Author: suzannecycles

Being a Smug Know It All is a time consuming occupation, particularly when you have to do it across both your personal and professional lives. Remembering all ones own sage advice can also be a challenge, which I thought about at length at the start of the year as I pushed my bike up a snowy verge and recalled some of my own advice on the topic of safe cycling in rural and remote Scotland.

Last year my ire was irked by a perfectly pleasant new guide on my work website because it failed to mention that Scotland Is Much More Dangerous than cycling elsewhere and a phone signal and nearby provisions should not be presumed. I rattled off a disgruntled email, got a lovely accommodating one back and put the resultant task on my long list of things to do after I sorted this out. In my defence, several friends are mountain rescue volunteers and I’ve spent many an evening hearing about lost map-less morons in flip flops, partners with no real idea of where their beloved had gone on the hills and what it’s like to find a body partially eaten by wolves. Alright, I made the last one up but you get the idea. Despite this grounding in outdoor safety basics I managed to make a selection of textbook fails on a solo ride in January, which I now present as a slice of cold humble pie:

Don’t tell anyone where you are going

This is most effective if done in combination with not knowing where you are going, which I find a particular hazard due to having no sense of direction or ability to read a map. This set of personal challenges led me to using my Garmin’s ’round trip’ function, putting all my navigational faith into a blue line after telling my husband I was ‘going cycling’ and I would ‘be back later’. All of which seemed perfectly sensibly when I was standing in my kitchen, but less sensible a couple of hours later when I realised no-one knew where I was. Not even me.

Don’t take a map, or know how to use one

Like the point above, this can lead to both being lost and then unable to tell anyone where you are. I managed to get my Bronze Duke of Edinburgh Award when I was a teenager but failed to really understand navigation and despite renewed efforts last year I still don’t. I’ve found my Garmin to be helpful in telling me where I’ve been but helping me know where I’m going, not so much. Particularly when it tells me I’ve cycled 26000 miles, freezes and the screen goes grey. Thankfully, the little blue line was consistent that day and I was able to follow it home – apart from one final fail, which was too idiotic to relate – on good roads with few navigational choices to make.

Go alone, preferably somewhere remote

You can die horribly on a bike in company in any city around the world, but perhaps being alone somewhere isolated makes the fear a little more tangible. I passed three or four cars in around five hours and as each one passed I wondered if I was more scared of them stopping or not stopping. I’d cycled through the winter months in the dark and finally discovered that I enjoyed the solitude on rural lanes, but out on the hills on my own I felt the the other side of ‘epic’ and I found real fear – of not knowing quite where I was on icy roads I couldn’t cycle on, in a temperature that had me shivering in my layers of wool.

Misjudge elevation, mileage and the weather

Standing in my kitchen, Garmin in hand, my rough 30 miles = 3 hours cycling equation looked feasible and meant I would be back as it got dark. But that doesn’t work when hills are added into the mix, which I *know* but failed to recognise in January due to I don’t know what – perhaps an excess of hygge over Christmas in Denmark? In a similar brain failure, I’d not recognised that although it was ice-free on my sea level road it would be snow covered by the time I’d climbed up into the hills.

Set out after lunch, without having eaten lunch, in winter

In my enthusiasm to enjoy the best of the winter weather I set out around 1pm, after the rain passed. Only I didn’t eat lunch ‘because busy’, thinking that the two cereal bars and the ’emergency’ chocolate pilfered from my son’s Christmas stores would be adequate. This meant I was cycling on my breakfast bowl of porridge for around five hours with three hours of daylight left.

Ensure you’re in an area with no phone reception

In the modern world its now rare to be without internet access, much less a phone signal. Unless you live outside a city in Scotland, where you can enjoy impromptu social media breaks just by leaving the house. I rode for miles without phone reception, stopping to panic and check every few miles as it started to get dark. The little black lines finally reappeared as Torness came into view in the distance. I never thought I’d be pleased to see a nuclear power station, but I could barely contain my delight as I recognised the light in the darkness.

Bad mistakes, I’ve made a few..

If you really want to max out on poor practice you should forget your lights, take no water or extra clothing and leave essential medicines back at base camp. These, at least, I avoided and I had a flask of tea and a fully charged battery pack and associated cables.

Just don’t ask me about the whereabouts of my bike pump that day.

Car Forup* came into my life as part of the small number of ‘non art’ possessions my husband brought into our marriage, and was soon put into service as a workhorse as we started our house renovations and family life in Dunbar. With the renovation completed and my working life altered, Car Forup was often sat unused for weeks at time, waiting for the weekends that it could live its best life as a vehicle of adventure.

Car Forup was a reliable helper in those frantic weeks after our son was born, transporting breastmilk to the hospital and our belongings to our new house. He enabled me to reach some of my further flung colleagues better than our rural train network could manage and get the whole CTC/Cycling UK promotional bandwagon to more Pedal for Scotland’s than I want to remember.

As the legal owner, the final words are from my husband in a Facebook goodbye back in July last year after we received the news from our mechanic:

*Car Forup is a highly amusing take on my husband’s artistic heritage..

Header photo: Rachel Keatinge

Four years ago, on the eve of my son’s second birthday, I started this blog to document my crash landing into parenthood and thank those who helped me survive the impact.

Our tiny premature baby has grown and thrived and, although cycling isn’t everything*, he learned to pedal just after his third birthday, cycle toured the Netherlands before he was four and was mansplaining adequate breaking technique to me at five. He has distributed hundreds of Pedal on Parliament leaflets, handed #walkcyclevote postcards over the least receptive looking people in two elections campaigns and been my inspiration to keep campaigning when it felt like we were getting nowhere.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The world has been chaotic, confusing and often downright depressing over the last few years. But throughout that there has also been joy, learning, growth and excitement too. Here’s just a few of things I’ve discovered with my son over the last four years:

Cycling is child’s play

Want to get me raging? Just tell me about a great initiative that makes children more active but don’t follow it up with a comment about the most sensible and sustainable method of enabling everyone to meet physical activity guidelines. We design our towns and cities so many children need to be transported by car – to school, to friends and after-school activities – rather than enable independent mobility and then wonder why our children are inactive, obese and unhappy. In the Netherlands they aren’t content with enabling their offspring to gad around on bikes like it’s normal, they even built their communities to prioritise play. Thankfully there are now some people linking active travel and childhood freedom in the UK, supporting the re-prioritisation of our streets towards what we all really value – our families. Temporary street play initiatives are helping communities see that car dominance is having a detrimental effect – on children, health and air quality – and that another vision for our communities is possible, one where everyone, particularly children, can thrive.

Sharing sucks and size matters

‘Share nicely’ must be one of the most overused phrases in early parenthood, but it’s at least one that my son paid attention to and he’s now an excellent sharer as long as he doesn’t want whatever it is that much.

When it comes to road space I’m really not into the sharing thing so much myself anymore. I realised in early pregnancy that soft bodies and large metal objects don’t mix well and stopped cycling. You can ‘encourage’ mutual respect, ‘educate’ drivers until they can recite the Highway Code and dress every child in Scotland in flashing high-visibility vests but none of that will prevent a ‘momentary lapse of concentration‘ which seems to affect drivers on a daily basis. Let’s have segregated cycling infrastructure networks in our towns and cities –  as well as keeping us safely away from motorised traffic, it would enable modal shift, create places that people want to be, reduce air pollution and mean we can all eat more cake.

I’ve told my son that no-one likes a moaner, so I’m just offering some friendly feedback here to the designers of cycle paths based on our ‘user experience’ of this NCN route in East Lothian where we live. Sometimes ‘useable’ but imperfect is acceptable, but if a five year old is making judgy comments about your infrastructure then you have seriously under performed.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Excellent is possible and we’re seeing more local authorities take the plunge and start to design streets for people in towns and cities across Scotland. Often city schemes get the attention, but I’d like to give a high-five to whoever worked this magic in one of Scotland’s smallest local authority areas, Clackmannanshire, enabling us to cycle for miles on safe, separated paths, discovering a corner of our own country we’d never seen before.

Use the Mummy Measuring Tool

A number of highly respected cycle campaigners carry measuring apparatus with them to assess by how much our cycling infrastructure fails to meet the mark. This is great as it gives something objective to work with, but the only question that matters to me is simply ‘is this safe for my child?’. If our planners brought their own children to work we might start to get what the Dutch and Danish have already, because until we have infrastructure that most parents feel safe using with their children we won’t see the modal shift our Governments want.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Yes, we’ve learnt a lot over the last four years, not least that we need to stop campaigning for ‘cycling’ and engage people in a conversation about where they want to live, work, bring up families and grow old. When we start to talk about what we want we can perhaps stop building communities in a way that deliver what we don’t want – congestion, air pollution and inactivity.

With the new investment in active travel I have hope that my son’s cycle campaigning career will be short, and that his children will be able to walk and cycle safely whenever and wherever they choose – because we decided to really make Scotland the best place to grow up and put our families first.

“If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people” Enrique Peñalosa

*Cycling is everything, but my husband looks at me strangely when I say it out loud.

Please note, this is my impression of Lisbon from an afternoon of attempting to cycle (and from discussions with local campaigners) not a comprehensive study tour!

I enjoy cycling in cities and have taken to two wheels in Mumbai and Panama City in the past and New York, London and Rome more recently so I was keen to try the streets of Lisbon at the end of our summer holiday in Portugal.

I’d arranged to meet some local campaigners to talk infrastructure and advocacy, and to give my husband a break from my incessant cyclist spotting:

Me: Look, there’s someone on a bike! It’s another Brompton!

Husband: *eye rolling incomprehension as to why that might be interesting*

Like many cities in the throes of summer, the streets were packed with tourists wandering aimlessly, disregarding all attempts to keep them on the pavements, and disgruntled locals trying to get on with their lives. Some car users had obviously done the Roman driving test and were putting their new parking technique into action by leaving their motors double parked, blocking entire streets.

Lisbon streets felt quite hazardous, with the tram tracks snaking their way across the city, accompanied by hills steep enough to push my thighs and rental bike to their respective limits. These obstacles were compounded for me by the one way streets so I seemed unable to avoid them, leaving me wheeling my bike more than riding it.

My friends Tito and Patricia rescued me from endlessly cycling around the pedestrianised Praca do Comercio by taking me to try out one of the few pieces of cycling infrastructure in Lisbon, a lovely green path perhaps a couple of miles long. Splendid. Unfortunately it suffers from the issues that plague cycling infrastructure across the world – it’s not part of a network and it doesn’t go where people want to travel.

After our enjoyable, if short, ride to the end of the path, we hauled our bikes over the railway bridge to try the path by the water, which links up to this usable but shared use confusion zone. Pedestrians, bikes, cafes crowded with people drinking alcohol in the sunshine adjacent to the sea. What could go wrong?

After putting my hill climbing and tram track dodging capabilities to the test, Patricia and Tito handed me over to Ana, a cycle campaigner who runs a cycling social enterprise in the city. We found that advocacy in both our countries has some distinctive similarities – volunteer run, under resourced and over stretched – but the barriers to progress were different, possibly reflecting the cultural and political situations as well as the personalities involved.

I tagged along with Ana to a meeting arranged with Pedro, the R&D lead for a Portuguese cycling company that had been involved in developing the new ebike for the Lisbon bike share scheme. The bike was on display at the World Bike Tour, and I felt distinctly A-list as we cycled past security and into the exhibition area. The bike share promises to be cheap, with the electric assist helping on those thigh-testing hills. The prototype even had a phone holder to keep an eye on Twitter ensure you can keep your city map right in front of you as you ride.

We didn’t get to try out another segregated cycle way on the other side of the city as my rental bike was due back so I pedalled and pushed, thinking about a glass of Vinho Verde in the evening sunshine, my way back to the shop. Then carried my bike up two flights of stairs before this:

Lisbon has many attractions – fantastic architecture, excellent food, good weather and easy access to lovely beaches – but superb conditions for cycling is not one of them yet, and is unlikely to be for some time. However, it is evident there is a latent demand for cycling – the cycling businesses look like they are booming and there were more than a handful of fully kitted out roadies and mountain bikers, as well as tourists and locals weaving between the pedestrians on the pavements.

Looking at the Lisbon streets now it’s hard to imagine many parents choosing cycling as a convenient and safe transport option in the near future. But perhaps people used to say that about car choked Amsterdam forty years ago.

I’ve always loved sleep. Call me Cinderella but even as a student I loved to be tucked up in my bed well before midnight with a good eight hours of shut-eye ahead of me.

Then I had a baby that didn’t sleep. That baby turned into a toddler that didn’t sleep much, who then eventually turned into a four-year old that slept in our bed and Kicked. Me. All. Night. Sleep became something I would dream about, if only I could be asleep long enough to dream.

So the thought of ever doing the Edinburgh Night Ride seemed farcical; why would I voluntarily torture my sleep deprived self, and try to cycle the furthest distance I’ve done since childbirth into the bargain?

Two factors converged this year to make me book myself a place and get my tired legs in training – our son was evicted from our bed (and we all started sleeping for more than four consecutive hours) and the legendary ultra endurance cyclist Mike Hall was killed during the inaugural Indian Pacific Wheel Race.

I never met Mike, but like thousands of others I’d been touched by his passion for cycling and the way he inspired people to be the riders they dreamed they could be. From all accounts, he was a kind and generous man into the bargain, making the tragedy of his unnecessary and early death harder to bear. When the call came to #BeMoreMike – to be brave, to challenge yourself, to say yes – it was clear what I should do.

Despite my concerns I knew I was in safe hands because the Edinburgh Night Ride is organised by a cake loving, map reading, super planner with help from an elite squad of scone connoisseurs. In addition it’s semi-supported by Leith Cycles and the riders are divided into small groups led by a crack team of cycle ride leaders that ensure you aren’t left cycling by yourself in rural yokel land in the middle of the night. You might feel exhausted and desperate for sleep, but you won’t be alone.

The ride itself was on familiar territory, starting close to where I’d lived in Edinburgh to within a few miles of the town I now call home with my family, before back to the city for breakfast. Yet as I pedaled the familiarity grew less as we travelled along roads I’d never seen and in mid summer darkness that I’d not seen on purpose for some years.

The miles slid by easily, with some help coming from chat with friends and a restorative cake selection alongside the soup at Loft Cafe and Bakery in Haddington. My only discomfort was in my eyes, with contact lenses complaining bitterly that they really shouldn’t be out and about at this time in the morning and what the hell was I playing at?

The hours followed the miles and sunrise took me by surprise by happening as I drank the Loft dry of tea. It was light as we left at around 4am and the well-past-midnight-snack did its job by convincing my tired eyes and legs that it was a sensible time to up and start the day, without having gone to bed yet. Just after 6am I was taking celebratory photos of my bike at Portobello Prom and at 7am I was face down into my first of about 500 cups of returner tea, tweeting to the world that I had survived.

For many people this wasn’t an epic, it was an average length ride at a peculiar time of day. But for me it was another turning point in my life as a cyclist, now a slightly braver one that’s looking to embrace a few more challenges and say yes, this woman can.