Background Beelines is arguably the most important local transport initiative I will experience in my lifetime. A plan to create a network of a thousand miles of safe routes across the Greater Manchester city-region to enable increased levels of walking and cycling (“active travel”), revolutionise the way we get about the place and mitigate some of the detrimental impacts of car-centric transport planning (congestion, pollution, potholes, poor public health, etc.). In cycling-advocacy circles, talk has been of little else since the Beelines launch in June 2018. Among people who cycle but don’t actively campaign, most have at least an awareness that Beelines is a thing, though their detailed appreciation of…

Folks, tonight I feel closer to quitting the whole cycling lark than I’ve ever been. This week, still only four days old, I’ve had so many depressing, worrying, dangerous incidents that it’s sapped what little joy I’ve managed to muster since a sustained slump over the summer and I’m genuinely wondering whether it’s worth all the aggro. So no links or pictures this time, just some raw insights. On Tuesday someone tried to run me off the road in a massive 4×4, then stopped to have an argument when I wouldn’t yield (that in a moment of rare composure I refused to get drawn into). On the way home, a…

Cycle campaigners are fond of the maxim: “build it and they will come“, i.e. if you create a safe environment for people to cycle in, then people will, of their own volition, change habits and start cycling. But is it really that simple? And, a related, intriguing question: would building a safe environment in and of itself rectify the current gender imbalance in cycling? In other words, we talk a lot about how to get more women cycling in the face of male-domination across all types of cycling in the UK. However, does that question miss the broader point that most people, whether women or men, don’t cycle, so is…