycles – doing the school run by bike builds a bit of movement into my day every day and helps keep me happy.
I’m grateful too to see the boys starting to set good habits of their own. Young children naturally move a lot through the course of the day, but I can see that as they get older there will be far more demands on their time in terms of school, homework and other focused activities that require them to sit still for many hours a day. Like us, they will have to become a lot more intentional about making time to move their bodies.
Our current school run is about a 10km round trip. When my husband is taking them, he uses an acoustic triplet, which means the kids are able to be active too. I am less strong, and less confident in balancing them if they wriggle, so I ride an electric long tail with a super low centre of gravity, where they are just passengers. But Fridays are special – we have a bit more slack in the schedule and Mr Seven is allowed to ride his own bike to school if he’s ready early enough. We never have to nag him to get going on a Friday morning!
I’m hopeful that when they are teenagers getting about by bicycle will be second nature to them. We’re taking a multi pronged approach to safety – they will have been riding on our bikes and observing our road positioning for years, we will help them plan the safest way between the places they want to go, and we are campaigning (through Kidical Mass) for better connected cycle routes across Reading.
And, who knows, maybe one day they might have little people of their own and find themselves struggling to meet everyone’s basic needs with a newborn around. Perhaps they will be grateful to find (from the other side) that a bike ride is a great way to get a baby to nap whilst its parent also gets some exercise.
Somewhere along the line growing up I learned that there are some topics that it’s impolite to discuss in casual conversation – most notably religion and politics. To those weighty items I would also add that I am reticent to discuss my feelings as a cyclist about road safety. I have STRONG feelings on the subject, and I do not want to subject my (lovely, well meaning) driving friends to a breathless tirade. So, Dear Reader, I thought I’d subject you to it instead (since you are here voluntarily and can leave when you like).
Remember how vulnerable cyclists are. The best visual I ever saw explaining safe passing distances first showed a hand being slammed down hard on a table close to a hammer, and then showed the reverse. 🫱🔨 Only one of those things made me wince, and I bet you would have the same reaction. The cyclist is the hand, your car is the hammer. Don’t risk our lives just because it feels safe to you inside your car to be that close to us.
Be a bit more chilled out about cyclists when you’re driving. I particularly hate pulling up Peppard Road going away from the Last Crumb. The road there is not wide enough for a car to safely pass a cyclist (you can tell this, Dear Rider, because the separate bike lane doesn’t start until a little further up). The number of drivers who CANNOT BEAR to wait twenty seconds to get to a safe passing place is ridiculous (I am better now than I used to be at road positioning to stop this happening). Yet, when it is other cars (instead of bicycle traffic) causing the (much longer!) delay coming down that road they all manage to queue nicely without trying to rear end each other.
If you are in a SUV and you cannot generally give safe passing room when overtaking cyclists, then get yourself into a narrower car. There’s no need to hog that much of the road. Same goes for the drivers coming down Peppard Road who feel the need to keep one set of wheels permanently in the bike lane, thereby making it unusable. Almost all of our road space is allocated to cars, stop stealing the little that isn’t.
Always, ALWAYS look all around you before pulling away from stationary. It gives me a little mini heart attack every time I see a car lurch forward then stop just before hitting something as the driver clearly decided to do their mirrors check AFTER they started moving. That should never happen.
Stop parking your car on pavements and in bike lanes. ESPECIALLY on Henley Road where all the houses have massive driveways and many schoolchildren commute along the path. If you don’t have the fine control of your car to manoeuvre it safely into your driveway please turn in your driving licence immediately.
I suppose I don’t say these things to my friends because they are all lovely, well meaning people. However, I also suppose every driver who has ever close passed me, or undercut me on a roundabout, or parked their car in a bike lane or on a pavement is probably in most circumstances a lovely, well meaning person with lot of friends. Perhaps if it became more acceptable to talk about these things we would see less of them.
I’ve got a couple of bikes. For a long time I used to ride a Charge fixed gear bike I bought on eBay, but as my commute has changed (and my fitness has declined!) and includes more hills I’ve invested in a geared touring bike.
When the kids were very little I used a Burley Bee cycle chariot and a front seat to take them both to nursery, but as they’ve got older and we live near their school I no longer have that set up. It’s a shame as they used to enjoy the journey and it was very satisfying cycling pass the cars going nowhere in the rush hour traffic jam on the Reading road, and the slightly unorthodox set up was always a talking point with parents in the car park.
How does cycling fit into your life?
I use a bike to commute to work and for local journeys. As both myself and my wife work, this allows us to only own one car, which is a big plus given that we don’t have any off road parking at home.
The kids cycle, although we live within a short walk of their school and so don’t need the bikes on a day-to-day basis.
Why did you get involved in Kidical Mass?
I started cycle commuting (and subsequently got more into cycling) when I moved to Reading in 2010 and have been a member of the Reading cycle campaign (RCC) since then. A few years later we moved to Wokingham and I got involved with the Wokingham Active Travel Campaign (WATCH).
It was at a RCC meeting that I heard Kat talk about Kidical Mass and how she wanted to set it up locally, I was really impressed with her drive and enthusiasm and the idea of Kidical Mass, as a way of getting a broader cross section of people (beyond the Lycra MAMILs) out on bikes and so got her details. I helped marshal some of the early Reading rides and really enjoyed the fun and support that can sometimes be absent at cycling events (not all!) I have attended in the past.
WATCH had been looking for a cycle event we could put on in Wokingham and after chatting with Kat, we agreed that we would run a Wokingham ride every other month under the Reading (and Wokingham) Kidical Mass umbrella.
What is your role in Kidical Mass?
I am one of the organisers of the Wokingham KM events and try and help out with many of the Reading events as I can get to.
Last weekend the University of Reading held its annual community festival, and Kidical Mass Reading (and our own community) had a stall and ran a ride. We were delighted to be back on the university site, which has a great network of quiet roads and off road paths. In terms of planning how to marshal the rides, it’s definitely the easiest location we use and I would thoroughly recommend it for a weekend family bike ride.
We had hoped that our route would be a able to briefly leave the site to take in part of the new bike lane on Shinfield Road, but sadly some road works popped up a few days before the ride rendering it temporarily usable. That was a shame, as it is a nice bike lane. However, it did mean that the whole route was very low traffic and the drivers we encountered were very patient and calm. Generally traffic tends to move slowly around the university site, which I’m sure is good for everyone’s stress levels!
Leaflets galore
Our stand was shared with Reading Cycle Campaign and Avanti Cycling (who run the Bikeability training in schools). This meant that we had an abundance leafleting material, in addition to the Kidical Mass flyers, stickers and temporary tattoos. We also had two Super Keen preschoolers who were determined to carry on distributing stickers and post ride until they were all gone, despite their parents best attempts to get them to move on towards lunchtime. (Yes, Dear Reader, one of them was Mr 4). The stall was manned throughout the afternoon to continue spreading the word about cycling in Reading.
Dr Bike DrBiking
One of Mr 4’s birthday presents last year was a kickstand for his bike, and whilst we were waiting for the ride to start he decided to use it as a makeshift turbo trainer, balancing the bike on it and pedalling backwards. It isn’t really designed to take that kind of weight so it ended up pointing off at a completely random angle. Dr Bike (aka Santa’s Elf) was positioned next to our festival stand. He is adored by Mr 4, who was delighted to have a repair to request (the kickstand was very quickly and easily realigned). After the ride it looked like there were a fair few people bringing their bikes for tune ups, and it’s great to see that service being used.
Three balance bikes on a single picture!
With the new location came some new faces on the ride, including a few slightly bigger balance bikers – a great sign that their families had done the research on how to teach a child to ride a bike. The stabilisers I remember from my childhood are not currently the recommended approach. They completely change how a bike behaves (you cannot steer by shifting your weight), and when the stabilisers are removed the child then has to relearn how to control their bike. Rather it’s suggested that everyone starts with a balance bike, which steers in the same way as a pedal bike does. For bigger children a pedal bike can be temporarily transformed into balance bike by removing the pedals and lowering the saddle. It was great to have some kids riding in this manner out with us, and they did brilliantly at covering the distance. Scooting a bike is rather harder work than pedalling!
If you missed out on this wonderful community fuelled ride, then please do join us for one of the ones coming up:
the next Wokingham ride will be on Sunday 23rd June
the next Reading one will take place on Sunday 7th July.
April’s ride featured two councillors from different parties riding on our tandem, Daisy. Daisy is the only bike in our family “fleet” that has a name that’s stuck. She’s been with us longest, and, although (or perhaps because) she was bought second hand about two decades ago when we were both fresh faced students, she’s probably the bike I’m most emotionally attached to.
It’s been a while since I rode on her – at the moment “my” seat is usually configured to bring the pedals high enough for a four year old, which means if I tried to ride her it wouldn’t be very comfortable! Seeing two adults on her bought back memories from our earliest days of cycling together, when there were only two of us, and I was rather less keen.
It was the early 2010s. My then-boyfriend had convinced me to try out camping (a first for me, I came from a decidedly indoorsy family). He had found a suitable campsite in Dorset and suggested we get there by a combination of National Express bus and bicycle. I nervously agreed, on the basis that he would be in charge of logistics and route planning.
Travelling by coach with the tandem was an…interesting…affair. The bike had to be dismantled and the pieces wrapped in bubble wrap before it could be loaded into the coach hold, which added a fair amount of time to the journey. Even more interesting, however, was the route between the coach stop and the campsite.
I suppose I should have been concerned when my partner showed me his printed out map and explained his plan. “Look, it’s suggested three cycling routes. The first is long and flat, the third is short and hilly, and the second is somewhere in between. But LOOK there is another route which it hasn’t found which is even shorter so we’re going to do that.”
I think my favourite part of the journey (at least now that it’s just a fun story from the past) was when, having just pushed the bike up a long 17% hill on foot, we stopped in a village to check directions for the rest of the journey. The lady looked at us, and, like a character in a sitcom, just shook her head and said, “Ooo, I wouldn’t have come this way.”
Nevertheless, both we and (spoiler) our relationship survived the trip. We had a lovely holiday, and amended our bus ticket home to go from a stop closer to the campsite. After that experience, any bicycle camping we have done with the kids have been (a) actually glamping, not camping, (b) combining trains+bikes not buses+bikes and (c) had me on my cargo e-bike. But, hey, maybe as the kids get bigger we’ll get more adventurous.
For now the tandem mostly gets use ferrying Mr 4 to and from his Friday afternoon Kindermusik class. But one day, when the kids are bigger, it will be converted back to two adults permanently. I imagine my husband and I will still have a use for good old Daisy long after the kids have left home and the newer, shinier, kid carrying bikes have found a new home.
I don’t, however, think I will ever again agree to a tandem bike camping trip in Dorset.
