I’m not expecting to do much work on this blog for the next couple of months, but will try to keep it simmering with the odd frippery …
As a one-time hardcore urban walker, I was rather tickled by this:
It by Harry Pearce and is from do the green thing.
From this it appears that people actually try to take their bikes into a shop. I find this quite strange – it would just get in the way wouldn’t it? You might get oily marks on things. Honestly, some people. Tut.
But it might be an example of behaving like traffic – forgetting that the bike is an actual large lump of encumbering metal and thinking oneself a natural unencumbered pedestrian and behaving accordingly.
Or it could be an attempt to reduce the faff factor – all you want to do is pop into the shop for a quick nosey – 2 mins, tops – but if you have to faff about finding a bikestand and then faff around with a huge heavy lock, then it’s hardly worth it.
Last week I drew your attention the the causes of Too Many Cars, (and, fortunately, no-one reads this blog, so I’m not wading through a bunch of indignant comments about Freedom and Choice). I showed this diagrammatic summary of the ‘vicious circle’:
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Unsurprisingly, there is a corresponding diagrammatic summary of the solutions, the ‘Virtuous circle’:
You will notice that it’s a very similar diagram but with the arrows going the other way. Which implies to me that there are many possible Things That Can Be Done – and the trick might be to operate on many fronts at once.
(Source: the Levett-Therivel sustainability consultants. This graphic is quite well-known, I think, and I found this copy here.
The thing is, transport is a systems problem – lots of interlocking factors, change any one of them and the others will change in turn. Difficult to get a proper handle on and so really, you do need a diagram:
(Source: the Levett-Therivel sustainability consultants. This graphic is quite well-known, I think, and I found this copy here.
Also by Roger Levett: an astute discussion of how government actually behaves.)
Psychobikeology 