Broken Lights and Boris's Potholes

How to start a blog, I was wondering? How to start? Well, perhaps, given the title, it should be cycling related. And cycling home today, for the second time in less than 6 months, I hit a pothole so hard that my front light came flying out of its bracket and it shattered on the road. It didn’t much help that it was also run over by a taxicab after coming flying off. I have shattered shards of bike-light sitting in my pannier, rather uselessly, now.

This winds me up for two reasons. The first is to do with bike-light manufacturers. Do they build in redundancy by making useless brackets that don’t grip tight enough? How hard is it? As Bob Dylan once sang, how many bike-lights must one man break, before he buys one that’s half decent?

What really gets me, though, is the potholes. I’m sure this isn’t a new thing. I don’t ever remember the streets of London being smooth and fluid. But this year it feels like they’ve reached a new high. Or is that low? Anyway. There seem to be more and more and more of them, deeper and deeper. And it feels like the councils (or whoever’s job it is to fix these things) are doing increasingly poor fire-fighting jobs of fixing them. They’re often fixed, but with just another little patch of tarmac. And within a few months the problem returns. London is awash with these things.

And for a cyclist, there are more problems than just the destruction of lights and the increased profits for Cat-Eye. There’s the perpetual damage to the reproductive organs of us cyclists. Now, some of us don’t want children, but even so having a bike saddle repeatedly shoved into the groin is not much fun for most people (I’m sure there are some who pay for this particular delight in some dubious Soho clubs, but I’m pretty confident it’s a minority pursuit). And it actually ruins the bikes too. All those buckled wheels of London – it’s not just that us cyclists are a little on the portly side. It’s the ruined road surface that destroys them.

I would like to blame Boris Johnson, of course. This does feel like it has become substantially worse in the last couple of years. Under Boris’s watch. I’d like to blame it on the lunatic Johnsonite/Cameronite devolution of power to local communities so the can make local decisions for local people, taking power away from the centre (which, as anyone who’s ever heard a word from Newt Gingrich and 90s US Republicans knows, translates as “We want to remove responsibility from ourselves, and cut taxes massively, and then if anyone suffers we can blame local people for being rotten”).

Unfortunately, this probably isn’t the case here. But don’t worry, there’ll be lots of other opportunities to attack this hateful nonsense.

Instead, the roads have just been dug up huge numbers of times in recent years. Partly for the spectacularly poorly organised replacement of the water main. But also because of the really unjoinedup thinking that’s come from the privatisation and balkanisation of gas, electric, phone, tv, and so on; so each company which has a problem digs a new little hole every time they have some work to do. And that just mashes up the roads. Too many small holes. I don’t know what the solution is. But it surely isn’t pushing more power away from the centre and reducing red-tape on utilities companies.

Well done Andy. Good start. A "Something Must Be Done But I Don't Know What" whine. Let's hope we can improve, eh?