East Angular, Hills Road and Boris-biking!

It just so happened that the launch of Boris’s bikes coincided with my very first trip to Cambridge. When we arrived there, the first thing that struck me – not literally – was the presence of cyclists in tandem with the absence of gradient in the topography. At this point, I’m busting to mention that by an odd quirk of nomenclature, the thoroughfare from Cambridge train station to the town centre is called Hills Road – aaah!
These happy people are not in need of a cajoling municipal official, a sponsoring big business, nor a set of ‘docks’ alongside a non-existent set of underground stations. In short, cycling is what comes naturally to the good folks of this East Anglian town, with its scaled-down locales and even roads and pavements. I hate to knock a project before it gets off the ground (sorry!) but I cannot see how London will ever be a cyclists’ city in the same way as say, Amsterdam.
Alright, there will be the odd sod who, by virtue of living near an underground station, who doesn’t have to spend more than thirty minutes cycling to work nor negotiate steep gradients, and whose domestic set-up excludes parking space for a bike, make those cycling charges more than offset what they would have spent on other transport, making ‘Boris-biking’ fit comfortably into their lifestyles. Indeed, in a metropolis the size of London, that could amount to a sizeable number of people, enough to make the project as it is now, worthwhile. But at the end of the day, cycling will only ever be the embroidery on the tablecloth. A few thousand more cyclists on the road will never rule out the need for a well-financed, integrated network of trains, tubes, trams and buses. Enough said.