We couldn’t live without our bikes – either of us. We use each car once a fortnight, but both bikes get taken out daily. Even at weekends, when we use them to go to the market.

Trouble is, when it gets icy or wet, I’m always a bit wary of using my light, slick-tyred ride, and at the same time reluctant to use my older bike – despite its better tyres – on account of the weight.

So I’ve bought an old bone-shaker to do up. We saw it by chance chained up outside a house on the main road with a £25 sign tucked in its brake cables, and so when we’d got back from where we were going I walked around and knocked on the door.

The man who was selling it wasn’t at all what I expected. Much older – didn’t look like he’d been on a bike in his life. He explained that it had spent the last few years living in his garage, unused, which was why he was getting rid of it.

Now it’s not perfect: the paint could do with some touching up, the brakes squeal and the gears are reluctant to change, but I reckon it should be fine for doing up, which would be a good project to take on as I could do with learning more about bike maintenance.

So next weekend I’ll head into the greenhouse and spec it up, pricing up what I need to replace. It may be a tricky job, going on my level of expertise, but it’s a good frame for £25, so even if that’s the only bit that remains in the finished bike it was something of a bargain.

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My front bike brake has been broken for a while. It still pulled me to a stop, but the cable had snapped right after the pads, and could have easily slipped out at any time, sending me hurtling into oncoming traffic. Not good when it’s my primary means of transport.

Fortunately most bike repairs are fairly easy to do yourself, and this one needed nothing more complex than an alan key and a pair of wire cutters.

The frayed brake cable. It was damaged by the D-lock that I keep slung over the handlebars when riding it or parking in the shed so that I always have it with me for locking up in town.

The first thing to do is release the old cable. This is a two-step process. Start by loosening the grip at the wheel end of the cable using an alan key. It helps to have a combination tool like the one I’m using below as various bikes will use different sizes. There’s no need to remove the gripper altogether – just loosen it enough for you to slide out the cable. My cable was so frayed that I just loosened it up, snapped off the loose end of the cable and slid the rest out.

Use an alan key to loosen the grip that holds the cable in place.

Once the cable has been freed, you need to pull it out through the sleeve that keeps it dry and stops it rusting. To do this, apply the brake. Now that there is no tension in the cable, the lever should stay in the applied position, allowing you to swing out the bracket that holds the top end of the cable within the brake lever (below).

Without any tension in the cable, you can apply the brake remove and remove it by swinging out the bracket that holds it in place.

The top end of the cable has a cylinder on it, which stops it slipping out of the bracket. Align this so that you can slide it out through the hole in the bottom of the bracket, guiding the cable through the slot in the end.

Be careful here, and preferably wear gloves, as the cable will have been greased to help it run smoothly through the sleeve. You can grease your new cable, but I have found that enough remains on the inside of the sleeve to slide in the new one without doing so.

Once the new cable has been slid into place, it must be secured using the original gripper.

Push the new cable through the sleeve until it emerges at the wheel end, and then lace it back through the gripper. You can do the next step on your own if you have flexible fingers, but if not you might want to ask for help.

Make sure that the bike lever is in the fully off position (pushed away from the handlebars) and then simultaneously pull on the brake cable (wheel end) and position the arms of the brake so that the pads are just off the wheel. Hold this position as you screw the gripper back into place using the alan key.

You will know if you have done it right if you can pick up the bike and spin the wheel around without it touching the brake at all. Make sure that you can stop the spinning wheel by pulling on the lever.

Trim the end of your new brake cable so that it doesn’t interfere with your wheels.

Check to see if there is a way to safely trace your brake cable down the side of the braking mechanism to avoid it snagging on the wheels, and then trim off the end with a little to spare so that it doesn’t slip out of the gripper.

Brake cables are usually sold in just one size and no distinction is made between front and back cables, so you will have a lot to cut off if you have just replaced your front cable.

Carefully test your repairs before taking your bike back out on the road to ensure it is safe to ride.

Frugal tip: If you’re replacing your rear cable and the damaged part was near the braking mechanism, hang on to the cable you’ve removed. You can easily cut it down to size to use as a replacement for the front cable when that, too, starts to fray.

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I love my bike. One of the best parts of the day is the ride from home to the station or, even better, from home to the market on a Saturday morning.

And I’m not the only one. My car is just one of many that’s sitting idle these days, as the credit crunch has seen 3.3 million extra bikes out on the streets. Halfords – a name most often associated with oil filters, tyres and new car stereos – is cashing in, and breaking out its existing bike business into 50 dedicated stores.

It’s a gutsy move, but a stroke of brilliance in a time of uncertain petrol prices and general frugal belt-tightening. They’ll run under one of two brands: Cycle Republic and Bikehut, which sound so much better than Halfords.

The Times covers the move in full, and quotes the national cyclicts’ association’s belief that us cyclists are only going to get more numerous: ‘It predicts the economy will increase the number of miles cycled in Britain by 40 per cent, based on data after the oil price rises and recessions of the 1970s.’

Me? Well, much as I welcome the news, I don’t think I’ll be heading to a Bikehut any time soon. Chelmsford has three excellent independent bike stores that I plan on supporting for a good long time yet.

As an aside, why all the secrecy? If you go to the Bikehut homepage there’s no mention of Halfords – not even in the underlying code. Yet if you dig it out of the online archive, you can see that just last year it was covered in Halfords branding. And if you apply for a job there, the dedicated recruitment site doesn’t include any Halfords branding, either, and it’s using a specialist recruitment agency, PPS with no mention of the Halfords name.

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Following on from yesterday’s post on fuel price hikes, a story about the local taxi drivers campaigning to increase their rates caught my eye this morning.

Taxi fares in Britain are regulated by the councils in whose areas the drivers work. So, if they want to increase their rates they have to petition the council, which will then rule in favour of their proposal, or against.

(Mini cabs, which you book on the phone, can charge whatever they like.)

Well, right now the drivers working in a lot of the towns around the Blagger plot are campaigning to increase those prices, from a base of £2.70 to £2.80. Just 10p, or 3.7%. It doesn’t sound like much, does it. Except that while that 10p is the headline figure onto which everyone will latch, the more important figure is what that £2.80 represents.

Currently your £2.70 will take you 725 yards. Under the drivers’ proposals, £2.80 will take you just 586 which, as a letter writer to the local rag pointed out, means the cost of going the same distance has actually increased not by 3.7%, but by 28.28%.

That same letter writer has worked out the actual economics of the situation and it’s quite baffling. I’ll present his argument here, in its entirety, and point out that while it may leave your head spinning the upshot of his argument, whether he meant it or not, is that wherever you’re heading, you’re better off on your bike.

The actual basis for the increase is the cost of fuel, 725 yards is less than half a mile and would be travelled by most cars 50 or 60 times on a gallon of petrol or diesel at a cost of about 12 pence each trip (50 x 12 = 600) on the basis of a £6 gallon or 10 pence when it was £5 a gallon.

The increased cost for this trip would therefore be about two pence or 20 per cent of the cost of the fuel which forms approximately 3.5 per cent of the cost of a £2.70 fare, so put another way 20 per cent of 3.5 per cent is 0.7 per cent of the overall fare, which constitutes he increase 0.7 per cent of £2.70 which is less than two pence.

Now by my reckoning he’s shot himself in the foot, as he seems to be saying that the increase should be about 2p, and that for that we should still be travelling 725 yards, although he uses it as an argument for why we should ‘share the fact that cheap energy is running out’.

That’s as maybe, but we have seen petrol prices decrease lately, and I haven’t seen the taxi drivers lowering their expectations. The trouble with arguments like this that take a short-term view of any situation is that they are almost impossible to roll back. Once the drivers get the right to charge us £2.80 for just 586 yards of travel, there will be no going back.

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London looks set to copy Paris’ example by rolling out a city-wide scheme of free bikes. Good stuff, but of more interest to established and budding self-sufficients in the capital (and those travelling in from the suburbs) is a parallel plan to introduce 12 bicycle motorways. These will offer a ‘network of quick, simple, and safe routes for cyclists’ that should give bikes and pedestrians greater priority over the city’s motor traffic.

The bikes scheme is ambitious enough, with racks for 6,000 publicly funded cycles every 300 metres, the ultimate goal being to encourage one in every ten journeys in the city made on bike.

The budget? £500m.

The bicycle motorways will consist of a dozen radial Cycling Corridors, dedicated Bike Zones with 20mph speed limits, and dedicated routes to cut the time and effort required to travel between key destinations like waterways and parks.

These Bike Zones look like being massive, covering a radius of 5km from key town centres. Slowing down all of the traffic in such a large area is going to have a heavy impact on drivers, and for them it’ll be a hard sell. For the moment, though, reception seems to be largely favourable, with the Guardian quoting Edmund King, president of the AA, saying ‘The current system of haphazard provision for cyclists is not good for them or for other road users. I think separating out cyclists can only be good for everyone and the only provision I would raise is that we still need to have roads for the movement of trucks, cars and buses – so we need to make sure we get the balance right.’ (source)

Of course, this will all take time, but the first Corridor should be in place by next year, with others following closely behind.

Technorati Tags:
cycling, london

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Some time ago I wrote on here about Pedalites, the self-powered lights for the pedals on your bike. I ordered a set and promised to report back once they’d arrived, been fitted and tried out. That time is now.

They’re about the same size as my old pedals, but much chunkier and a little heavier. They don’t look so good, being made of plastic with large bulges for the power packs, but they’re by no means eyesores.

Now as they’re more expensive than an average set of pedals they’re supposed to be difficult to steal, so the first thing you see on opening the box is an allen key that you use to screw them in place. Regular pedals can be unscrewed from the crank using nothing more complex than an adjustable spanner.

This turned out to be more difficult than expected, as you have to hold the pedal horizontally while turning the screwhead with the other. While one went in with relative ease – probably because of using the dominant hand – the other refused to line up, and it took ten minutes of careful and frustrating effort to get it in without sheering the thread on the crank.

It was worth the effort, though, as once in place, the pedals felt safe and sturdy, and the dimples on the upper surface gave good grip.

The Pedalites people warn that the first few times you use them you may notice some extra resistance but that this would slacken off over time. We didn’t. It felt just like we were using our old, regular pedals, and despite an oncoming headwind needed apply no extra effort.

It was difficult to judge the amount of light given out until we parked the bike in the shed, at which point each flash lit up its interior to an impressive degree. It should certainly have been enough to be spotted by an oncoming driver.

Of course, Pedalites are no substitute for regular front and rear lights on a bike, but when combined with a fluorescent jacket and good LED bulbs they should contribute to your safety on the roads in the dark winter extremities of the day.

The price – £34.99 plus postage – is fair when you consider the technology incolved and compare it to regular lights (although Halfords is currently having a half-price in-store lighting sale that’s worth checking out), and so the Pedalites earn themselves a four-star Blagger rating. They’d have got five out of five if installing them hadn’t left us worried about that thread on our crank.

Price £34.99
URL pedalite.com
Pros No running costs; fix and forget convenience.
Cons Fixing was a little awkward.
Verdict A simple way to improve your visibility and safety when cycling in the dark, but one which should only be used in conjunction with conventional bike lighting.

Technorati Tags:
cycling, pedalites, pedalite

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I move this weekend, after eight months of doing up the house. It means I’ll be closer to town, so won’t need to use the car for the station each day. My petrol consumption – and with it the cost of running the car – should decrease rapidly, and I reckon I’ll only be filling up once every month to five weeks. At the moment it’s more or less fortnightly.

It’s got me to thinking about how I can use the car even less, though, and switch to the bike for all but the longest or most impractical journeys, which is why a little column in today’s Guardian about attaching trailers to your bike for shopping and the like caught my eye.

The appropriately-named Bikes and Trailers specialises in such things, and I see from looking at their site that they come in all shapes and sizes. It’s like adding a boot to your bike, and although you wouldn’t use it for a trip to Ikea, something like a Mini-Boy or a Bike-Hod would be far more suitable than a ruck-sack for the weekly shop, particularly as I can get to the town centre Tesco entirely on cycle paths.

In fact, the Hod is designed specifically for shopping, as you can unhook it from the bike and wheel it around the supermarket, scanning your items as you go, dropping them into the Hod, paying at the self-service till and then hooking it up to your bike again for the ride home. It all sounds very efficient.

Only trouble is, it looks like an old lady tartan shopping trolley.

Technorati Tags:
bike trolley, shopping, cycling

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The number of cyclists in London has increased 83% in the last seven years. Whether that’s down to lousy public transport or rocketing petrol prices isn’t clear, but now that petrol has topped £1 a litre you can take an educated guess.

(For American readers, that’s about $8.15 a gallon – and GasBuddy tells me that in St Louis right now it’s actually $2.87.)

Apart from being a good source of exercise, cycling is a fast and free form of eco-friendly transport (once you’ve bought your bike), so it fits in perfectly with the Blagger ethos of low-cost, low-impact living. Besides, the ride to and from the station, even in the cold, has actually become something of a highlight of my day.

But the press release trumpeting that 83% stat isn’t about the growing popularity of the bike, but the increased dangers of this form of transport over any other: 61% of cyclists complain of cars coming too close, 51% worry about not being seen, 48% of cyclists feel unsafe on the roads, and 75% of accidents happen on junctions because bike lights generally point forwards and backwards, not to either side.

They may be scare tactics, but they were convincing, and an effective introduction to Pedalite, a self-powered lighting system that you attach to the pedals of your bike. It’s charged by the turning of your crank shaft, and flashes lights to the front, back and – crucially – side of your bike, making you more visible to cars approaching from a side road. That’s something that’s concerned me more and more since the nights started drawing in, and wasn’t much alleviated when I invested in a fluorescent belt and chest strap to reflect the lights of oncoming cars.

They’re eco-green and, like bike transport itself, free to run once you’ve made your initial investment (£34). So, I’ve ordered a pair, having been assured by the site that they fit any bike designed for someone over 9 years old.

It’s difficult to see whether they’re metal or plastic from the pictures on the site, but you get a money-back guarantee, so I’ll report back once they’ve arrived and I’ve fitted them to my bike. In the meantime, here’s a picture of Pedalite in action.

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