Categories
Life on bikes

It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood

My Dad likes to play the long game. I don’t remember this, but I know (because he tells me at least once a year) that the first thing he said to me after I was born was, “In eighteen years you are going to leave home, and I promise that both you and I are going to be ready for it.”

I’d like to think that I’m a bit better at living in the moment than my Dad is, but I understand the sentiment and why he thought it was important enough to say to a newborn. It is our job as parents to help children grow into competent adults, and that’s not something that happens overnight when they turn eighteen. Freedom needs to be given to them gradually, in baby steps, as they are ready for it.

🧒👦📮

Our kids had a small milestone recently. They are seven and four, and I asked them if they wanted to go out together without a grown up to post their letters to their friends. The post box is a two minute walk away. We live on a quiet street, with footpaths connecting the houses and a small communal garden. Cars are relegated to a road around the edge, away from the houses, and there is no through traffic. After agreeing some ground rules (hold hands, the older one is in charge of deciding when it’s safe to cross the road, look both ways, don’t run) they decided they were up to the challenge. They came back having safely completed their mission and absolutely delighted with themselves.

The space we live in shapes how we live. We know many of our neighbours because we see them heading out on errands, gardening, or walking their dogs, and the boys stop to ask questions. Where are you going? What are you planting? Can I stroke your dog? The space is pleasant to be in, and peaceful, and encourages conversation. It won’t be long until the boys can go out and play in the communal area without me hovering next to them.

🧒 🚙 🚚 🚗 🚙 🚗 🚐 🚗

One of our Kidical Mass friends lived on a side road off Oxford Road, and her experience of life outside the front door could not have been more different. There are cars parked down both sides of the street, often blocking the pavement. There is nowhere to encourage neighbours to linger and socialise, and nowhere for children to play. The traffic on the main road is fast, and there aren’t traffic free alternatives. (In unrelated news, she’s recently moved).

How many years does an environment like that add to the point when a child can have some freedom and independence? Measures to bring down the speed and volume of traffic in residential areas would make a huge difference to the safety and quality of life of our kids.

On 20th April Kidical Mass Reading and Wokingham will both be running rides. These tie in with two very important action events, an international Kidical Mass one and the UK based Safe Streets Now. We want to raise our voices to make a clear statement. Our kids deserve safe bike infrastructure. They deserve safe streets. Allowing them to experience independence when they are ready for it should be a priority.

If you agree with us, do come and join us for a ride.

Categories
Infrastructure

Five (Bike) Things I Love About Forbury Gardens

As a campaigning group, we work to draw attention to areas of Reading where improvements to cycling infrastructure are needed. However, I think it’s also important to notice where cycling infrastructure works well. Here, therefore, is my list of things I love about Forbury Gardens.

1. Bike Specific Infrastructure

A proper bike lane

Approaching Forbury Gardens from the South, after crossing Forbury Road, cyclists find themselves for a short stretch in their own specific path. In most of Reading cyclists are either expected to mix with motor vehicles (with a painted line to protect us, if we’re lucky), or to share space with pedestrians (with a painted line to suggest that we take half the path each, if we’re lucky) which substantially reduces the speed at which we can safely travel. Here the bike path runs along side the pedestrian path, but, crucially, at a different height to it. It makes a big difference, and I’m glad the new bike lane on Shinfield Road has been built this way too.

2. Low Motor Traffic Levels

Cars are definitely permitted on the roads around Forbury Gardens – there’s parking and you see the odd one driving around – but for whatever reason (presumably the combination of one way streets/bollards/bus only zones) it isn’t an area that gets used as a rat run and the traffic that comes through tends to move at a sensible speed and observe give way lines. I think I see more buses than cars here, and the low traffic levels mean that it’s one of the few places (outside of Kidical Mass) where cars are allowed that we’ve let our children ride their own bikes.

3. The Amazing Bollard Placement

3 bollards being not equidistant

Presumably contributing to those low traffic levels are the bollards under the Abbey Archway. Every time I come through these they make me happy. The central one isn’t quite central, which means that one of the gaps is bigger. My cargo bike is (slightly) wider than a standard bike, and I can slip through easily without worrying. It’s a great example of how accessibility improvements can help multiple groups of people – wheelchair users, families with pushchairs and unusual bicycles can all benefit. I’m really glad someone put a bit of thought in when installing the bollards here.

4. Accessible Cycle Parking

Speaking of accessibility, I love that there is bike parking right by Forbury Gardens, and that the pavement is profiled such that I can walk round to it without having to push my bike over a kerb. I can do that, if I need to, but with two kids on the back it can get pretty heavy! So I really notice here that the bike parking is easy to navigate.

5. Kidical Mass Memories

All of our early Kidical Mass rides finished at Forbury Gardens, and some of them still do. We’ve ridden to climate festival and children’s festival events there (two causes very well aligned with Kidical Mass goals). I’ve eaten some excellent cake in that garden, and seen kids visit with Santa (and have their bike given a tune up by his elf). When I’m in the gardens it brings back lovely memories of seeing the kids run and play together.

If you too would like to come and make memories with us, please join us for our next ride on 20th April. We’d love to see you.

Categories
Life on bikes

Proportionate policing please

Back in November, one of our number messaged in the Kidical Mass WhatsApp group (where all the cool kids hang out) to say that they had been surprised to find a strong police presence outside Caversham library that morning. Five officers had been present. It’s great to see officers out in the community, and he asked them if they were there for a particular reason. They said they had been sent there because of complaints about cyclists riding on the pavement and ignoring red lights.

Now, I will be clear that I do think everyone including cyclists should follow the rules of the road. And, as a pedestrian, I understand the frustrations around having cyclists whizz past you on pavements that aren’t shared paths (though, as a mother, I’m not going to judge another family who decide that their small children are safer riding on the pavement than on the road).

Police appeal for witnesses following serious road traffic collision in Caversham

However, do you know what else happened in Caversham in that same spot in December? A crash involving six cars and a van, in which five people were injured. The consequences when people in control of fast, hard, heavy chunks of metal are reckless on the roads are far, far worse than they are for cyclists. Despite the fact that cyclists and pedestrians are often forced to share the same spaces, between 2012 and 2021 98% of pedestrians who were killed or seriously injured in a collision were injured by a motor vehicle rather than a bicycle.

I do think it’s antisocial when riders of illegally overpowered e-bikes (often working for delivery companies) whizz through pedestrian spaces at inhuman speeds. I know that many of these riders are in very precarious situations, and that the delivery companies make it very difficult to make a decent hourly rate. To get paid, riders take more risks in order to take on more jobs.

It’s like that age old ethical conundrum: riding what’s effectively a small motorbike antisocially is wrong, but if you have a choice between that and watching your family starve, which is the greater evil? For me the blame here lies squarely with the delivery companies who are happy to incentivise these behaviours and then hide their head in the sand about the consequences whilst raking in the profits. And, mostly, I think those riders endanger themselves rather than others.

Do you know what else makes pavements and bike paths difficult to navigate? When cars are parked on/in them. This forces pedestrians and cyclists (often young ones) out into traffic they shouldn’t be having to navigate. It can block routes entirely for wheelchair users and make life very difficult for families with pushchairs. Those cars often aren’t just there momentarily when passing through, they can be an almost permanent hazard (e.g. on the shared use path alongside Henley Road).

I’ve tried reporting pavement parking in Reading. The council has a website where you can submit photos but when I’ve tried it for the Henley Road bike lane I’ve got a (very quick) form response letting me know that the council have no power to enforce anything there, and the police have no resources. However, it seems the police have managed to find resources to conduct an operation to seize a few souped-up e-bikes in the town centre.

I know there are some really good people in policing – I love seeing some of them out on their bikes and we were delighted with the pair who joined our ride from the cycle festival in September. They aren’t the ones making the decisions about where their time is spent.

In a world where policing resources are so limited, can we not focus traffic enforcement on vehicles that do the most harm? We have an election coming up for the local Police and Crime Commissioner, who has the power to set the priorities for road safety enforcement. If you’d like to see a change, make sure you let the candidates know that what’s important to you and use your vote on 2nd May.

Categories
People

Blake’s firsts

When you have a child, you have all these dreams and expectations for them, even if you don’t realise that. The moment they’ll take their first step, their first word, their first bath, their first breath.

In my case there was definitely this idea of that first bike ride, that first mountain we’d climb together. I’d grown up cycling, being dragged up mountains and orienteering, so it seemed perfectly reasonable my son would have those ‘delights’ too. (Admittedly at age 7 falling into a patch of briars while orienteering didn’t feel that delightful.)

So, having a baby at 28 weeks and 3 days wasn’t something I expected. Nor was Blake having a significant brain bleed and being told by the consultant he’d have disabilities.

Blakey had lots of firsts I never expected – the first time he breathed without a machine, the first time I could hold him, the first time he could drink milk rather than via feeding tube. But one thing I was adamant about was that no matter what the scale of his disabilities were, he would have his first rides, his first mountains.

After months in hospital, we moved up to Scotland and in with my parents. I can’t recommend living with retirees while on mat leave enough, especially when those grandparents cycle.

‘Umpah’ and I lashed a car seat into a double trailer, negotiated with Nana that we’d wait until it stopped snowing to use it, and conducted numerous field trials with a brave toy soldier to check safety.  

The month Blakey and I started cycling, we had a permanent marshal cycling behind the trailer to make sure we were safe (Umpah). And just like that, Blakey was cycling.

We joined a Mums on Bikes social ride, more for me to meet other parents than to get confidence cycling, and a whole new world opened up to us. I couldn’t weave through traffic like I used to. I often couldn’t fit down narrow bike lanes that would get me to assisted stop boxes. We got as much aggression from drivers, if not more, when we cycled. I was in contact with other women who cycled, I was part of a community of people who also used their bike to get around.

That first year we cycled hundreds of miles together, and I realised that the rage, the risk, the violence I’d normalised over the years wasn’t good enough for my child.  Blake had more firsts I’d never dreamed of — the angry men who drove after both of us beeping and swearing, the first close pass, and sadly the 2nd, 3rd etc, the first time he heard Mummy called a bitch and a cunt because she dared to take her bike on a road with him.

I met other women who thought the same and Kidical Mass Inverness became a thing. We raised the profile of cycling for all cyclists, spoke to councillors and inspired groups across the UK to set their own rides up. Blake went from a trailer to a seat on my bike, and Umpah was still there, fewer people swore at us. We were making a difference.

Then suddenly he was 15 months, or 1 depending on how you count it, and it was time to return to paid work. I’m a Product Manager when I’m not being a Mum or cyclist activist. We came back down south, his Dad became part of our lives and we instigated Kidical Mass Reading. We’d had all of those 1sts I’d been told would probably not happen (including trips up mountains on my back 🙂 )

And it wasn’t safe for us again, we got harassed on Oxford Road, close passes, verbal abuse and the council had no idea why it mattered that cycle routes were inclusive. I was scared again, I was scared that my desire for a future for my child with clean air, streets he could play on, a habitable future would cause us another stay in hospital.

I met the Smart’s and we set up Kidical Mass Reading, next came Samuel, Blake’s Dad got into cycling, Jeroen joined, Dr Bike became an important person in my life — and once again my cycling campaigning started making a difference. But more than that, it gave us a community.

He’s now 3, he did his first bike ride on his own at Reading University in Jan, and his 2nd in Reading town centre in Feb, and to say I am a proud Mama would be an understatement: I’ve made everyone at work, social media and friends watch that video of Blake balance biking his way around a 4km safe route. I’m so proud of my tiny balance biker who finished the ride beaming and so proud of himself.

It wasn’t just me cheering him on, it was the whole group, it was every marshal keeping him safe. It was the other preschoolers he very proudly announced he was cycling to. I’m not sure I imagined one of his firsts being a group ride, but I’m so pleased I could make that happen for him. I’ve promised him I’ll make the roads safe for him — a big promise, I know. But I really hope that in a few years’ time, other kids won’t have firsts of adults swearing at them just because they’re on a bike.

Why am I writing this? I guess because these firsts were firsts that I never imagined when I found out I was pregnant, and then never dreamed would be possible after his start. Because I’m a proud Mum, who is in awe of her balance biker, who is demanding he gets a pedal bike like the other kids. Because cycle campaigning gave me a community I never dreamed of, in 2 countries, which I’m so glad to have in my life. And because we need to make sure that we give our kids better.

Categories
Life on bikes

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Maths was my favourite subject as a kid (and I still love it now). One of the interesting problems I remember learning about is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The premise is this: you and a pal are suspected of wrongdoing. You are taken into separate rooms and questioned. If both of you say you didn’t do it, you both serve a short sentence. If both of you say you did do it, you both serve a medium length sentence. But if one of you admits to the crime and the other does not, the one who talked goes free and the one who didn’t fess up gets locked away for a really long time. What should you do?

The mathematically correct answer to the dilemma is this: if each prisoner acts solely in their own interest, they will always turn each other in, even though they would be better off if they both kept quiet.

Sometimes I think that the choices people make around transport modes are a kind of prisoner’s dilemma. Except the losing option if we all act solely in our own interests is “large parts of the planet become uninhabitable”.

“There’s so much traffic on the road that I wouldn’t feel safe riding a bike.”

If everyone who could ride a bike to get where they were going chose to do so, the roads would feel a lot safer for all of us.

“I drive a big car because I feel safer around the rest of the traffic.”

When I walk my children through car parks I have to remind them to stay extra close to me around SUVs, because the drivers are so high up they might not be able to see them.

“There’s no space for dedicated bike infrastructure on our roads because they are too narrow.”

I agree, our roads are narrow in places. If I were queen for a day I would bring in legislation around bringing down vehicle width. When I’m on my bike, I really feel the difference between being overtaken by someone in an SUV or someone in a smaller lighter car.

SUV Share of registrations: 2021: 50%, 2022: 57%, 2023: 60%

I gave you the mathematically correct answer to the prisoner’s dilemma above. However, I’ve always felt that the actually correct answer is to associate with the kind of people who won’t turn you in. I also reckon the morally correct answer (leaving aside the issue of the crime committed at the opening of the problem) is to be the kind of person who is willing to do what’s right for your friends.

We are in a climate crisis. I know you all know this. I do think we see more and more bikes on Reading’s roads as the years go by. I’m grateful to all those people who make the sometimes difficult choice (I know we don’t have the best infrastructure yet) to travel this way. The more people make that choice, the easier it will be for others to do the same.

So, Dear Reader, if you want a new year’s resolution but haven’t yet settled on one, how about this?
When you travel, look at the options reasonably available to you and consider as a factor the impact that your choices make on other road users.
When your car reaches the end of its life maybe a car with a smaller footprint would be sufficient to transport your family.
Perhaps public transport is viable for your commute.
Maybe some of your journeys could be moved to active travel.

And if, after all of that, you sometimes find yourself on a bike in Reading, do pop by to join one of our rides.

Categories
Ride

February 2024 Wokingham ride

We had a rather low turnout of ~20 for our ride in Wokingham today — maybe because of the yellow warning of rain, issued just before. 🌧️⚠️
In the end, we didn’t have any rain, and this just meant we had more cake at the end. We have photos to prove it! 🍰🍰

Categories
Report

New Routes and Old Problems

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.

Categories
Ride

February 2024 ride

Slightly wet ride today, with about 35 people, and a new route that brought us on Blake’s Wharf through Filbert Street, which many of us discovered today! Hot chocolate was de rigueur at the end.

Categories
Annual General Meeting

Annual General Meeting minutes

On Sunday 14th January Kidical Mass Reading held its first AGM. The purpose of this meeting was to officially adopt the constitution, define a list of members and elect the committee, all of which we did. We also heard a report from the Chair (Kat Heath) in which she thanked everyone for their involvement and the Treasurer (Samuel Langlois) updating us on how the £3.8k grant received from the university last year has/will be spent.

Per the constitution, membership is open to anyone who has attended 3 or more rides, and anyone who wasn’t at the meeting who would like to be on the list of members should let the membership secretary (currently Hilary) know. Being a member gives you a vote in selecting the committee — this is the only purpose of membership, otherwise we make no distinction between members and other volunteers/marshals.

Kidical Mass is largely organised by WhatsApp. The two members and friends groups are “KM Reading+Wokingham” which has a lot of organisational chatter/conversation, and “KM Reading Marshals” which is used primarily for letting marshals know details about the rides and is deliberately low chatter. Anyone who is only in the marshals group (or vice versa) and who would like to be added to the other one should let us know. We agreed that minutes from the AGM (which is what these are) would be circulated in both WhatsApp groups, and that any members who did not want to be in those groups should let us know how they would otherwise like to be contacted with the minutes (there were none this time).

MEMBERS
  • Hilary Smart
  • Simon Smart
  • Samuel Langlois
  • Adrian Betteridge
  • Natalie Wilson
  • Kat Heath
  • Rodrigo Perez Vega
  • Jeroen Wouters
  • Olivier Iffrig-Petit
  • Al Neil
  • Sam Hatfield
  • Sergio De Gregorio
COMMITTEE
Categories
Report

Uni-Cycling around

The first bullet point I listed when drafting this write up was a very happy one, “People showed up!” This was not necessarily a given on a freezing mid-January ride on new territory for us, so we were delighted to have around 50 riders present, including several new faces. It’s great when so many families show up to celebrate cycling together, helping children to build confidence and campaigning for better cycling infrastructure. 

The new territory was the University of Reading site. I’m afraid, Dear Reader, that the pun in the title of this article is slightly gratuitous as we did not in fact have any unicyclists join us (though, going for an increase rather than a decrease in wheel count, we did have several tricycles). You will see on the list of upcoming rides that we will be back on the Uni site on Sat 18th May, and many brownie points (if not actual brownies) will be available for anyone who shows up on an actual unicycle, thereby enabling me to use this pun more legitimately.

The 4km route was probably our calmest and easiest to marshal yet, and involved lots of segregated bike paths. Where we were on the roads, they were (at the weekend anyway) very quiet, and the cars that were moving around were relatively slow and calm. We passed several other groups who were clearly out for an afternoon’s ride together. It was great to see how infrastructure like that enables families to get out and ride together even without the friendly Kidical Mass marshals present to keep traffic at bay.

There was only one point on the route we had any issue with, and that was a spot where there were a couple of bollards quite close together on a bridge – most of us could get through but some wider trikes and bikes had to take a slightly longer route around. We’ve flagged this to the university in the hopes that they might be able to make this pinch point a bit more accessible.

The quality of the infrastructure would have been reason enough to want to run a Kidical Mass ride on the university site, but we are also have another link to the University of Reading – they kindly awarded us a community grant last year. This grant has enabled us to ensure we continue to have insurance and relevant safety equipment for the rides, funded the build a bike workshop and helped us to publicise the rides more widely. We are so grateful for their support.

On the subject of insurance, Dear Reader, if you have happened upon this blog and don’t live in Reading and are thinking, “I need to get one of those Kidical Mass things in my home town” (an obvious conclusion after reading about the all the fun we have here in Reading) our own Kat Heath has helped to put together a guide to setting up a ride, which includes instructions on how to affiliate to the UK network of rides and get covered by the insurance:

Setting up a Kidical Mass event

This was a particularly special ride for Kat as her little one balance biked the whole thing independently – his first one. The younger of our Kidical Mass Interns (Mr 4) also rode on his own pedal bike with me at the back of the ride and helped me to make sure that we didn’t lose anyone. You’d think that after what is for little legs a very long ride that at the finish point they’d want to stop and rest, but nope, most of the kids got back on their bikes to ride around the square. Karen Roberts from Avanti Cycling, who joined us from the ride, organised them into a race and then very liberally declared EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM the winner. “You are the winner of the under 5’s!” “You are the fastest balance biker! “You two are the joint co-winners of the under 10’s category!” Hi-fives all round.

And indeed, as we piled into the pub afterwards with many of our Kidical Mass friends to hold the AGM, elect the committee, and discuss the successes of last year and the plans for this year (more on this in the blog next week), it did feel like at Kidical Mass we can all be winners. I’m looking forward to seeing many of our Kidical Mass friends again (and perhaps you, Dear Reader?) at the next ride on Sunday 4th February, meeting at Thames Lido at 2pm.