50 years on… (part 2) and the racing bikes have changed very little. On Tuesday I was talking to Mike Burrows, who doesn’t mince his words when the topic is UCI, the cycle racing governing body. Its extreme conservatism, in Mike’s view, stifles innovation and hurts bicycle sales. And so, given that his monocoque and monoblade designs have been banned, he now devotes his skills to building cargo bikes, such as the 8-freight. (Picture courtesy of Peter Eland) If his book, Bicycle Design inspires you, [...]

Kottke summarises an article in Salon about the way uncertainty makes the road safer, because all road users pay attention. In Suzhou, the traffic rules are simple. “There are no rules,” as one local told me. A city of 2.2 million people, Suzhou has 500,000 cars and 900,000 bicycles, not to mention hundreds of pedicabs, mopeds and assorted, quainter forms of transportation. Drivers of all modes pay little attention to the few traffic signals and weave wildly from one side of the street to another. [...]

Drawing by Jack Hudson for Anorak Magazine: Diaries are great, aren’t they? They don’t come any greater than Oscar Kirk’s Diary. Started in 1918 by a 14 year old messenger boy who lived and worked in the London Docks and now on display at the Museum of London Docklands, it caught our eye when it was serialized on the museum’s website and promoted on Twitter. When the Museum of London Docklands & Oscar’s family agreed to let us publish & illustrate some of his entries, [...]