London Calling

So, it probably hasn't escaped your attention that today marked something of a quantum leap in London's evolution towards becoming a more two-wheeled city.  Finally, after years of political wrangling, first under Red Ken and latterly Blue Boris, the UK capital's municipal bike hire scheme finally went live.

Barclays Cycle Hire, as it is rather clunkily branded, aims to do for London what the iconic Velib scheme has done for Paris - basically, providing an automated fleet of hire bikes that enable people to get around the centre of town on two wheels, without resorting to polluting taxi journeys or increasingly-overstretched rail services. Eventually, the bikes will be available for hire by the hour, simply in exchange for your credit/debit card details at the docking station - in the meantime, customers must register online via the Transport for London website (tfl.org), to receive an Oyster-style 'smart key' that enables bikes to be released from their docks and deposited at the other end of the journey.  I won't go into the vagaries of the tariff system here as it's quite dull, but suffice to say that once registered, journeys of less than 30 minutes are free of charge, so that's quite nice.  Nor will I list the multitude of dock locations but on today's evidence they are everywhere.  Well, everywhere within Zone 1 at least, but we all know that the known world ends just outside there anyway. 

Being a bike geek, a professional greenie and a London resident, of course, I've been following the progress of this scheme for years.  It was therefore with no little excitement that I witnessed the docking stations being installed across town over the past few weeks, let alone the serried ranks of shiny new bikes greeting me on this morning's commute.

This excitement manifested itself in two test rides on day one alone - a quick jaunt around the block near my Fitzrovia office before work, followed by a full-on commute from the West End back to Vauxhall tonight, via Hyde Park - I think I'm as well-placed as anyone to pass first judgement on the machines themselves and the prospects for the wider scheme.

Firstly, the bikes themselves:  not entirely dissimilar to the aforementioned Velibs, the main first impression is that they are reassuring solid but seriously heavy.  I'm sure part of this is a deliberate anti-theft measure - believe me, would-be thieves will not get far - but after being spoilt rotten by my race bike, they feel like cast iron by comparison.  On the plus side, they have three-speed Shimano twist-grip gears, dynamo-powered lighting for the darker months, kick-stands, quick-release saddle adjustment and a cute little luggage rack on the front, perfect for that baguette.  Or indeed one's briefcase.  Oh, and all the oily bits are very well concealed - I know because I selflessly/stupidly wore chinos for these test rides, without the merest hint of a stain.  No need for cycle clips at all. 

On the move, the 'Boris Bikes', as they will inevitably be known henceforth (bad luck, Ken), betray their obesity problem with pretty cumbersome handling.  Again, perhaps this is a safety measure - there'll be very little danger of losing control in a city centre as flat as London's as speed is not really an option.  The riding position is classic sit-up-and-beg but when one has to be alert to so many urban hazards, this too is no bad thing.  What I did find more troubling is the gearing.  Again, I am spoilt by top-end kit on my regular bike, and it could just take a while for the Shimano hub gears to bed-in on the hire bikes, but I found the gearing a bit strange for London roads.  First gear is almost too low, fine for pulling away from the lights but little else.  Second and third, on the other hand, seem a bit too high for bikes of this character - indeed, I reckon Cav would struggle to use third gear on the flat. Well, not quite, but you get my point.  I might not be Cancellara but I've been cycling semi-seriously for a while and if I found the gearing a bit of a struggle, what will the average punter think? Combined with the fat (flat?) tyres, the whole effect was pretty exhausting it must be said.  Certainly makes you appreciate just how fast and energy-efficient our space age carbon thoroughbreds are.  All those irritating commuters on clunky old Trek hybrids, the same ones I normally take such secret delight in blowing past, were suddenly cruising past me imperiously.  Galling.

What else?  Ah yes, the thorny issue of helmets.  Believe me when I say that you won't meet a more passionate advocate of lids.  The consequences of a bad crash without one are unthinkable, as in you will literally not be thinking any more.  So the prospect of inexperienced cyclists riding busy London streets without lids does worry me, but on the flip side you would have to be seriously unlucky/unobservant or riding really stupidly to get in serious trouble on these bikes.  They're just too slow to be properly dangerous and it's not like your feet are clipped into the pedals or anything.  Of course, this doesn't remove the risk of taxi drivers pulling out without checking mirrors or idiots opening their car doors without warning, but these are risks we all face. So the jury's out on the helmet thing but such is life.  In the meantime, I have to (really hypocritically) admit that the feeling of riding tonight without a lid, probably for the first time in about 25 years, was brilliant.  And obviously the fundamentally unregulated nature of cycling is one of its big appeals to many riders.  Tricky one. 

As for the scheme itself, it is bound to have its detractors, as progressive things always do.  Yes, there will inevitably be technical glitches to start with. Yes, a few bikes probably will be stolen by the usual pond life.  The rest will probably be vandalised by their cretinous mates - I can't see the bungee luggage straps lasting more than a week.  So too, the corporate branding still grates - but experience teaches that Barclays' brand will become invisible before too long, and the powers that be had to finance the bloody things somehow.  Frankly, if you're the sort of person who'd happily go through the massive ball-ache of changing bank accounts just because you've seen the a particular bank's brand on a hire bike or cycle super-highway, good luck to you.  The less impressionable amongst us realise that advertising's days are increasingly numbered, so the branding thing doesn't bother me too much really. 

At the end of the day, I was able to enjoy a really relaxing journey home from work, with minimal technical issues, picking up a bike yards from my office and depositing it a short walk from my front door.  I followed well-marked cycle routes virtually door-to-door, particularly in Hyde Park with its billiard-smooth cycle lanes.  The banter with Brompton riders at traffic lights and curious questions from commuters really made Londoners come out of their famously introspective shells.

For this idealist at least, there was a real feeling of civic progress in the air today - a feeling that all is not lost, that London is maybe - just maybe - starting to wean itself off its fossil-fuelled traffic jam habit at last. The Boris Bikes won't be perfect immediately, and London certainly isn't going to turn into Amsterdam or Copenhagen or Portland overnight, but make no mistake - this is an important step in getting more people onto two wheels and making this a better place to live in general.  Hopefully, it will make a few more cities sit up and think, too.  As one out-of-town cycling friend put it earlier: 'Chapeau, London!'

The best-ever book about bikes?

So it will come as no surprise to those who know me that I'm rather keen on bicycles, to put it mildly. Done a few (sprint) triathlons, various sportives; currently training for this year's Etape Caledonia; feel probably a little bit too comfortable in skintight lycra; constantly working out how many bikes one small flat can accommodate - you know the sort of thing.

I can still recall the precise smell of the wrapping paper concealing that first Raleigh Budgie, a particularly lurid shade of 1980s metallic copper (the bike, not the wrapping, alas). Graduating via a blue and yellow Raleigh Burner BMX (yellow/blue) to an even more lurid Emmelle MTB (fluorescent orange and green). Inheriting my first 'proper' drop-handlebar bike from an uncle, a heavy old lump of pig iron by modern standards, way too big in the frame for a teenager, but it made me feel like Greg LeMond. I can't even remember the brand but it was red and had a luggage rack, if that helps?

There's something about cycling that feels forever young, evokes powerful childhood memories of that sense of adventure from setting out alone, back when kids could still do that sort of thing safely. That heady whiff of independence, more so even than the day I passed my driving test. Much as I love cars (disclaimer: guilty secret, yes I work in sustainability), there's something Zen-like about the silence, the efficiency of bicycles, a feeling that all is right with the world, for a few precious minutes at least. However steep the hill, however long the route, every ride contains at least one moment of pure, blissful calm, a state of grace. Something I don't feel that often in this rush of days, making it all the more special.

Like life itself, cycling can be a cruel mistress - quite probably, behind all the marketing slogans and failed drug tests, road racing remains the toughest sport on the planet. Often a headwind, occasionally a blessed tailwind; grinding up hills that never seem to end, always with the faint glimmer of hope for a glorious, freewheeling descent the other side. A kind of raw, elemental beauty in masochism - broad, sunlit uplands the occasional reward for brutal hard graft and gallons of sweat. There are lessons in life to be had in the saddle, which may be scant consolation when you're toiling into work in the rain, playing Russian roulette with bendy-buses on your knackered old Brompton, but there we are.

I'll stop before I disappear up my cod-philosophical tailpipe completely, but it's this Zen-like feeling that for me makes Tim Krabbe's 1978 novel, The Rider, such a beautiful read. Even for those with not the slightest whiff of interest in bikes, there's a magical quality to Krabbe's book, a metronomic fascination akin to that famous Guinness surfing advert. Tick follows tock, follows tick, follows tock. Crank follows crank, mile follows mile, in almost hypnotic fashion. The premise is actually simple - Krabbe puts the reader inside the mind of a serious amateur rouleur competing in a mythically-tough, one-day race somewhere in SW France - but the overall effect is mesmerising.

Krabbe's novel is lionised by the cognoscenti, thanks in no small part to the retro-marketing muscle of brands like Rapha and Condor, but it remains criminally unrecognised outside the narrow confines of the cycling world. I can't recommend the book highly-enough - it's rare that someone with my attention span... sorry, got sidetracked there... it's rare that someone with my attention span reads a book in one sitting.

Here's a particularly celebrated example of Krabbe's purple prose - a quote that will be familiar to Rapha customers, but which captures the magic of the book, and indeed the sport itself: -

"The greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is nature's payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses; people have become wooly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. 'Good for you'. Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few friends these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms, she rewards passionately."

Krabbe is not a famous writer, not outside his native Holland at least (although he did also write The Vanishing and his brother is the actor Jeroen Krabbe, trivia fans), but like many an aspiring racer, for one fleeting moment at least, he achieved Zen-like perfection.