Moving bikes by bike

 With a little help from Simon, handyman-par-excellence, I've got my bike trailer up and running. It's made from two car roof cycle carriers attached to a sawn-off roof rack. This sits on the base of the Carry Freedom trailer (with the extended towing bar) and has a couple of bits of Velcro wrapped around it to hold it rigid, which simply required two one inch long holes cut into the marine ply base.

It's amazingly stable with one or two bikes. It had a real test yesterday as I had six Pedal Power Kennington bikes to donate to a school and it made moving the bikes around more of a joy than a chore.

I love my trailer

I wish Carry Freedom would get together with the billboard owners on Kennington Road to have huge posters of their trailers in use, replacing the tedious adverts for cars.

In the meantime, here are a trio of photos from trips I've made in the past few days with my Carry Freedom trailer. I have the wide Y-frame trailer with the extended arm, and most of the time I have a box on it, which is actually a cupboard that was fortuitously dumped near our house just when I started looking for a box.

Taking bikes to a community event - it's more stable than it looks!

  Picking up a garden table that I found dumped in a skip.

Taking garden and household waste to the recycling centre.

Belated floral display

I've not been in London much this summer and missed the Festival Hall's floral ride (not to mention the long-awaited changes to Lambeth Bridge's cycle lane, which I haven't yet had cause to visit).

I think I made some amends for missing the floral ride today as I picked up some plants from New Covent Garden Market to deliver to a school down Nine Elms Lane.

 The trailer is laden with plants en-route to the school's baskets, while the pannier is laden with flowers discarded at the market to adorn our house.

unskipping with joy

 Once or twice a year our housing association has a skip for people to dump stuff they don't want, as do the local allotments. Today I took a load of useful lengths of wood out of the housing skip to be used at the allotments (also taking a neighbour's used grow bags for earthing up the potatoes),

 I then took multiple tins of paints out of the skip at the allotments and brought them home to decorate our house with.

Most of the stuff in the two skips could be reused in the local area as straightforwardly as I did with the wood and the paint (and a splendid TV and an unused laundry basket we now happily own).

At the risk of sounding churlish given the quality of the stuff we've taken from these skips, it would be much better if people offered stuff to their neighbours, put it on Freecycle or gave it to a charity shop thus negating the need for a skip or reducing the frequency of their use.

After all, skip lorries are amongst the noisiest and most dangerous vehicles on our streets - never mind the wastefulness and danger involved in making and transporting new products when existing ones can so easily be reused.

Coffee, soft drink and a newspaper?

 I saw this cyclist in Lille (the black frame on the bike is a bus stop behind)

 and saw him a few minutes later set up and trading

 Soft drinks, newspapers and freshly brewed coffee were on offer. The coffee machine is winched up from the base of the trailer, you can just see the winding mechanism on the lower left of the trailer.

How to transport bulky roof insulation

Throwing £31m away each year

At a birthday party last weekend I was gobsmacked when this sparkling, musical birthday fountain was produced only to be thrown away about one minute later. Once lit, the flower sparkles whilst the petals slowly open lighting the candles around. At the same time, the "Happy Birthday" tune starts playing. There were no details on the packaging about replacing the pyrotechnic so this contraption is clearly intended to be used once then thrown away, batteries (yes, two) and all.

Lambeth Council is working out what services are for the axe as it's being forced to make cuts of £79m over the next 4 years.

It costs £31m a year to collect and dispose of Lambeth's rubbish (£113 for each of the 272,000 residents) so it's clear to me that the sanest way to protect essential services is to cut down the amount of crap we mindlessly consume.

What's this got to with riding a bike? Well, first of all we'll have fewer lorries on the streets...

Secondly, it gives me a chance to mention Lambeth Freecycle - the Yahoo group for giving and collecting unwanted items. When we use it we normally give preference to people collecting on foot/public transport or by bike.

Thirdly, if you're reading this shortly after it's been posted, there's still time to vote for the Council to provide funding to kickstart the Brixton Reuse Centre (including bicycles). Deadline for voting is midnight 1st December.

Moving stuff by bike

There's work going on at a local pub with at least some of the wood arriving by bike. It's not as heavily laden as this bike that I've seen being cycled by St James's Park and photographed in Victoria

Tower Bridge is the base of Office Depot's fleet of 8 'La Petite Reine' cargo bikes that make deliveries in the City of London. Read more in their press pack.

A longer established local leader in delivery by bicycle is Darwin's Deli in Sail Street

Hopefully this idea will catch on at Pimlico Plumbers, directly opposite Darwin's Deli. I bet most of their journeys are within two or three miles.

Transport for London undertook a useful scoping study on moving freight by bike . See if you can guess which stationery company was involved in their trial.

There's more on cargo bikes at I Bike London