Two things are usually true of the annual Kidical Mass ride at the cycle festival:
- It’s fairly well attended.
- We get wet.
On the second point in the run up to the day it didn’t look good at all. Increasingly dire forecasts of thunderstorms, combined with some of our key personnel becoming unavoidably unavailable at short notice led us to wonder if we would even be able to run a ride at all.
We love to run the rides. It’s great to see children having a blast on their bikes – and to see adults and children making friends with other like minded families. But safety is paramount and we did make some changes to the planned route to avoid the South side of the river (where the path is very close to the water) in what was supposed to be some quite heavy wind. In the end, however, the weather (for the ride at least!) was perfect and we had about 60 riders out and having fun on bikes. Many thanks to the marshals who gave up their time to make the ride possible – as ever, we couldn’t do it without you.
We did have a backup plan if the festival had got rained off and we couldn’t run a ride – we were going to direct families to the exciting new bike hub in central Reading (between Broad Street and Jackson’s Corner). It’s in the old Mothercare unit and has a free to use indoor balance biking track in the back part of the shop. They also offer good value bike repairs, bike hire, second hand bike sales and cycle training courses. Kat, our fearless leader, is part of the team getting this off the ground and hopes it will become a space that connects and supports cyclists in Reading. If this sounds like a good idea to you and you’d like to support it, the crowdfunder link is here.
Our rides serve a serious purpose as well as being fun. We want to try and highlight the need for safe cycling infrastructure that younger riders can use, and are building relationships with councillors and officers that helps with this. Recently a mistake was made and the crossing in front of the hospital was “upgraded” from a cyclist-and-pedestrian crossing to a pedestrian-only crossing. We raised this with Cllr Rowland and the signage was fixed within days. After the ride earlier in the year from the University of Reading community festival we pointed out that when turning from the university site onto the bike lane on Shinfield Road the profile of the curb presented a hazard for many of our younger riders. The council are now planning to reprofile this.
After the ride we enjoyed the rest of the festival, catching up with friends from Avanti, Reading Cycle Campaign and AW Cycles (among others). AW (the bike shop on Henley Road) had sponsored the raffle in aid of Sport in Mind, donating a helmet, a lock and a bike. Our boys loved watching the stunt rider display and riding Avanti’s ramps course, even when the rain came down later on – it’s great seeing how their confidence has come on from last year.
If you’d like to join us on a ride, our next rides are 🎃Halloween themed🎃 on 19th Oct in Reading, 26th Oct in Wokingham.
Then there are 🎅Christmas rides🎅 on 7th December in both places. We hope to see you there!