Bike beats car across London- Huzzah!

Transport for London? by Owen B.

TopGear (a testosterone heavy but amusing car program here in the UK) staged a race across London feature four of their presenters using different modes of transport: car, public transport, bike, and speed boat up the Thames. Much to their dismay and my eternal delight, the guy on the bike took the day, and the car in fact came in last. The boat was second, but given that it was a super expensive speed boat and its success depended on both ends of the route being on the river, there are obvious scaling problems. It was a long route, so you’d need to be both fit and aggressive to match the cyclist’s performance, but the public transport option came quite close and is obviously accessible to most everyone.

Considering that London is totally not designed to support cycling, however, you have to wonder how much better it would be if there was genuine support for the use of bicycles.

Thanks to the Colchester Cycling mailing list for the tip that the race was gonna be aired.

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2 thoughts on “Bike beats car across London- Huzzah!”

  1. Oh hell yes!

    I have to say that now having been in London, I am made very sad by the public transport here in The Cities. Its just abysmal.

    And as an avid cyclist, I am glad to know one could still navigate though such an urban area with speed and success. Again, you can’t really do that in The Cities either. You are taking your life in your hands if you have to cross any of the beltway roads even by over/underpass.

  2. Unfortunately, the public transport in much of America is abysmal. There are exceptions, but not enough of them.

    Watching this guy cycle across London was pretty amazing. The traffic was quite heavy and congested (which is a significant part of how he beat the car), but he never had to cross a highway or anything large like that.

    The bike group here in Colchester fusses a lot about two nasty roundabouts that apparently make it very difficult to cycle up to the town centre from the south side of town. I had thought seriously about getting bikes when we came over here, but the traffic is just uber creepy and I’m a coward, so we didn’t. It’s also rough because the days are short and damp here, which doesn’t seem a good combo for cycling. We got out of a movie today at 4:20, and it was already close to dark. Sub-Evil and I can still take the back footpath in the morning, but I suspect it’ll be too dark for that by early December.

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