Having been involved in cycle campaigning in London in the 90s, it was a real uphill struggle to be believed on these sorts of points. You at least have better weather in Oz. But that is another one of the myths. The likelihood of being caught out in the rain in London, if I remember, is actually as low as something like 7 or 10 times a year, assuming five days a week commuting. It is all to do with our perceptions of probabilities, but don’t get me started on that…

You do need good facilities. It helps, if you are riding more than five or six miles, to have a shower available at the end.

I found, when working in Fleet St, that a 13-mile cycle commute left me sharper. Any reading time on the train that I missed out on I made up for in overall productivity.

Once you have developed an urban cycle technique (and there are even “schools” where you can learn like this one: http://www.londonschoolofcycling.co.uk/home.html), it turns out to be fairly safe.

But for beginners, getting started can be difficult. You need to make sure you are well kitted out, with efficient and safe gear. And, once you are serious, you need to treat it like proper training. I used to cycle quite hard every day, and without realising it began to suffer from overtraining syndrome, even though I did not consider this training. I’d recommend different levels of intensity, and not feeling driven to ride each day. Another thing poeple should do is take the nobbly tyres off their mountain bikes. They slow you down a lot. And the impact of cold on the knees is even greater than Ron Hill described in one of my earlier posts on running, since at speed you have windchill at work, which will make knee cartilage even stiffer.

I suspect that with congestion and global warming, there will now be a lot more momentum behind cycling provision, and our cities will start to feel a bit more Dutch.