Cycling Embassy of Great Britain

Last summer I had the pleasure of spending three days in Assen (and Groningen) on a David Hembrow study tour. This was my second study tour; I had previously been on the 'official' Cycling Embassy study tour back in 2011.

With mild temperatures returning to the UK after a brief week of winter, those yearning for a proper winter had to look across the Atlantic where Snowmageddon closed city streets for cars but opened them for people, including a hardy few on bikes.

It might seem strange for a bike blog roundup to start with a pedestrian story, but they suffer from the same sort of victim blaming that cyclists do - the drip feed of articles that add up to a toxic atmosphere over time - although that might be because the messages around 'Vision Zero' have concentrated too h

It comes up every year - the 'Dutch style' cycling infrastructure that turns out to be not quite all it's cracked up to be. This year's 'double dutch' story seems to have come early with Northumberland's 'Dutch style' centreline removal treatment - but is it fundamentally misunderstanding the context the Dutch would use such an approach?

Welcome back to the bike blog roundup after our (much needed...) Christmas break. We were going to kick off the year with a look back at some of the issues that shaped 2015 but it turned out that many of our favourite blogs had done just that already.

Our board member Sally Hinchcliffe spoke about national campaigning for cycle infrastructure at a recent ESRC event in Newcastle. Her presentation is called “How cycle bloggers shifted mountains”. You can watch Sally’s 15 minutes presentation on the event page (link above) or read the transcript:

Anyone who's been involved at all in cycle campaigning knows how long it can take for anything to get done - but cities wanting to spearhead change would do well to heed Janette Sadik-Kahn's advice for Toronto from New York to move fast and trial things and tweak later.

For this week's Blog Roundup we're sitting back and watching videos. There are lots of people out there producing video that accompanies or even holds it own alongside the blogs we regularly cover. So we thought it would be a good idea to pick out a selection of videos so that as the nights draw in we can all sit with a mug of tea in hand and watch people cycling both in comfort and in conflict the world over.

This is a 'one off special' for the Embassy's weeekly blog roundup. Today we're trying to gather all the useful things you need to know when someone tells you that cycleways are going to kill your businesses, your shops, or, well, you. 

This week has loads of PDF links because we're in the world of some pretty serious academic papers and reports - while pretty tough stuff to read, they provide a wealth of actionable, reliable data.