mjr wrote:pjclinch wrote:But for "serious cyclists" in Embra,
Which would bring us back to whether the Big Bike Revival imagery should be showing "serious cyclists" or everyday ones?
And of course part of the game/problem is that in much of the UK they largely amount to the same thing. Those folk at PoP were, perhaps by dint of getting to the event on "everyday" roads, wearing what they wear for "everyday" cycling every, errr, day. And the people around them will think of them as
Cyclists, doing weird dangerous stuff that they wouldn't contemplate themselves (for the sort of person who'd ride a Bakfiets to PoP, check out the excellent
Mummy's Gone a Cycle blog).
mjr wrote:pjclinch wrote:I don't think I'm stretching credibility to suggest that Cambridge is something of an outlier. I wish that were otherwise too.
Oh for sure it's near one end of the range - although I picked it mainly because it's the most recent big ride that I've got photos of - but it's the end of the range that CUK should be trying to make more of the country look like, so surely it should be used as source material at least sometimes?
I think there's a case for that in Big Bike Revival and the like, but you've also got the issue that if where you ride it's
Cyclists in All The Gear it is entirely possible that looking at somewhere folk aren't riding in fear will create a feeling along the lines of "well, that's all very well for
them, but it's different here". And we know that that line of thought exists because we hear it all the time in surveys about why folk don't ride bikes.
In other words, it will be quite impossibly to get it completely right, because it's really about change management which is (a) difficult and (b) there's always someone saying you're doing it wrong (wrong way, wrong speed, wrong goal, some combination thereof). And with that in mind I think it's important not to make CUK out to be the enemy: we've got quite enough of the Real Thing as it is.
Pete.
Often seen riding a bike around Dundee...