Jamison Valley from Katoomba. Wikimedia Commons Well, I'm doing this. Yep. I'm crossing the Blue Mountains, from Lithgow to Penrith, utilising as little actual road as possible, on my shiny BMC Speedfox Mountain Bike. I'll be packing...

So, Sydney's much-maligned monorail is to be bought by the government, and torn down. Good. Except for one thing You see, there is one, single, lonely, solitary useful thing about Sydney's monorail. One gleaming upside to the pointlessness of its circuitous route around the Darling Harbour tourist black hole. That one good thing, ladies and gentlemen, is this: Pyrmont Bridge (Wikipedia image) Yes, that one good thing can be seen in this picture. If you're a true Sydneysider, you'll know it. It's the strip of shade provided by the monorail line, which gives pedestrians a welcome respite from the bastard sun. This line of reduced radiation is an old friend...

This This This This and This Oh, and the ABC used obvious-nutcase-is-obvious Meryl Dorey to comment on a story about which she knows nothing at all. This is why there are days where, given the chance, I would gladly push the big red button that disentegrates the planet.

As I was drafting the previous post, this popped into my mailbox. It resolves a few questions, more so than the previous RTA email, in fact Subject: RE: Bike lanes, traffic lights, police operations and RTA guidelines Hi Jason   The Lord Mayor has asked me to reply to you directly on this issue.  I'm also available to speak to you in person if you'd like to discuss in detail   You've raised quite a few issues, and I know John at RMS has replied to you though you feel not all questions are fully answered.  So I'll try here, and you can let me know if...

I spent an hour or so on Monday morning in the company of Amanda Hoh, a video journalist from Fairfax Digital, looking at the bike lane traffic lights which have so exercised me over the last couple of weeks. I was Amanda's guide and model for a video piece on the lights. We tested various ways of hitting the sensors and found that they really only work when you're dead center on the line where the diamond markings should be. We also discovered, in an adjunct experiment, that it's not sufficient to have a wheel on the outer edge of the sensor...

I managed to get out on the bike again at the weekend, despite awful weather. This time I was in the company of Dave The Happy Singer, who would be riding my new (to me) Avanti Hammer XT hardtail. Esther's dad Tim was kind enough to bring me the Hammer, a 2003 model, from his large collection and I was told to consider it a permanent loan. Which is win. Anyway, two bikes don't fit into one small Celica, so it was also the first outing for my new bike rack, and the first time I've had an external bike rack...

Should more proof be needed that supporters of the Australian Vaccination Network are morons, I present the following screenshot, in the comments of Meryl Dorey's absurd idiot-stroking blog post in response to Mia Freedman: Yep, Nathan really seems to think that it's somehow surprising that a newspaper may publish pieces which come from different perspectives. In NathanWorld, newspapers are monolithic entities, written by drones in lockstep, whose every word is attuned to a pre-determined ideological slant. It never crosses his mind* that A: The articles do not actually support an antivax viewpoint, but highlight the safety concerns and problems inevitably raised in a system that...

So I wrote to the RTA about the trouble with the Union Street cycle corridor, which I've been blogging about for the last few days. I include the response here in full. My initial approach garnered a specific name, so here's what I sent: Hi John, I've been given your email to forward the below enquiry. I've re-pasted the enquiry here. Not sure if you'll end up receiving this two ways: http://www.mycolleaguesareidiots.com/archive/2012/03/06/The-green-light-and-why-youre-not-getting-it.aspx  Traffic lights/delays Message I'm a blogger with an interest in cycling, among other things. I've recently posted about sensor-activated cycle lane traffic lights in Sydney - which made the SMH news yesterday due...

Australia's most debunked woman, and occasional president of the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) is at it again. Here's a little tweet she fired off this morning: I wonder, readers, if you can guess what I'm going to say next? Yes, that's right. Predictably, the article to which Meryl Dorey links says nothing of the sort. In fact, it says: Barely two weeks after World Health Organisation (WHO) declared India as a polio-free nation, an 18-month-old female child was admitted to a state-run hospital in Kolkata with suspected polio on Monday. The child, Sumi, a resident of Indrabala village near Baruipur in South 24 Parganas district, was...

Having written to the RTA and Clover Moore about these frustrating bike lights, I figured I ought to talk to NSW police about their crackdown day: I'm a blogger with interest in, among other things, cycling in and around Sydney. I've recently been blogging about the cycle lane lights in Pyrmont. A day after my first blog on the topic, I noticed a crackdown by Sydney Police on red-light running. Ironically, my blog of March 6th had been about how the traffic control sensors are unreliable and badly installed. This being the case, I'm after some press comment on the crackdown of...

I've posted recently on some problems with Sydney's otherwise excellent cycle lane network, well it turns out the subject doesn't really go away. A day after I blogged about the road sensor problem, NSW police staged a crackdown on red-light infractions and non-helmet wearers. Laying aside the helmet issue for now, it's easy to see, if you've read the previous piece, that there's a problem here. It could well be that the issues with the traffic light sensors have contributed to the light jumping problem, and this, in my opinion, makes any fines issued on crackdown day very doubtful indeed. So I...

So I spent a day riding the Speedfox around the Blue Mountains yesterday, and had a great time, though I covered fewer kilometres than originally planned. Torrential rain during the week blew the original plan, which was to take two relative Newbies down the Oaks track. NPWS closures and a river purported to be in flood meant it was probably unwise to do much in the lower mountains, so I decided to head for higher ground in the Mt Victoria - Blackheath area, but not before stopping off in Lawson to have a one-hour thrash around the Old Volvo Trail. The old Volvo Track is...

I've been riding my bike to work recently. Not every day, but certainly enough to re-learn a few of the things I used to know back when I was a regular bike commuter. One of these is that drivers are sometimes idiots. Certainly not all the time, but when you encounter perhaps a hundred cars on a given commute, it only takes 0.1% of drivers to be idiots, and you're getting a near miss (or worse) once every ten trips. However I've also observed that sometimes cyclists can be idiots too, me included. So, anyway, there's this lovely bike path network that the City Of Sydney have...