Cycle Training

Can Do News - November 2000

Pushing the bike in London

London transport issues are now at the top of the political agenda. The city is slowly grinding to a halt under the sheer volume of motorised vehicles. Evidently something has got to change, and quickly. There is a solution which could help to alleviate the problem, and it's as simple as learning how to ride a bike. In fact that's it - we all learn to ride a bike, but properly. Now we have the very man to teach us. He is Simeon Bamford, a Millennium Fellow, based in Peckham, South London. In 1998, he set up a company called Cycle Training.

Simeon was a computer programmer and in his spare time he campaigned for the London Cycling Campaign. "People wanted to take up cycling in the city as a form of transport", he said "but there was no real training available to give people the ability to do it, so I realised there was a gap that needed plugging."

So Cycle Training became a project to provide training for adults and children, initially, in Lambeth Southwark and Lewisham, however it became clear that it could be needed over Greater London and beyond. This persuaded Simeon to hand in his notice at work to concentrate on the project, and in January 1999 he applied for the Scarman Trust Millennium Award. …

Simeon's enthusiasm for cycling is palpable and you can't help being carried along by it. But would you fancy venturing out into the London traffic on a bike? General public perception is that it's a dangerous scary thing to do. But, according to Simeon, that contradicts the opinion of those who do it. He explains, "Once you get to do it you realise it's safe, enjoyable, healthy, economical and reliable." All those attributes benefit the individual and society.

Often we only see the cyclist as courageous, if not reckless, taking their very lives in their hands. Simeon asks us to see things from a different perspective, "From the driving seat of a car you have a quite limited view. You've got blind spots and you're quite low down. Once you get up on a bike with your higher view, 360 vision and providing you know how to take the correct place on the road where you're supposed to be, you'll find that you've got a very good view all around, and that people will respect you as long as you respect yourself. The view from a driver's perspective is just not representative of what it's actually like once you get on a bike. It's not scary in the way people would imagine."

Also we must remember that although traffic in the city has increased in volume, the average speed of 10mph has remained constant, just as it was one hundred years ago. So cyclists tend to travel faster and take up less space.

Many school children would like to cycle to school but parents are afraid for their kids - understandable, perhaps, but he maintains that, "the solution is to give the children the skills to be able to cycle safely and give the parents the confidence to let them."

Cycle Training's £20 an hour service is available for complete beginners or for people brave enough to consider leaving the car or tube behind. For the latter, he insists, "We can take them through their route to work and back and accompany them until they feel safe and confident to do it themselves."

Now the business has taken off, and you can have tuition one-to-one or as part of a group. In addition, Cycle Training runs riding clubs for young people, maintenance courses, bike building workshops and runs mass rides for people. He says with a wide smile "This year we took 110 kids down Clapham High Street for a big fun ride and they loved it and everyone else loved it as well." And Simeon's final comment? "The core is we're doing cycling promotion activities and part of that is training people, but the most part is just giving people confidence and giving them enjoyment and letting them cycle themselves."

So why not get a bike and learn to cycle? As TV character Delboy from Peckham always says, "You know it makes sense!"