Cyclists the length and breadth of Scotland have this weekend been participating in the eighth national Pedal on Parliament, with imaginative and inspirational ‘Pop-Up’ protests taking place from Dumfries to Inverness and Glasgow to Aberdeen.
While the previous seven editions of the campaigning event, first held in 2012, have included a mass ride in Edinburgh that finishes outside the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh, this year the focus has been on campaigning at local level.
From Friday until Sunday, grassroots campaigners highlighted local barriers to cycling in a co-ordinated weekend of action spanning the country, taking such diverse forms as people protected bike lanes, bike buses for schoolchildren, a search – with the aid of Jelly Babies – for “Edinburgh’s most ridiculous bike lane, fancy dress protests and even a ‘chicane challenge’ in the capital.
Here’s some examples of what has being going on across Scotland this weekend, with descriptions provided by Pedal on Parliament.
In Stirling, campaigners coned off a cycle lane that is often ignored by drivers – and cheekily installed the ‘no parking’ notices that the council ought to have put up almost 14 years ago.
Pedal on Parliament Stirling Pop Up (credit Andrew Abbesss) (Image Credit: Farrelly Atkinson)
Meanwhile in Glasgow, cyclists took more direct action on Howard Street with a revolving human bike chain occupying a bike lane that is notorious for illegal parking.
Pedal on Parliament Glasgow City Centre Pop-up (credit Iona Shepherd) (Image Credit: Farrelly Atkinson)
Elsewhere in Glasgow, the GoBike Board of shame revealed its latest location on Kilmarnock Road beside a notorious narrow cycle lane painted in the door zone. The board read “Roll Up! Roll Up! For Glasgow City Council’s FREE ride of danger rollercoaster THE DOOR ZONE!! Ride in it and get whacked! Ride out of it and get smacked! No height restrictions apply! Mind how you go!”
In Edinburgh things took a more surreal turn, with one campaigner fed up of dangerously narrow cycle lanes, taking his “Jelly Baby Warriors Stick” to the streets to measure the width of some of the cities more terrifyingly narrow lanes – some even with streams of traffic on both sides. With 1.5 metres (50 Jelly Babies) being the minimum safe distance for overtaking a bike, narrower lanes have been found to encourage dangerously close passes. After a call out for Edinburgh’s worst bike lanes,.
Pedal on Parliament. Jelly baby Measuring Cycle lane width. the jelly baby measure is half the recommended lane width (credit Iain Jack) (Image Credit: Farrelly Atkinson)
Elsewhere in Edinburgh, a caravan of cargo bikes, tandems, trailers and other non-standard machines took on the Chicane Challenge. Attempting to navigate the barriers on NCN1, protesters demonstrated that this safe route can actually be impossible for some of the more vulnerable cyclists to use.
In East Dunbartonshire campaigners gathered with stuffed bears to complete the Bears Way which was controversially stopped before more than a mile had been built. Since then, at least one cyclist has been injured in a collision on a section that ought to have been separated from traffic had the route been built in full.
In Scotstoun in Glasgow, local father Andy Watson organised a protest and launched a petition to ask the council for a safe route to Victoria Park. Families, assembled with signs calling for safer crossings, attempted to re-enact the famous Beatles Abbey Road album cover but, without a real zebra crossing, it was too dangerous to attempt.
Elsewhere in Glasgow, the GoBike Board of Shame made its second appearance of the weekend – outside the University of Glasgow who, along with Glasgow City Council, have recently been slammed by cycling advocates for failing to include safe cycling provision in their redevelopment of University Avenue.
In Cambuslang, guerilla action turned a painted bike lane into what is thought to be the world’s first ‘Hoover-protected cycle track’ in recognition of the town’s industrial past. Toy Hoovers formed a temporary barrier between cyclists and motorised traffic, showing how easily safer cycling could be achieved.
In Dumfries, local cycle campaign group Cycling Dumfries were also calling for safer crossings – by dressing up as cows to protest the absurdity that dairy farms get signalised crossings on the A75 while people on foot and on bikes often have to wait for a gap in the traffic or are fenced in on narrow traffic islands while waiting to cross.
Meanwhile, in Aberdeen {below) and Dundee, mass rides were taking over parts of the cities where traffic dominates all too often.
Ahead of the weekend of action, Pedal on Parliament organiser Sally Hinchcliffe said: “This year we want to take the battle to local authorities to highlight the sort of issues our supporters face every day in just trying to get about by bike.
“While the Scottish Government has started to increase investment in active travel, many local authorities are falling behind and whether you can cycle safely or not is becoming a postcode lottery.
“With climate change now becoming an urgent issue, we need to change the way we travel, and that means changes to enable cycling everywhere, with safe cycle routes away from cars.”
Pop-up coordinator Iona Shepherd commented: “When we put out a call for creative protests we were hopeful we might get a few good ideas – but we’ve been blown away by the response, with 20 events planned across the country.
“It’s not just established campaign groups that are taking part but individuals – parents and commuters who just want to be able to cycle safely with their families and get home from work alive.”
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Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
@mitsky Its another one of those things that makes no sense isn't it. Someone was saying in another thread that we need a harder driving test. I don't think we do. Everyone who has passed in the last 20 years has done a test that is more than happy to fail you for behaviour that 90% of drivers exhibit every time they get behind the wheel. The test is fine. The fact that getting your license seems to be considered some weird proof that you will continue to drive safely is the issue. The fact that when you prove that you cannot drive safely its not immediately revoked is the issue.
@Rendel Harris The issue with GPS chips, as everyone who has one of those black boxes will attest to, is that they are crap. They interpret heavy braking as poor driving rather than someone else forcing it. They see rapid acceleration where there is none.
All we need is a much higher chance of people being caught and punished for their everyday shit driving. I'm sure as a cyclist that every single time you go out on your bike you will have a dozen or more times when you think "that would have been a nasty accident if someone was coming the other direction". Eventually, when bad behaviour suffers no consequences it becomes completely normalised. Then we struggle to treat it as anything but a normal, unavoidable accident when that bad behaviour does incur consequences.
Drivers regularly pull out in front of me and cause me to slam on the brakes or avoid them. Very often they have seen me and just assume I'm not going very fast or they assume I will slow down/stop (which I do). Too many drivers don't look for cyclists, hate giving way to them or expect the cyclist to be moving slowly and just pull out.
@Rendel Harris By the time someone is looking at prison time its too late. As has been proven time and time again, the severity of punishment is a poor deterrent to bad behaviour if people don't think its going to happen to them or they don't think they will be caught.
Now I do think that there should be far more severe and immediate punishments for bad driving when drivers are caught but this would need to be coupled with a massive push to actually act on information/proof of bad driving. As anyone that submits footage to the police knows, its a crapshoot and certain police forces are anti-cyclist.
This would try to essentially put people off misbehaving whilst driving before they cause an accident rather than getting the tired old excuse of "it was a single dangerous incident, they definitely don't do this all the time and their luck finally ran out".
Perhaps it should go even further and if you have a history of speeding and you hurt someone speeding, that is looked upon in a very dim light.
Can we talk about “Washing up liquid contains a lot of salt – not a great idea to use a corrosive substance on a bicycle”?
This is an urban myth.
I have washed all of our many bikes using Fairy liquid or Ecover for decades. I’ve never found any evidence of corrosion, paint, laquer or decal wear, or any sign of anything. I regularly service forks and bearings, swapping a lot of gear, and everything has always been fine.
Here’s far too much info below - long story short, Fairy liquid in 5L of hot water has a borderline-homeopathic amount of salt, it’s fine to use on a bike.
============
The honest answer is that neither Fairy nor Ecover publicly disclose the actual sodium chloride concentration in the consumer products I could find. The safety data sheets list hazardous ingredients above reporting thresholds, but sodium chloride is not reported for either product.
However, we can put some realistic bounds on it.
Fairy Original
The SDS lists:
Sodium laureth sulfate: 20-30%
Lauramine oxide: 5-10%
Alcohol: 1-5%
No sodium chloride is declared. 15
In detergent formulations, sodium chloride is commonly used as a viscosity modifier (thickener) and is typically present at around 0.5-3%, sometimes lower. The absence of declaration suggests it is either not present or present at a low concentration that does not require reporting. This range is an informed formulation estimate, not a value stated by Fairy.
Ecover
The Ecover ingredient information lists:
Sodium lauryl sulfate
Lauryl glucoside
Cocamidopropyl betaine
Alcohol
Lactic acid
Sodium octyl sulphate
Again, no sodium chloride is listed.
Ecover's formulations tend to rely more heavily on plant-derived surfactants and may use little or no salt for thickening, but I could not find a published concentration. 63
What does this mean for bike washing?
Let's assume a worst-case 3% salt content in Fairy.
If you add:
10 mL Fairy to a 5-litre bucket
Then salt introduced would be approximately:
10 mL × 3% ≈ 0.3 g salt
Distributed through 5 L water
≈ 60 mg/L salt
For comparison:
Typical seawater: ~35,000 mg/L
Lightly salted winter road spray: often hundreds to thousands of mg/L
The wash bucket above: ~60 mg/L
So even under a pessimistic assumption, the salt concentration is hundreds to thousands of times lower than the salt exposure your bike gets from winter roads.
From a corrosion perspective, the quantity of salt introduced by washing-up liquid is essentially negligible compared with:
Riding on salted roads
Coastal spray
Leaving winter grime on the bike
Therefore my practical conclusion remains:
✅ Fairy or Ecover in a wash bucket is extremely unlikely to contribute any measurable corrosion risk.
✅ The important thing is rinsing and drying afterwards.
✅ Winter road salt is the real enemy, not washing-up liquid.
Another example of a driver's actions that would have been a straight fail in a driving test but is barely likely to lead to a disqualification...
I'm wondering if having a driving licence is like a "Get out of jail free" card...
@perce I'm not sure I agree with that. I think thats just confirming that he is take fully responsibility and recognises that the cyclist could have done nothing to mitigate it.
@Rendel Harris Agree, I am baffled that the 84 year old who is now banned from driving for year can then start driving again without a retest. We should be re-tested regularly.
