BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
This piece first appeared in the April edition of BikeBiz magazine – not subscribed? Get a free subscription to BikeBiz.
In my new BikeBiz column, I’m interested in reflecting all things cycling industry: where it is, where it’s going and maybe even where it needs to be. I’ll no doubt talk about ebikes, and some of the good, the bad and the meh in cycling, while cracking some bad jokes along the way. You can get in touch with thoughts and ideas via my social media channels.
It was a dark and stormy night. Rain was lashing down, as blood poured from my lacerated finger. The pedestrians of Piccadilly Circus walked by, every one oblivious to my increasingly desperate plight. I can’t remember the details of how I’d drawn blood trying to fix a puncture, but drawn blood I had. It’s possible I’d used a penknife to remove the offending shard of glass from the tyre and ended up removing a slice of finger. Once the inner tube was repaired and the Marathon Plus tyres wrangled back into place I took my oil-blackened, bloody hands into the loos of the nearby McDonald’s to clean myself up for the ride home, trying not to scare the customers too much.
The event, while hazy now in my memory, must have taken place in my earlier days as a London cycling commuter. I’ve learned a lot over those years, including choosing tyres that aren’t so thick they hurt my hands to change, while improving my puncture repairing skills. A ten-year-old photo that resurfaced in my social media feed recently shows I used to use knitted gloves to cycle. I’m far too much of a convert to neoprene and other technical fabrics to go there again. Looking back at my cycling journey, it’s fun to remember what it’s like being a novice to cycling, wearing all sorts of weird things (plastic bags inside trainers to protect from rain and cold in winter), and learning what works for me, pretty much regardless of any trends.
People I speak to, who want to start riding a bike, are embarking on their own journey – and they’re doing it, dozens of them, every day. It’s a wonderful thing – and it’s what will keep the bike industry alive. Now, when I pass other cyclists on the bike lanes I look at them and think, I’ve been riding in London since you were a kid. I’m the elder now, weirdly.
Younger riders in London – cycling for leisure or commuting – do things differently to how I did them, or possibly you did. Those in their 20s and early 30s might view a full Lycra outfit for a leisure ride, for example, as a bit gross. It’s cotton t-shirts on top, padded shorts down below – a nod to the wider 1990s revival. People seem to have discovered, en masse, the joys of a front rack for carrying stuff, a joy Dutch riders have long known. In London at least, there’s just more people cycling than there were 20 years ago: every day more than 1.3 million people hop on cycles of all shapes and sizes in the capital. Some of them are going to work, some are parents with cargo bikes or child seats dropping their kids off or running errands. They are younger and thankfully more diverse than they used to be: this morning two Muslim kids cycled past my window on their way to school, apparently unaccompanied – a freedom that wouldn’t have been possible without the recent Low Traffic Neighbourhood.
Many young people don’t bother owning their own bikes, and for younger, more diverse riders, it’s Lime or Forest e-bikes all the way. Not having to own, store and maintain a cycle, and the availability of e-assist bikes scattered across cities like London, has opened cycling up to far more people.
That’s not to say some of the hire bike cohort won’t buy a bike one day. The difference between them sticking with cycling long enough to do so, or not, is whether they feel safe cycling. I am unusual in that almost nothing would stop me riding my bike: I love it enough, and am stubborn and gung-ho enough to persist almost no matter what. I am in a tiny minority, however, especially among women. For most normal people a scary incident on the road or two, something like a puncture they can’t fix, or indeed the theft of their bike, will send them back to the bus or car – a phenomenon known as churn. Maintaining cycling growth means removing as many of those potential ‘churning points’ (sorry not sorry) as possible.
The bike industry has suffered an unparalleled boom-and-bust period since the pandemic, but there are hopes the green shoots are starting to show. Policies across Europe to boost active transport, i.e. walking and cycling, have been described as essential to those shoots’ survival. In the UK, as around the world, we know most people – around two-thirds – want to be able to cycle more, and most support investment in safe routes to help them do so. The thing holding them back is an understandable fear of sharing with traffic. With the culture wars largely over at national government level, the rhetoric at both national and local level apparently favours walking and cycling (more weakly since the departure of Louise Haigh as Transport Secretary). The implementation of cycle-friendly policies is too often lacking: councils say cycling and walking come first, but almost none are making that a reality. As friend and colleague, Sam Jones, writing for one of Cycling Weekly’s excellent ‘new-to-riding week’ advice features put it recently, safe routes don’t happen because of the good intentions of local decision-makers, they happen because people and campaigning organisations push for them, for years. That also includes communities and businesses both local and national level.
The status quo has a habit of enduring, and it takes a determined and concerted push to change it. That might just mean having the right conversations with those in a position to change something and joining industry advocacy bodies. Sometimes it means not taking no for an answer.
We have to try and push at this open door, to make policy and rhetoric mean something on the ground; if you like a clumsy metaphor, it means rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty in the real world. We’ll struggle to get in out of the rain otherwise.
