Actually, before I get on to that; if you cycle in Scotland you’ll probably be aware that a young woman was killed in Edinburgh last Wednesday. 23-year-old Zhi Min Soh was thrown from her bike by the tram tracks embedded in the surface of Princes St and then run over by a bus. It’s a death as needless as it is tragic, given Edinburgh council had been warned regularly over the last five years that their street layout was going to kill someone.
I wrote about it here. If you want to pay your respects (or visibly show your anger) there’s a minute’s silence on Wednesday 07 June at 0830. The Facebook event is here, and there’s more information about the plan on the CityCyclingEdinburgh forum thread here.
On which note…
CityCyclingEdinburgh.info is a forum for people cycling in Edinburgh, surprisingly enough. Three things amaze me about it.
It’s consistently polite. There are heated discussions, certainly, but it’s the friendliest forum I know by a long stretch, and the amount of personal attacks in the five years I’ve been reading I could probably count on one hand. That’s amazing for an internet forum.
Its members have just the right breadth of weird knowledge to make a forum interesting and pleasingly unpredictable. The thread on the Scottish independence referendum was the best online debate on the subject that I found, there’s always a fun array of mechanical bodges circulating onto the front page, and there was even a healthy thread on chimneys and their component bricks a while back.
And finally, if you come across a “grass-roots” cycle event or campaign in Scotland, chances are it started on CCE. The amount of scheming, cunning plans, and general machination is remarkable. When the bike revolution comes, it will be controlled from the shadows by someone in CCE.
A few years back we decided that Glasgow could do with a bit of that, and launched CityCyclingGlasgow.com to cater for those on the western side of the central belt.
A core of users soldiered on with it, but the software was a bit of a pig (particularly on mobiles), and it remained a pale shadow of its eastern sibling. (The admin was also, if we’re honest, much more interested in running his own blog than keeping the forum gears greased… :) )
Shortly after the Glasgow PoP this year an enthusiastic pair of new admins was found, and we relaunched with some swish new software (nodeBB, if you’re wondering).
It now looks glorious and is much easier to use (particularly on a mobile), and the conversation is already starting to flow.
Please drop in!
(There’s also a Twitter account @CyclingGlasgow, which is moderately active. At least when I remember to keep an eye on it…)
