Another Brick in the Wall

Some of you might have noticed the wall in yesterday's photograph. Well, that's part of the York city wall. These walls extend for several miles around the centre of the city, and it's possible to walk around on the top of them - at least before they shut them at sundown. Though "sundown" is a fairly abstract concept when the sky is so filled with clouds that you can't actually see the sun, so at times it might be more guesswork than anything else.

While they don't completely surround the city centre like in the Chinese city Xi'an and you can't ride a bike around them, they do pre-date those walls by about 500 years, having being built some time around 71 AD. This is the one really weird thing about the UK. Everything is old. Historic. It's not like Australia where something is historic if it's been around for a hundred years or so. Heck, by those standards, there's probably some moldy bread lying on a street that's historic. But I digress, and I could most likely write a whole post about that, so there's no point in wasting good blogging material. So, back to the walls.

Well, it's obvious that the thing have been here for a while, because if you walk on the edge, a loose stone here and there reminds you that you're perhaps not doing the safest thing in the world. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the ground level at points has risen so much that the walls would be unlikely to keep out anything at all. In fact, they could probably be breached by a slightly aggressive squirrel whose nuts have been stolen. Hmmm, squirrel sappers. Now there's an idea.

Life in the Bike Lane

Apologies for not having updated this in a while, but I've been fairly busy. I thought I was overdue for me to give a bit of information about where I am. I'm living in York, which is an interesting little city. So far, the English weather has proven to be as fickle as a four year old's temper, and the Crowded House song "Four Seasons in One Day" isn't even close. Four seasons in one hour would probably be closer to the mark.

But the thing I'm posting about today is how York is so amazingly accommodating to cyclists. Coming from Canberra, which is supposedly a cyclist friendly city (although sometimes some car drivers seem to forget that), York wins unequivocally in providing for cyclists.

Not only do cyclists get bike paths on the side of the road, but cars actually give way to them instead of treating them as a mobile speed hump that gives them points in some kind of real-life Grand Theft Auto game.

However, the really unique thing is that cyclists get their own traffic lights. Yes, there's bicycle lights that go green when cyclists get their turn to go while all the cars are stopped for them to go through.

In some intersections, there's even little "bike-only" areas right at the front of the intersection, so the cyclists get to ride past all the stationary cars at the red traffic lights to their little buffer zone. Then, before all the cars get to go, the cyclists get a few seconds to get moving and through the intersection and get back in their bike line before the red lights disappear completely and allow the cars to move as well.

Of course, there has to be some drawback to all this cyclist generosity. And there is, but it's a fairly simply one. If you ride on the pedestrian footpath, you're liable to be hit with a 30 pound fine.