Category: Report

The weather in July has been an absolute scorcher, with almost two weeks of consecutive bright sunshine. I say almost, because for the weekend of Kidical Mass (and our school fair) the forecast predicted an absolute downpour. Yes, we did have a word with our resident weather forecasters, and yet they insisted it wasn’t their fault.

However, perhaps they did manage to quietly flip a few switches, because on the day itself the rain mostly held off. The forty plus riders who gathered to enjoy each other’s company and the ride (oh, and to show the demand for better cycling infrastructure) mostly stayed dryish. Hurrah!

☀️

We took the circular route from the Lido that goes up to the Kennet and back through town. It’s a great option that didn’t exist a few years ago – the developments by Blake’s wharf and the station have included off-road options for cycling which is much appreciated.

There is, however, one pinch point at the top of Chestnut Walk where a boom barrier blocks the road. We’re practiced with this now and use my cargo bike to bring ramps to take everyone around it. Kat (our fearless leader) led everyone in a chant of “What do we want?” “Drop kerbs!” “When do we want it?” “Now!” Never let it be said that we aren’t rock and roll.

We have raised the issue of that particular pinch point with the council before and will do so again. It’s not just cyclists that would benefit from that lovely route being made more accessible, it would make a difference to anyone with wheels – families with pushchairs, wheelchair users and roller skaters alike.

🍪

On arriving back at the Lido lots of vegan chocolate chip cookies were pulled out. Since we lost our original baker (she moved to Germany and thought it a bit far to come back for rides) Kat has been stepping womanfully into the breach, however, she’s always been clear that baking is not her forte. After she shared the rather dark brown colour of her cookies Samuel (our lovely treasurer and website manager) also had a go at some – in theory using the same recipe but they did turn out rather more golden coloured. However, my youngest boy, Mr 5, did try both cookies (perhaps he fancies himself a bake off judge?) and declared Kat’s offering the best. I suspect this might be because it was given to him by Kat’s young boy, who he met through Kidical Mass and is now a firm friend.

Kat (who occasionally moonlights as a cycling instructor, which she is rather better at than baking) then led the kids who hung around after the ride in some games on bikes, which gave their adults a chance to chat. I admit I wasn’t paying that much attention to the games (being more interested in the chat) but there were cones for riding a slalom and it looked at one point like they were playing something resembling duck duck goose which she informs me is to help children learn emergency braking.

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Kidical Mass Reading takes a hiatus now for the Summer, but we’ll be back for Reading Cycle Festival on Sunday 13th September and Kidical Mass Wokingham are running a ride in Earley on Saturday 2nd August. If you’re in favour of kids being able to get safely out on bikes then please do join us! And if you’re able to join our team of marshals for some of the rides then please get in touch – without their support we could not run these rides, and we’re grateful for all of them.

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:

• in Wokingham on Sunday 22nd June for the Wokingham Bikeathon
• or in Reading on Sunday 6th July

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:

1. The route we’d originally planned to use was closed for the runners…
2. … 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!

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

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

With a few weeks to go, April’s Wokingham Kidical Mass looked like it might not happen…

The April ride was planned to coincide with the national Safer Streets Now (SSN) action day on 20th April. This gave us the benefit of cycling in support of two great causes (Kidical Mass and SSN) but meant we couldn’t rely on our Reading KM neighbours for support as they were running their own ride on the same day. 

This combined with the absence of several of our regular marshals, meant we considered cancelling the event, however as is so often the way we were lucky (thanks to Natalie and Danny) to find 4 volunteers who kindly stood in to marshal and allowed the ride to go ahead. 

The weather was better than it had been  over the previous week (no rain), although there was a cold wind and arriving at the traditional starting point in Elms field at around 13.40 and finding no other cyclists in sight, I did wonder if we might not need those marshals after all!

Around 13.50, people started arriving, a recumbent cyclist who had come over from Bracknell was the first to arrive and after that the path along the park started to fill up. 

We cycled the usual circular route with the highlight being the ride down Denmark street through the town centre. Maybe it was just me, but it felt like the reception and waving we had this time around was the best I have ever seen, and the noise from the bells was definitely louder than I remember!

We had about 30 riders on the main ride and about 5 minutes after we arrived back at the finish in Elms field, we saw a family of 4 coming in. They had arrived a few minutes late and missed us at the start but had been picked up by the partner and son of one of our regular marshals, who were also late and had gone round with them! 

As is the tradition now, we had delicious home made cake provided by Lyme and caught up with people who are now familiar faces as the Wokingham rides head towards its second anniversary. 

So the April ride did happen and cycling home I reflected on what makes these things a success. It’s the people – the marshalls who give up their time (at the last minute in our case) and the attendees who prioritise coming even when the weather is bad. It’s all those people who waved and even cheered as we came down Denmark street and its the 99% of car drivers who were lovely (and mostly always are…)

Thank you all for making Kidical Mass what it is. 

Last weekend’s ride was a 4km loop from the Lido which went through the town centre. Some of our riders were very small, but still very nippy, and we had great fun riding together. After the ride we enjoyed swapping advice on different cycling setups with other families. We had a good turnout from the Reading Cycle Campaign – a group with which we share the common goal of pushing for improved cycling infrastructure in Reading.

Joe Edwards, the chair of RCC, mentioned that he had seen my recent article about Kidical Mass which was published in “Cycle” (from Cycling UK). Cycling UK also shared the article on their Facebook page. The vast majority of responses were enthusiastic and kind, but there were (naturally) a few idiots complaining about kids being “used to make a political point.”

This bamboozled me. The framework in which we all live our lives – what rights and responsibilities we are given, what options there are available to us, what safety we have – is dictated by the politics of our countries. Kids cannot escape the effects of politics. They generally spend a large proportion of their time in government run institutions. They are relatively small and powerless – a teenager who cannot travel safely by bike does not have the option to drive themselves independently. They are the ones who will have to live the longest with the consequences of the action we do or don’t take on climate change. To insist that it is somehow not fair play to make these points is to say quite clearly that you don’t care about them.

So, yes, the families here at Kidical Mass Reading do believe in engaging with our political systems to ask for better for our children. We were therefore delighted to have representation at April’s ride from three different political parties. Labour Cllr John Ennis, who is the lead councillor for climate strategy and transport gave a candid speech at the rally after the ride, in which he asserted that the council is determined to make cycling in Reading easy and safe, and acknowledged that at the moment it often falls short of that goal. He placed the blame largely on the lack of funding available for active infrastructure, and certainly this is part of the story. We were able to offer our thanks that he and his colleagues were able to reinstate (and in some cases improve) the cycling infrastructure on Lower Henley Rd that the council removed earlier this year. Mr 7 used it to ride his own bike to school on Friday, and we are very glad about its return.

Henry Wright, the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Reading, also joined us for the ride. Speaking to him afterwards he said that he regularly commutes by bike to work, and he sees that the cycling infrastructure we have is not good enough. He too wants to see a bigger investment in making our streets safe.

Cllr Dave McElroy of the Greens and Cllr James Moore of the Liberal Democrats also joined us, and were brave enough to ride together on our tandem (after an initial test run twenty minutes before the ride). As they were slightly wobbly they stayed near the back of the ride, and as back marker I was able to take the opportunity to point out the wonderful placement of my favourite bollard near Forbury Gardens (more of that sort of thing, please).

Having the two of them on the tandem was a great metaphor for the kind of cross party collaboration that we need to see at all levels of government if we want to see investment, action and change on cycling infrastructure.  If you too think this is important then don’t forget to vote in the local and Police and Crime Commissioner elections on the 2nd May – and please do join us for our next ride on Saturday 18th May.

Last year we found that (apart from Christmas) our Winter rides were generally low on numbers. I believe we discussed this and decided that, as much as people love free, fun, family friendly bike rides, they love them slightly less when the weather is freezing.

We clearly forgot that we’d learned this when we scheduled the rides for this year, as between us and Wokingham we’ve had monthly rides between November and January, finishing with a double ride month in February. However, numbers have not been bad at all – last week we started off with 33 (including several new faces), and finished with 38 (thanks to excellent recruitment efforts from the marshals to passing cyclists).

Perhaps this is in part because of how mild February has been to date – the temperatures are in the double digits, daffodils are growing and I am trying not to think about whether or not this is something I should be worrying about from a climate change perspective.

On a positive note, we had a last minute route change – which we’ve had before due to path closures and roadworks (our planner always checks the route in the day or two before the ride). However, this time it was for a very good reason – the route on the North side of the Kennet is finally open. It has been closed for a very long time whilst the area was under construction, to the great frustration of our official route planner Simon Smart (which I have heard about at length, Dear Reader, because he is my husband and we have the best pillow talk, if your definition of “best pillow talk” is chat about cycle lanes).

This is a much easier connection into the centre of town with children than we have previously had from Thames Lido – it avoids several points that require our marshals to be on alert, including cycling alongside Kings Road for a short way after passing the Narrowboat (previously known as the Bel and Dragon), merging out onto Duke Street and cycling past Reading Central Library. It’s now a route to Forbury Gardens that we would consider doing as a family with the kids on their own bikes, whereas before there is no way we would have attempted it outside of a Kidical Mass ride.

The only fly in the ointment is a boom barrier between Chestnut walk and the Abbey archway, where you have to push your bike up onto the pavement without a drop curb and walk around (unless you are four, in which case you can limbo on under the bar – a very rare case of a route being more accessible to kids than adults!). Kidical Mass will be using our voice at the cycle forum to ask the council to look at improving the connectivity here, as it is otherwise a lovely and much needed low traffic route into town from East Reading.

Coming through town we had the usual run ins with rail replacement buses parked on the “no stopping” section of the route past the station (there seem to be some almost permanently stationed there at the moment, which is something of a problem), and the occasional impatient driver who really didn’t see why they shouldn’t drive straight through a group of very young cyclists – all ably managed by our marshals, of course. I would be remiss, of course, if I didn’t mention that most drivers we encountered were friendly and polite.

At the end of the ride the kids had a great time riding around with their new friends – and many of our new faces let us know that they hope to see us for the next ride as they were heading off. We look forward to seeing them (and perhaps you, Dear Reader?) in Wokingham next week on 17th Feb, or in Reading or Wokingham for the Safe Streets Now action ride on 20th April.