Making Camden more cycle-able

Many houses on our streets have long steep steps down to very narrow pavements which are close to our busy and dangerous road. Bringing a bike down to the roadside is pretty hazardous.

• There’s the obvious possibility of a fall
• The front wheel has to poke out onto the pavement before the person holding the bike can see who is coming along the pavement
• If there’s a second or third bike to be considered, this compounds the issues of safety and security
• If there is one parent, with a baby carrier, how does that work?
• Electric bikes are really heavy.

Others have front doors issuing straight onto the pavement and very narrow hallways which are hardly appropriate for bike storage.

All this is solvable by providing on-street, safe and secure, bike storage using something called a bike hangar. It is very much part of our Liveable Neighbourhood campaign for Camden – please click HERE to sign up and help us to get to 200 households – half of the total in Camden – which will give us a lot of leverage with the Council.

Bike hangars would make the use of a bike so much more convenient and therefore a ‘first choice every time’ rather than ‘I can’t be bothered’: no wet saddles; nice, easy start and finish to your journey, and you are far less likely to be regarded as awkward inconvenience to other road users. To see the concept being demonstrated, click here.

Of course there are few things that we would need to hammer out which others have done:

• If it were not to be free to use for residents then surely it has to be cheap – much, much cheaper than a car permit
• Relatively few households, I would suggest, have single bike users in them, so those that opt to use a bike hangar for all their bikes do need the charge per bike to be less pro rata – particularly as they are ‘doing the right thing’ and not using fossil fuels on their journeys
• 12 bikes = a parking space, so if it was really popular we might need to find some more parking space. With a ‘Liveable Neighbourhood’, as we would envisage it, with far, far less through traffic, reducing the length of some double yellow lines looks possible.

Finally Bath Newseum and NextDoor Camden have featured the same idea a few days ago. Click here to see the article and the ensuing interest, including some from us!