I’ve always cycled, I started at age four and never really stopped. It gave me freedom from the overcrowded tube at rush hour, it allowed me to move to South Wales without a car; so when I became a Mum, and a solo parent at that, it never occurred to me to stop.
Many of you will have heard this story before, but off Blake went into a trailer at one month corrected (he was born three months early so I’d had four months to recover at this stage), we lashed a car seat into a double trailer and off we went.
Brilliant, I had my freedom back, except I didn’t really have it back, I couldn’t access so many routes, as bollards put in to stop cars and motorbikes blocked us from safe car free routes.
I couldn’t weave in and out of traffic, so we became stuck in traffic jams breathing other people’s fumes – which is worse in a trailer because of how low the kid is – and I couldn’t use a lot of bike parking.
When thinking about which shop I wished to go to, I had to work out if we could get there on a safe route accessible to us, and would we have any parking – this took us down to about 30% of the shops.
None of this was done intentionally; they didn’t sit down and decide: I want to exclude a Mum on her bike, but their design wasn’t inclusive.
I was so excited when I got his bike seat – especially as the week before I’d got stuck between some bollards on the seawall. Despite measuring the first of the three bollards it turns out they weren’t all built exactly the same.
We’re really top heavy but we could filter again, bike parking became accessible for the most part, and those pesky bollards allowed us through!
I’ve mastered the awkward flamingo leg pull to get on my bike (you can’t swing your leg over the back of your seat, and you definitely don’t tip the bike).
But cyclists dismount signs fill me with new dread – did I mention we’re top heavy? – pushing my child along on my two wheeled bike is much harder than cycling him and I’m lucky that I’m fully able bodied.
(I have a good friend with MS who uses his trike to overcome his walking limitations – he simply can’t push his trike no matter how willing he is.)
We moved to Reading while Blake was using the child seat, and my journeys are normally multi-faceted – I bike him to nursery, then off to the train station to get into London for work.
I can’t get my bike on the train rack. The lifting to get it in is logistically beyond me (with his seat on) and there’s nowhere to leave the bike seat at the nursery.
So I park at the station and hope it’s there when I return – my journey is longer as I need to use the Circle Line and walk to the office, not do a nine minute ride on the other side, but bike hire isn’t part of my ticket cost.
My sister lives in Wallingford, so we cycle to get the train to Cholsey and cycle from there. We’ve stopped using Tilehurst station as there’s no lift, so do a longer route to get to Reading.
At Cholsey we had this awful nine-month period where Blake was too heavy to lift the bike with him on it down the stairs (it could flip over), but he was too small to walk on the stairs – I was reduced to asking strangers to carry my child or my bike so we can get off the platform.
Now he’s back on a bike attachment for longer rides, which is great, but we’re stuck on the Thames path, and to fully avoid the traffic home from nursery, we went from 6km to 10km. A big difference for little legs.
This sounds like cycling is all negative – it’s not! I love our rides, we chatter, he engages with people as we cycle – and we’re part of our community not trapped away from it in a metal box.
We’re healthy because of it, he’s learnt to cycle at 3½ because it’s his norm, our journeys are really predictable because I don’t get stuck in traffic jams, and it’s so much quicker because of the same reason.
I get my exercise in and now I’m getting to share that love with him – watch out for the now almost four-year-old as he toots on campus, giggling and yelling “sorry I’m learning” as we’re still a bit wobbly – and I still love cycling.
But, and this is a big but, inclusive design would have made our lives so much easier – I cycle despite the barriers not because of them.
I can’t imagine how exhausting it must be for people who face this in every facet of their life.
Kat Heath
Events Coordinator