News round up; Bromptons, drawing, Pashleys and bike polo...

Here's a round up of some of the recent cycling news from around London to start your month of March with:

Pink Bromptons ahoy!

Better Bankside, the business improvement district south of the river, have made a clutch of Bromptons available for businesses in the area to use for business trips.  Painted in Better Bankside's distinctive pink, the bikes were sourced from local bike shop On Your Bike on Tooley Street.  The bikes are available for loan to businesses in the area free of charge and aim to encourage use of sustainable travel.  We like this; any scheme that makes people consider the bike as an easy and sensible transport choice gets our vote!

Cycling in London illustration competition opens!

The Association of Illustrators have a competition for all you creative types out there.  They've joined forces with the London Transport Museum and are mounting a call for illustrations showing cycling as an emerging means of transport in London.  The winnning entries will get a cash prize and may be used in a Transport for London poster campaign, whilst the top 50 illustrations will form an exhibition at the museum to tie-in with the launch of the cycle hire scheme in the city this summer.  The competition closes on May 17th and you can enter here.

Four Guv'nors on their Pashley Guv'nors!

Four riders will be setting off on May 28th on a very special cycle ride from Islington Green to the French Alpine town of Morzine Avoriaz.  They hope to complete this 1100km journey in just 9 days... on 3-speed Pashley Guv'nors and dressed in period cycling clothing.  A Tweed Ride too far, perhaps?  Well, it's all for a good cause...  The gentlemen in question will be riding their beautiful bikes to raise money for the Lavendar Trust in memory of a friend who lost her fight with breast cancer at the age of just 29.  You can track their progress here, and more importantly pledge your support for the brave gents here as they work towards their fundraising target of £20,000, and we wish them all the luck in the world! (Go on, spare them the price of a cup of coffee at least!)  Better still, a private donor has promised to match all of the funds that they raise pound for pound - so the more you pledge, the double they get.  Not a bad way to kick start your month, we think...

London exceeds 2010 air quality quota before sping is even here...

Nitrogen Dioxide levels (most often found in the emissions of diesel vehicles like Black Cabs, buses and HGVs) continue to be the headache that wont go away for London's politicians - before the month of February was out nearly every single air quality monitoring station within the M25 ring had exceeded it's maximum quota of Nitrogen Dioxide levels for the WHOLE of 2010.  You can monitor the London Air Quality Network map here, and follow Clean Air for London's alerts on Twitter here.

Luckily, despite those funny face masks you sometimes see more hardcore cyclists wearing, air quality inside a car is actually worse than outside of it: you're better off by bike!

East Festival kicks off this week!

East London's very own week-long party of culture and arts, East Festival, kicks off on the 4th of March.

The programe encompasses a plethora of events, including 3 free music concerts in different venues across the East End which you can cycle between (I'll see you at the London Gypsy Orchestra performance at Bethnal Green Working Men's Club - they are superb!) on Sunday 7th March.  From the 1908 London Olympics, to the modern hard courts of Brick Lane; there will be a demonstration tournament of Bike Polo on Saturday 6th inside Spitalfields Market from 1PM - if you've never seen them thrashing it out on the court before, nows your chance: I thoroughly reccomend you go along to watch a game or two.  All the festival details are here.

i b i k e l o n d o n gets a facelift!

As you can see times they are a-changin here at the blog: a big apology to those of you who subscribe by RSS feed who have probably had mulitple alerts over the weekend as the majority of the changes took place.  It's quite a big step up from our old style so have a look around and let me know what you think - you can still comment on all posts simply by clicking on the red word 'Comments' at the bottom of every post.

101 reasons to love cycling in London #15 - not killing off those old brain cells...

This week's reason to love cycling in London comes from blogger The Bronze Bombshell in Georgia, USA.  She came across a couple of studies that show cycling is better than driving a car at keeping those valuable ever-diminishing grey cells of ours sharp - if like me you're convinced most mornings that you have early-onset Alzheimer’s, this is really something!

She found a study (via Anna at Cycling is Good For You) that shows that "Cardiovascular fitness is associated with cognition in young adulthood." ie. exercise keeps your brain sharp.  The other study she found showed that exposure to unleaded fuel can encourage aggression and anxiety, and furthermore that the changes happening in the brain as a consequence of this exposure can be described as 'damage'.  No thanks....

In a seperate study traffic-sourced air pollution has been observed to reduce the I.Q of children - we'll come back to this later...

Lots of people I know believe that cycling through a big city like London must be like a perpetual battle through the smog of a hundred and one engines, but I rarely find this is the case - most of my route is on quiet back roads and where I do cycle on a main road (High Holborn, which, incidentally has some of the worst air pollution in the UK) being out in the open and breathing fresh rather than recycled air is enough to keep me feeling free.  That master of cycle advocacy discourse Mikael Colville-Anderson of Copenhagenize first alerted me to a study which showed that air quality inside a car is much, much worse than outside of it.

Keeping mentally alert whilst pootling along on your push bike?  It's reason number 15 to love cycling in London!

Raising your kid's I.Q by getting them to ride a bike? Call it reason 15 and a half ;)

P.S  I'm well aware that there's a couple of inches of snow on most people's doorsteps at the moment and that cycling might be the last thing they'd consider doing right now - that's why I've included so many links in this post - reading about cycling is a close second best for brain-warming!

101 reasons to love cycling in London #6 - zero emissions!

Regardless of whether you believe in climate change or not (and frankly, I see no sane reason why you wouldn't) I think everyone agrees that the release of toxic particles such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere can't be a good thing.  One of the great joys of cycling is, of course, the fact that it is emissions free (which is why, of course, we don't pay 'road tax' - these days it's called vehicle emissions tax and if you ride a bike, or drive an electric car, you don't have to pay it either - honest!) Whilst of course there are a certain amount of carbon emissions released in the construction and delivery of your bicycle these are minimal in comparrison to the emissions for the production and delivery of a car. 
And the emissions for driving 5 miles to work and back for the working year in an average family size car? (I'm going here for the UK's favourite car, the Ford Focus, a 3 door 1.6ltr manual, in silver, naturally) 


You'd emit 157 grams of carbon per k/m.


10 miles = 16.09km
16.09kms x 227 working days in a year = 3652.43kms per annum
3652.43kms x 157grams of CO2 per km =
573431.51 grams of CO2 (or half a tonne)


That is to say, your little Ford Focus would emit half it's own weight in CO2 every year - just to drive 5 miles to work and back.


Your bike?  ZERO!  Is this a reason to love cycling in London?  With our city great capital having some of the very worst air pollution in Europe , I like to think so.