Kidical Mass ReadingSave 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.
Christmas ride 🎅 — circular ride from the Thames Lido
Christmas ride 🎅 — circular ride from Elms Fields Playground.
Kidical Mass Reading celebrated Halloween with a themed ride on Sunday 20th October (it was a little early because we have realised that running rides in the school holidays and expecting people turn up is a Fools Errand). We invited attendees to come in costume if they wished (not was also fine of course, and our favourite characters are always families who ride bikes).
Our own boys have recently discovered Quidditch and wanted to dress accordingly. My husband (and Kidical Mass ride leader) Simon enjoyed hunting for a branch and some sticks with Mr 5 (the artist previously known as Mr 4, he recently had a birthday) to make a “Nimbus 2000” and we had great fun (if slight time stress) working out on the morning of the ride how to attach it to the back of the tandem so it looked like Mr 5 was riding it. Simon sportingly agreed to wear a golden snitch picture on his back so our young Seeker could be following it, and Mr 8 (who also recently had a birthday) had a hoop on a stick on the back of his bike to form a Quidditch goal so he could be Wood, the Gryfinndor keeper.
I recycled an idea from the very first Kidical Mass ride in Reading and went as Room on the Broom (this time with soft toys instead of children as passengers), because I still think that’s the most appropriate costume for a long tail cargo bike.
Despite our persistent badgering of the marshals who work in weather forecasting (there are six of them, which you’d think would be enough) the rain was only due to clear up in time for the actual Kidical Mass ride, and not for the marshals recce beforehand. Nonetheless, the marshals managed to accomplish their most important job on the recce, which was to place the ramps that would mean we could take the ride around the barrier blocking the end of Chestnut Walk (we continue our campaigning work to get a permanent workaround put in here, as it’s otherwise such a lovely car-free route into town).
With the rain we were worried turnout would be very low, so we were delighted that 34 people came along. Probably the most gratifying were the granddaughter-grandfather team who showed up. He informed us that he had been told they were going to come along that afternoon as she had enjoyed the last ride from the cycle festival so much. We were delighted to have them both!
We also had a family with a child on a scooter – her bike currently needs some work. They initially planned to only join the first bit of the ride around Kings Meadow, but actually having done that they kept with us for the whole ride. There was some great scooting going on there! I think the biggest difficultly for the scooter was on Kings Meadow itself, with the tree roots breaking up the path. It’s tricky for bikes, but worse for scooters. And to anyone whose bike needs light maintenance we recommend the free Dr Bike sessions funded by the council.
I enjoyed the ride around Blake’s Wharf – the grey day meant that for the first time I noticed that the fountains are lit from underneath. It really is a lovely spot. Coming through town we cut down to Garrard Street from Friar Street rather than navigate the big junction at the top (literally) of Greyfriars road, which was a lot less stressful! The taxi drivers queuing on Garrard Street were very smiley and waved at the children, which boosted everyone’s mood.
Then back through the tunnel under the station (hooray!) and we arrived at Thames Lido, where our friendly marshalling team handed out sweets to our young trick-or-treating riders. Huge thanks, as always, to the marshals who turn up to make sure the rides are safe and fun for all riders.
By this point the rain had cleared so we hung around for a while whilst the kids played. We chatted about the ride, parenting, and where in Reading we’d love to see additional drop curbs installed (we’re a niche interest group, I know). After that, Kat (official spokesperson), Samuel (treasurer and webmaster) and Jeroen (bike statistics mastermind) headed off to work on a presentation to Green Party members, on what getting around a city CAN look like if there are the will and resources to make bold changes.
If you’d like to be part of demonstrating that there is a desire for change in Reading (oh, and also if you’d like to ride with Father Christmas) then do come and join us for our Christmas rides. We’ll be meeting:
Reading Cycle Festival is an event we will always be happy to have in our calendar. It’s full of people who agree with Kidical Mass Reading’s aims – to campaign for better cycling infrastructure, build friendships between cyclists and to have fun on bikes. It was also full of people who were keen to go for a Kidical Mass ride and we had our biggest ride yet with around 90 riders taking to the cycle paths and streets to, well, campaign for better cycling infrastructure, build friendships between cyclists and have fun on bikes.
It’s been an exciting time for cycling infrastructure in the town centre, with both the rebuild of the bridge on Kings Meadow and the reopening of the (newly bike friendly) cycle tunnel scheduled for the week or two before the Cycle Festival. Yes, of course we planned a route that used both of these, and yes, of course we had a backup plan (or three) in case the projects overran – but thankfully everything was open in time!
The bridge over the stream on Kings Meadow was previously an area where our marshals had to be on high alert – the railings were horizontal and wide enough apart that an oblivious child on a balance bike could have slipped under. The new bridge is not only better in that it doesn’t have dodgy planks, it also has high vertical railings. Much safer, and much appreciated.
We then went through the Napier Road tunnel and along the Kennet to Reading Abbey. This route is perfect for bikes except for the boom barrier that blocks Chestnut walk. This time we came prepared with ramps so everyone could get round it on the pavement. Our team who attend the council cycling forum have raised this – putting in a drop kerb here would make the route usable for anyone with wheels (bikes, wheelchairs, pushchairs etc).
Then it was through the town centre, down Greyfriars Road and finally – finally! – we were able to take a Kidical Mass ride through the station tunnel as it has reopened and is accessible to bikes. The turn in was a bit tight and some of our recumbent trikes/bikes pulling trailers struggled a little, but I assume that when the building work at the station is finished that problem will go away. The tunnel creates a much needed centrally located crossing of the railway that is suitable for young or less confident cyclists (Vastern Road and Forbury roundabout are not for the faint of heart, unless you routinely travel with a team of marshals). I’m so delighted that the council are taking action on some of the unnavigable pinch points as well as building longer cycle lanes (e.g. on Shinfield Road). Both are needed.
We arrived back over Christchurch bridge to the festival where our boys had the opportunity to try out the ramps brought by Avanti (which they loved), watch the stunt cycling (which they loved) and socialise with their cycling friends (who they love). We had a stand next to Reading Cycle Campaign and near to Dr Bike – it was great to see so many of our cycling friends around.
This blog will not be as frequent this year, though we will continue to post about the rides which of course continue to run as normal. The next ride will be Halloween themed 🎃👻🧙🕸️ at 2pm on Sunday 20th October and, Dear Reader, we would love to see you there.
Come dressed up as your favourite character – or, if that doesn’t appeal, then come as our favourite characters: families who like spending time together on bikes.
Circular ride from the Reading Cycling Festival, with around 90 happy riders — probably our most popular ride so far!
How many bikes can you count?
In May Kidical Mass ran a ride at the University of Reading’s community festival. Over 50 people joined us for a ride through the university site. The campus is a great place to go riding with young children — there is very little traffic on the road, what traffic there is moves relatively slowly and many of the cycle routes are off road. It’s a very safe place to learn to ride and indeed our youngest regular attendee, Blake (aged 3) has learned to ride there this Summer. It was a very easy route to marshal and made for a relaxed and enjoyable ride.
Kidical Mass Reading have other reasons to be grateful to the university too — earlier this year they awarded us a grant which has enabled us to continue running the rides with related activities alongside (including offering bike maintenance to ride attendees).
So at July’s ride we were very pleased to welcome university researchers from the CALM (Clean Air Living Matters). The route went from Palmer Park to Forbury Gardens — back on our very first route — well, almost. There was a small change as the direction of traffic on Abbey Square, the one way road past the library, has reversed. This definitely made the route less stressful with small people (on this route the marshals always do most work on the stretch between coming off the Kennet and turning off Kings Road).
As part of their work, Dr Marta O’Brien and her team offer free assemblies and other resources to schools in Reading to help inform and empower students on these matters. If you have children and you think they would benefit from this please encourage their school to reach out – many schools in the Reading area have already taken advantage of the offer.
The researchers rode with us and sought views on cycling in Reading from the grown ups after the ride. I particularly enjoyed appropriating some of the pavement chalk that the children were using post ride to sketch out the new layout of Lower Henley Road and explain why it has made such a difference to our school run! I was also also able to explain why I am so glad that the tunnel under the station is opening to cyclists soon — the rivers and the train line are some of the biggest challenges for route planning in Reading and having a centrally located child friendly crossing of the latter is a welcome development. We hope to take a ride through the tunnel in celebration once it is finally open!
Going back to the university, and cycling, I made one too many puns about unicycles and the official Kidical Mass Reading route planner/leader (and my husband) has acquired one and is determined to learn to ride it with the idea of eventually being able to lead a ride on one. For now he looks quite funny wobbling about with one hand on the wall. With two small children finding the time to become proficient may take a while, but he’s a determined (stubborn?) man so watch this space for a future ride report featuring him.
This blog and the rides are on hiatus over the Summer so all that is left to say is that the next ride for Kidical Mass will be at 12pm from Reading Cycle Festival on Sunday 8th September – we hope to see many of you there!
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.
We try to push the council to implement more infrastructure for safe active travel. A big part of this is enabling families to do the school run in an active way. For example, we have recently campaigned for infrastructure to connect to the new River Academy school.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Therefore, here are some of my personal suggestions to the council:
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:
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).
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.
