This week Londoners can get their hands on one of 10,000 copies of issue 6 of Cycle Lifestyle, the only free cycling magazine in the UK that's for potential as well as regular cyclists.
All the familiar favourites are back. New Bike on the Block, Gareth Jenkins, rides from London to Wales with his cycling rookie wife, armed only with a basic map and a plan to ask locals for directions. The Best Cycling Streets’ Liz Hunter heads to glorious Waterloo Bridge to capture its splendour in her beautifully descriptive writing. The Peddler, Adam Copeland, has a taste of cycling (and numerous wines) in France; not a black cab in sight apparently (when you’re horizontal in a field). And Milly Skervin shows that you can learn to cycle and Give it a Go at any time in your life.
There’s also a delightful poem from celebrated poet Kate Potts, as well all the usual tips and advice on getting started, planning a route and staying safe – with a special Winter Cycling feature by Ry Morgan from PleaseCycle.
Finally, on pages 8-9 we show what the streets might look like if Simon Parker’s London Cycle Map proposal is adopted in the capital. We suggest what kinds of signs and road markings might be needed for directing cyclists around on his Tube-style network of cycle routes. This could make cycling from anywhere to anywhere in London as simple as following a few signs and a trail of breadcrumbs – dots on the road – rather than remembering hundreds of turn-rights and turn-lefts.
People love to hype things these days (One Direction: the New Beatles?), but Simon Parker’s London Cycle Map is genuinely a ground-breaking proposal. So please help our campaign, and help London become a world-leading cycling city, by signing the petition at www.petition.co.uk/london-cycle-map-campaign.
Special thanks to Sam Motherwell, whose brilliant linocut was used for this issue’s striking cover art, and Hannah Lewis, who produced the wonderfully wintry artwork on pages 4 and 14. It’s only through generous creative contributions like these that Cycle Lifestyle magazine is possible.
Comments
Im a cyclist but please lets
Im a cyclist but please lets not have anything like the eyesore you mock up of cycle map signs. London's streets need less not more street furniture.
Do you consider zebra
Do you consider zebra crossings to be eyesores? Traffic lights?
And do you consider cyclists killed or seriously injured on main roads to be eyesores? Are all the death/serious injury markers shown on the link below eyesores?
http://citybeast.com/londoncyclists.html
Notice how the incidents tend to cluster around main roads. Would the signs be an eyesore if they helped new cyclists off main roads and onto a properly navigable, quieter, safer London Cycle Network?
Anyway, why exactly do London's streets need less street furniture? I've heard this cliche many times - but never an explanation. Did the Tube need less 'furniture' (or more) when it was signed with Harry Becks colour coded routes? Should we all be moaning about the signage as we follow his elegant diagram through the underground?
The streetscape image we have designed is deliberately stylised and exaggerated to make it clear what is being proposed. The key issue is not the aesthetics of the image but the marvellousness of the compass colour system invented by Simon Parker.
Please take the time to have a good read of the supporting information relating to the image - use the 'London Cycle Map' dropdown menu - and then you may be able to appreciate why some dots of paint and signs (concentrated at intersections, where most information is needed) would revolutionise transport in London.
During a recent trip to the
During a recent trip to the Netherlands, I noticed their new(ish) nationwide mapping system.
They put numbered signposts at junctions in rural and semi-rural areas, accompanied by maps of the area and arrows pointing to other signs in the vicinity.
The overall effect is that you can quite easily navigate the countryside by 'bouncing' from one numbered sign to the next.
It's very easy to use, and doesn't assume that you want to go in any particular direction.
Needless to say, the Dutch back up their simple but effective route-finding system (stolen from the Belgians, I'm told) with a nationwide network of high-quality cycle tracks.
The is something that's clearly lacking in Greater London whatever system of navigation is preferred.
Thanks for your comment about
Thanks for your comment about the Dutch node system, James. I'm a big fan of it, and although I don't think it would work as well in London as Parker's proposal (since there would be many more nodes to remember for each journey than coloured routes), such a system would undeniably be an improvement on what we have. Perhaps the two systems could even be combined. A compass colour London Cycle Map spanning the whole of the capital, with a node system catering for local routes. I'm going to blog about this possibility soon.