Author: Carlton Reid

March 17, 2024 / / Blog

17th March 2024

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 349: Turn on Strava for everyday journeys, it could reshape streets for the better

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUEST: Tom Knights, Strava Metro

TRANSCRIPT

Carlton Reid 0:13
Welcome to Episode 349 of the Spokesmen cycling podcast. This show was engineered on Sunday 17th of March 2024.

David Bernstein 0:28
The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider. Whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That’s t e r n bicycles.com to learn more.

Carlton Reid 1:03
I’m Carlton Reid. On today’s show, I’m talking with Tom Knights. He’s the senior manager of partnerships and marketing for Strava Metro. This is a super-useful active travel city-making dataset-service from the athlete tracking app. And if you bristled at the word athlete, because you think there’s no sport in transport, listen on …

Strava metro was very, very

insistent in 2020. About how successful cycling and and walking in all active mode because of the pandemic and the blog posting was, you know, we’re very pained to say this. However, you know, it’s really, really, we’re going crackers with the amount of cycling as you know, the bike boom, yeah, what did go amazing. Now, the bike industry right now is famously and woefully massively down in the dumps. So what have you seen with usage? So what has happened since 2022? actual usage of bicycles not just, you know, we know the sales are bad. Is the usage bad also?

Tom Knights 2:21
Yeah, that’s a really good question. And actually like to say the kind of the free, the free, free call to Strava Metro kind of suddenly going free was actually very well timed, unfortunately, under very difficult circumstances globally. One of the reasons like I say, we kind of made Strava Metro free wasn’t actually because of the pandemic and the looming kind of crisis. And obviously, this switch to human powered transportation. It was like, almost like an unfortunate timing, but but obviously beneficial for cities and all the planners that start to use this data. So yes, we definitely saw this huge boom during the kind of 2020 21 era. And thankfully, because a lot of cities and a lot of regions and governments had the foresight to start investing in protecting cycle lanes in safe routes, which we know is one of the biggest barriers to people actually kind of picking up a bicycle. Lot of those initiatives have stayed, and we hope that they’ve stayed because actually, they’ve been able to see some of the Strava activity straight through Strava Metro, and then use that against other data sources to start to understand actually, is this being used in terms of trends, and overall, we’ve definitely seen more of a normalisation but again, what we are seeing is obviously, people looking for alternatives to either commute, and then well, kind of 2024 the word commute looks a bit different than maybe it did in 2019. But anything that’s a utility trip, and essentially through safe and accessible infrastructure. That’s what we know. And I’m sure you know, from all the kind of conversations you’ve had over the years, that’s the biggest driver to people, making it feel safe. So, long story short, yes, we’ve definitely seen a normalisation now, in terms of growth

Carlton Reid 4:06
Normalisation, that sounds like quite a bit of a euphemism for, for what?

Tom Knights 4:12
So I guess the new the new normal as it were, so we’ve definitely seen that growth. And then now what we’ve seen, like I say, as people who are consistently cycling now, and then obviously, we hope that through infrastructure improvements into society into communities, that will then also encourage even more folks to pick up a bicycle on that front.

Carlton Reid 4:33
I’m gonna carry on digging here, because I think it’s quite important. So that graph that was on the Strava Metro, I remember it well, the human powered transportation one Yep. Yeah. So I mean, that was that was great. But, you know, so when you’ve been normalisation, is that graph, it went up like crazy. And do you mean by normalisation that it went down so well usage is down or has

plateaued,

Tom Knights 5:00
so not I mean, it’s difficult to say but I wouldn’t say plateau because we’re always seeing kind of growth. And that’s what’s so exciting a and I can’t necessarily kind of say a lot more about the Strava core Strava world because of course, that’s a different kind of department as it were. But in terms of the Metro world, and what we’re seeing in terms of cycling, in general, we’ve just seen that spike from 2019 to 2020, that continued growth into 2021. And now what is is probably more of that kind of continuous steady growth. As opposed to that, we I wouldn’t say we’ve definitely seen any kind of drop off as it were on that front.

Carlton Reid 5:34
So it’s interesting, because we now have metrics that we just didn’t have, you know, 10, 15 20 years ago, from an industry perspective, used to be able to track

sales of number of bikes, and but you never knew whether, actually people even though a few bikes sold, actually, people might actually be riding more, potentially. So now we have metrics from from people like you, where you can not only track the number of bikes sold, but you can also track roughly whether people are using those bikes. So that’s fascinating information from a market point of view. And the way I’m going from on that is

you’ve got some high end holiday companies, you know, Glorious Gravel going to Sri Lanka, Namibia, all these amazing places with people who got clearly a lot of money and a fair bit of time. Yeah, still getting out there cycling. So when we haven’t seen that end shift at all. But no, that’s the rarefied end, isn’t it? That’s like, Yeah, from from a metro point of view.

Tom Knights 6:42
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I in terms of, you know, think travel and tourism, that is obviously a kind of luxury. And, you know, for kind of people a having the kind of means to kind of jump on a plane or to kind of visit and take the time off. And that’s great, though, for kind of seeing that, that boom, because we want people to kind of get an introduction to cycling in general. And if that means discovering it on a holiday tour, fantastic. Hopefully, that then translates into cycling into work maybe two or three days a week, or suddenly dropping a car trip once a week, because they’ve discovered the joy of cycling. But I think January what we’re hoping, though, is we see this bike boom, fueled by better and safer streets. That’s, that’s our kind of main concern is that, if you build it, I know, you’ve heard this phrase a lot before, you know, if you build it, people will come. And we know that from Strava Metro data, when you look at the kind of streets where there’s been investment, the Before and After Effects is amazing. See this kind of increase in trips. Now, of course, you might say, Well hold on Strava growth. But actually, what we’re seeing is that Strava Metro data alongside Eco-counter or Telraam data, you can start to kind of normalise and build a model. And I think that’s what we’re we’re hoping that people can start to, as you mentioned, all these amazing datasets start to pull these together, and then really build this picture to kind of tell a different story than perhaps maybe the negative stories are saying in terms of, you know, cycling booms over or no one’s using this bike lane, etc.

Carlton Reid 8:10
And this is an obvious question, okay. And this is a question that I’m sure you are incredibly well used to batting away, and you know, you’re gonna get it. And you, you could almost do it yourself. So that is in your documentation. It’s all about athletes. Of course, when you put that into Strava Metro, you’re talking about non lycra. I know you discuss this on your blogs, but just just tell me now, why I would be wrong to suggest that Mamils, women on bikes and lycra why the data is robust, even though you talk about athletes?

Tom Knights 8:53
Yeah, no, you’re quite right. And it’s a, it’s a really good point. And I suppose, from the data point of view, we’re not looking at,

we look at those as activities and people and trips so that the athletes is more of a kind of Strava kind of communications in a playful way to call our community athletes, and you’ve probably seen various different messages over the years about, you know, if you’re an athlete, you’re on Strava. And, and essentially, there is a lot of truth in that, you know, we want anyone who moves through human powered transportation, or through moves and find their joy in discovering movement ways we would define as an athlete, you know, anyone who is doing that, now appreciating the world of transportation planning and bike lanes and commuting, you might not think, you know, cycling across the Waterloo Bridge in the morning at 830. You’re an athlete, but essentially, from a metro point of view, what we’re looking to do is see these community based trips as data points, like say that can be used for improving infrastructure on that front. And I think the way that actually I would position it personally is often thinking, well, everyone who uploads a ride on to Strava is a human powered counter, because through through Metro

That’s going towards some kind of better cause in terms of funding and reviewing active travel investment.

But I do understand your point about you know, Mamil. And you know, a lot of drivers growth in the early days was fueled by that amazing core set of athletes. And you know, I grew up in this town called Dorking, which you’re probably familiar with, from the classic ride, sorry, and I’m very familiar, you know, the weekends kind of seeing, you know, the the kind of, I say the kind of more sportive rides coming through the town. But actually, what that served is actually an inspiration for more people’s go. Actually, that was quite fun. I should try that. And I think the data we’re seeing through Year in Sport that we’ve done anecdotally, through Metro data, that actually we’ve got a lot more 18 to 34 year olds, who are now also discovering the joy of active transportation.

And again, Metro data is telling us that it’s not just, you know, the weekend, you know, the Saturday morning at 10am, in the Surrey Hills or on the the kind of Yorkshire Dales it’s actually taking place on the streets of Manchester, or the streets of London, etc. And I think that’s what we’re hoping is that story through community or athletes, as you know, we’re calling it that that helps planners to see that trend is is not just, you know, the kind of Lycra

brigade Who are you know, cycling and I would all use what the same people that are cycling at the weekends, you know, on the kind of right sorry, classics or up in the Yorkshire Dales are also the same people that are using bike lanes. And equally as important when we’re thinking about counting.

Carlton Reid 11:30
Of course, you’re not getting

the invisible in American terms, it’s called the invisible cyclists. So these are often Latino.

Basically poor people on bikes, who are definitely not going to be using Strava. But going to using bikes, and then they call them invisible cyclists, because

they’re not on bicycles that perhaps

an enthusiast would ride, but they are using bicycles and all power to their elbow, but power to their knees. Now, you’re not capturing them. So if you’re not capturing a significant number of people who are using

the roads, does that not suggest that you’re missing an important chunk of people who are not using? You just can’t capture everybody? And how important is that?

Tom Knights 12:27
Yeah, really, really good point. And I guess a couple of bits on that is that

essentially no data set, you know, the world is accurate, you think about a, you know, a bicycle counsellor on the embankment or, you know, in the middle of Manchester, or even in the rural area, you know, if someone doesn’t go through that specific kind of counting station, as it were, you’re not being picked up in the count. And I think that’s what Strava Metro is really kind of aiming to do is essentially colouring the map with all the blank spots that aren’t being picked up. And being free, which is, again, one of these kind of opportunities to kind of get this data into the masses, allows transportation planners allows Safe Streets advocates, anyone who’s focused on transportation equity and environmental racism to dive into that data and go, Okay, looks like actually, there’s people going through this counting station here. But actually, Strava Metro is also showing us that people are going down this route. So what’s interesting what’s going on there. And again, you’re quite right to call out that the heat map, for example, in, you know, maybe underrepresented areas, or places that don’t necessarily have the same political will have, you know,

more affluent areas who have perhaps built cycle lanes or made their streets more attractive from things like heat islands, you think about kind of cities outside of the UK that suffer a lot from high temperatures, you know, the streets are not necessarily designed for being walkable and bikable. That’s what we’re really hoping we can also use the Strava data to show what’s not happening, as well as what’s happening. And again, a lot of the work that Metro is involved in is ties back into this kind of social impact piece. It’s not just, you know, we obviously want this data to be used by, you know, transportation planners, but we’re also hoping we can start to, you know, work a lot more with, you know, say advocacy groups, anyone likes easy, bold environmental racism and transportation equity, to really kind of look at that data, and metrics looks, it’s been designed that anyone including myself, I’m not a geospatial professional, but I can see, you know, through a map and looking at certain areas where people are cycling and when they’re not cycling, but also we want to build a product and I can’t really, you know, say I’m not necessarily holding the Strava product side, but we want to build an experience, which is all encompassing for everyone on there, but I definitely understand your point about the barriers to entry, you know, just in general, you cycling you need to have a bike to join Strava you need a mobile phone that supports you know, obviously your Strava although we do have connections with lots of fitness devices, but again, that comes at a cost, but hopefully, the more people that learn about

Metro and the authenticity and the kind of the fact that it’s free. The fact that Strava is free to join, it gives people a sense of empowerment that actually, I can change something that’s happening on my street. And that’s a big part of the messaging that, you know, I’m working on, and certainly have been working on for the last five years, because as you say,

maybe the association with Strava is it’s just for athletes, or people who are doing k runs, and Q RMS, etc. But actually, what we’re seeing is that more and more people are turning to Strava, to kind of log their activities, and hopefully through when they learn about Metro, they’ll realise that they’re actually changing their communities, because that data is really kind of playing a part in helping to shape your better infrastructure or, essentially, build a political case for more investment.

Carlton Reid 15:45
Good point. So somebody like me, who’s been a Strava member since 2013 I discovered by looking into my profile this morning,

Tom Knights 15:53
and then thank you for your long term membership.

Carlton Reid 15:57
I would say, I’m not a frequent updater. But I should be, shouldn’t I? So what you’re saying is people like me who have it on our phones, don’t use it, you know, because I don’t consider myself an athlete. Yeah, that should be turning on, for even everyday journeys, because it helps.

Tom Knights 16:18
So I’ve been, you know, I’d have that in writing. And, as it quite, you know, when we kind of go out to advocacy kind of events and talk to kind of people because I think, as you’ve just said, you know, the more people that discover about this, you know, cycle of like Strava, being free and then wanting to make streets better. And then Metro, obviously, enabling that, we think there’s a really compelling story. And I genuinely there’s, this is such a passionate thing to kind of work on. And I think we’re very lucky, you know, part of the metro team to be able to have these conversations with partners all over the world. And I think we are we’ve met at Velo-city a couple of times before. And the one thing that comes up all the time at these conferences is, you know, how are we measuring it? Or how do we win the case for safer streets? And, you know, this is our answer to that and to say, well, let’s come together and bring all these amazing datasets that are available out there. You know, let’s build a case and get people to see that this is available.

Carlton Reid 17:12
And those datasets, the expectation is, from your point of view, that a transportation planning department will be using multiple sources, they won’t be just using Metro. They’ll be using their own counting devices, hopefully, if they’ve got them. And they’ll be plotting everything. And they’ll have some sort of, will they have a desktop with everything on? Or have they got like a look at lots of different screens?

Tom Knights 17:40
Yeah, so what we hear from from foreigners, they use a lot of geospatial kind of software, you know, there’s obviously various different enterprise kind of grade level software and data analytics tools where you can always ingest multiple sorts of data. So we make extracting the data from from Metro, which is, I’m sure, hopefully, everyone realises completely anonymized, obviously, and then also aggregated, we make that very easy for partners to essentially download, and then upload back into, like, say, all of this data planning tools.

And obviously, you know, there’s multiple data sets out there. And largely, like I say, we use the same mapping tools as well. So OpenStreetMap is really important, you know, in terms of, actually, how do you paint a picture of your infrastructure in your area. And like, say, planners will then use that to build reports to kind of maybe produce research, and then essentially come up with this kind of our number, which says, you know, for every X number of trips on Strava, you can say that there’s 100 trips of normal, non non Strava usage, for example, send your Strava.

But, and we’ve seen a couple of examples that, you know, the Office of National Statistics have done that, in rural remote areas, Transport for London, have been using it to kind of model traffic lights through London and the timing that you get on green times, you know, and it’s not just Strava D. So you don’t want to build cities just around one particular user. But that’s why being like I say, a free tool to do that allows us to kind of

plug into all these other datasets.

Unknown Speaker 19:12
Let’s let’s go backwards a little bit into

Carlton Reid 19:16
that, that I’ll use your term, the athlete, so you basically got a rider? Yeah, going along. I’ll use like, even though I’m like to 50 miles away. I’ll use London as an example. So going along the Embankment. Yeah, yeah, yes, you’ve anonymized all the data. So this is not you know, you know, you don’t know this particular person on a bike at all. You can’t track anything. But you can see at a granular level, whether they are on the road or whether they are on the Embankment cycleway, and you can see where they make that you know, sudden turn like there’s a there’s a few turns on the embankment where you’ve got to make quite a shift to get on to the cycleway. So you in Strava Metro, you can see that too.

happening?

Tom Knights 20:01
Exactly that so we can see, like I say the, I think there’s something like 420 million edges in the whole world. So edge is referred to as streets on OpenStreetMap. And if you’ve got some enthusiastic mapping listeners on this podcast, hopefully they might be able to write in and correct me in some tell me how many exactly edges there are. But if you think about the world as all of these kind of different edges and routes that are built up, where there’s been a Strava activity gone over the top of that, and, of course, where there’s been a minimum of free, which allows us to kind of aggregate those activities, we can exactly that show you where people have turned left, how many trips went off, on a certain direction? Was this route busier because of a road closure one week? Or was this route more improved year on year because of a safer kind of passageway? You know, I appreciate we’re talkinh about cycling here. But if you think about running and walking, you know, was this improved? Because there was better lighting? Or were more people using this pathway, because, you know, there was a kind of nice new path put down. So I think this is like it’s this kind of colouring in the map with all the other kind of datasets that are available. And then Strava can kind of tell you that picture of where, you know, there has been activity.

Carlton Reid 21:12
So when Nick Ferrari goes on the radio and says, I got stuck behind a cyclist on the Embankment, they should be on the cycleway. You could or anybody could go to Strava Metro, and say, well, actually, that must have been just a completely

unusual person. Because look, 99.9% of of cyclists are going on to the cycleway. And here look, we can show you the heat map where that is happening. That’s what you can do?

Tom Knights 21:42
Exactly that. And like I say you want one colour, I would say is it’s not anyone. So that was one of the caveats to the authenticity of the kind of Metro project. And I know that word authenticity thrown a lot you know about but that the only reason Metro works is because the Strava community buy into this idea that the data has been used for something good, not for commercial purposes. So not anyone can access Metro, but TfL can access it, for example, in your example of the bike lanes in London, London cycling campaign could access this because of course, you know, they’re involved in advocacy work.

Unfortunately, LBC wouldn’t be able to access this, because obviously they’re using it for other purposes.

But actually anyone involved in safe infrastructure, and we hope that this is it, you know, when the the transportation teams, all these different medical authorities or local authorities can actually go, actually what we have seen on the street is that X percentage of people are using this bike lane on there. And that’s, that’s what I think it’s going to take to kind of not win the argument, but really convinced people that bike lanes are being used, and they’re a good investment. They’re just incredibly efficient, because you never see anyone in traffic. And then yes, people are constantly moving.

Carlton Reid 22:53
Yes. Now, I know you’re not on this side of it. So it’s a slightly unfair question to ask, but I’d like one I’d like you to tell me about anyway. So at the end, not not now. But at the end, I’d like you to go through and just tell people how much it costs to, you know, go the full fat version of Strava. But before you do that, and that’s going to be the end anyway, just let’s just, you know, just confirm this right now, you do not need to use Strava Metro for is free for transportation planners, anybody else. But you don’t need any, you’re not going to get hassled to become a pro member.

To be one of these people like me who just want to do good for the community by turning metro or Strava on for our normal daily rides, you won’t be charged for that you can get a free membership that will do everything apart from all the pro level stuff that you don’t need anyway, if you’re just one of these lapsed people?

Tom Knights 23:56
Yeah, it’s possible. And so, you know, Strava is like has always operated on that kind of freemium model, as it were, that you know, at its simplest, you can download the app, join the community upload rise. And then if you’ve made that road public, so I should have added that caveat as well, that will contribute to metric because of course, you know, people might want to hide the start or the end of their journeys, they won’t count. Some people might want to also hide a certain route. But hopefully, like say when they hear about the project and go actually, this is a pretty good idea, I should start uploading my routes and maybe, you know, further down the line as they kind of start to explore Strava they want to kind of look at a route or they want to kind of go oh, that could be quite a good tool to have because I’ve got more into my cycling journey, then yes, of course. Strava is open for them. But at its source and Metro, they are both free.

Carlton Reid 24:46
Mm hmm. Okay. At this point, I would like to cut away to my colleague, David who will give a short break.

David Bernstein 24:56
This podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles.

The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider. Whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That’s t e r n bicycles.com to learn more. This podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern understand that while a large cargo bike can carry oodles of stuff, many of us prefer something a little more manageable. That’s why they’ve come up with the HSD e-cargobike for folks with big aspirations to go car free, delivered in a compact size, with its rear shock, 280 kilos, and a combined hauling capacity of 180 kilos. The robust new HSD is stable and easy to manoeuvre, even when under load. And with its Bosch eBIKE SYSTEM tested and certified to meet the highest UL standards for electric and fire safety you’ll be able to share many worryfree adventures with a loved one whether it’s your kiddo or Nan. Visit www.ternbicycles. That’s te r n turn bicycles.com to learn more

Carlton Reid 25:57
Thanks, David. And we’re back with Tom Knights of Strava Metro, and I was looking at your LinkedIn profile. And as you do when you when you want to talk to somebody and you want to find out their background, and you’ve kind of similar background to me, in that you did classics you did you did like nothing to do with what you’re doing in your day job. You did like it will tell me what you did it was Exeter University exactly what you did.

So I kind of found found myself essentially looking at degree subjects where, you know, I was interested in more the kind of anthropological aspects of history and actually Classical Studies, and I’m always very much told by classic students that classics versus Classical Studies is a very different subjects. Obviously, one focuses heavily on Latin language in Greek texts, whereas Classical Studies is more about, you know, the discovery of what was going on during the Roman Empire in the Greek Empire period. So that was always a passion of mine about kind of understanding society, and maybe what was the kind of political kind of themes at the time and, you know, fascinated about some communities on there. And, of course, the story for the dad joke, but like, most people, when you study history, there’s no future in it.

I’ll use that.

Tom Knights 27:24
But yeah, obviously, you know, that allowed me, you know, I suppose to back in the kind of early 2000s, when I was at university, you know, it was a very privileged time, when they weren’t necessarily crippling university fees and structure. So it allowed me to kind of study a subject, which was more of a passion project. But of course, you know, didn’t necessarily elude me into kind of a specific career working in British museum or on an archaeological site in antiquity.

And actually, in hindsight, I think geography would have been more of my passion, because that’s ultimately what’s kind of landed me in this area of transportation and maps and bicycles. Geography was always my kind of first passion.

Carlton Reid 28:04
But you’re a man after my own heart, because I did a degree, that was nothing connected to what I eventually did. And that was religious studies and comparative religion. And I did Hebrew, as well. So I did do a not a classic language, but I did a language that was known to antiquity. I’d say, yeah, we’ve come similar backgrounds. But then you’ve if you look at your career progression, it went very quickly from something that’s completely useless to and affect your career. If I look at your career arc has been certainly tech. So from the very first it was you went from classics, blummin’ heck,, to tech, that’s that’s a leap. And then you’ve carried on that, that that trajectory.

Tom Knights 28:45
Yeah, definitely, I think that kind of, you know, almost juxtaposes the kind of interest in history, but I think a lot of my friends maybe went into, you know, in the early 2000s, like most people kind of found their way going into financial services, I’d always kind of been more interested in the world of tech and technology. And then working my way up through various kind of research firms and kind of people teams in that world of headhunting and kind of early days of, of search, when it comes to kind of jobs and careers. Allow me I suppose just to suppose learn a lot more about the world of tech, and then actually through interviewing people and and candidates and helping people on their search journey. That then opened my eyes into this whole world of kind of software, which again, early 2000s was really interesting, and then tied into that passion for sports and maps and mapping, landed, actually initially at a company when I lived in Hong Kong for five or six years, which was doing event registration for marathons and five K’s and stuff like that, which is obviously very relevant to the Strava world nowadays. But it was when Strava Metro came along and said that they were looking for someone to essentially grow the community on Strava Metro in Europe. It was too good an opportunity not to kind of put my CV forward so

You know, tied into all my passions around mapping and transportation.

Carlton Reid 30:04
And, and getting out there and doing stuff. As in Yes. Being an athlete if you want to use that term.

Tom Knights 30:11
Exactly. And you know, that’s a it’s an interesting point to kind of call up. But essentially the the advice, actually the CEO at the time, who was a gentleman called James, and actually Michael Hogarth, the founder of Strava, they said, The most important thing you can do in this role at Strava Metro is get out there and see bike lanes and infrastructure, or really understand what the kind of partners are doing. So over the last five years, that’s kind of allowed me to get involved and actually see some of these projects. And you know, one of the best moments of the year or certainly at conferences, or events we go to whenever there’s a bike parade, and I’ve never had a bike tour or a technical tour around the cities that you can visit, and you can really start to see the, you know, how those numbers come to life, actually, in the physical world, because, again, we’ve focused a lot on on this talk, we talked a lot about the Embankment. But actually, there’s a whole multitude of examples around the European continent, and also across the world of bike lanes, which we visited and gone. Gosh, that’s really interesting, what innovative design and oh, look at how that impacted this number of people.

Carlton Reid 31:13
Tell me about your day them. So you’ve got somebody flagged out that yes, sometimes travelling around a bit. So what what do you do, Tom, scribe, what you actually do to people who don’t know what you might be doing day to day?

Tom Knights 31:28
I love it. So my biggest kind of responsibility is to grow the awareness of Strava Metro. And obviously, the more people that hear about Metro, hopefully, from listening to this, the more people might go, okay, that’s really interesting. I didn’t know that. So essentially, that’s our, our main focus is to speak to the folks that active travel England through to the city of Paris, and obviously, the, the onset of zoom and online meetings has made that a lot more accessible now, which is great. So as much as I’d love to go visit all these places, a lot of them are done by kind of video conferencing, which is allowed us to scale and obviously tell the story in a kind of much more scalable way. But where possible, I’ll always try and visit partners and learn about what they’re doing on the ground. And then actually, one of the biggest kind of

tasks this time around is to then how do we communicate these back to the Strava community, and then get all these 120 million athletes who are on Strava, to actually learn about these projects that their movement has contributed to, because that’s going to be the power of when they understand that your cycles work, even though it’s providing you with your exercise or your means of transportation. It’s also having a big impact on how, for example, you transport Greater Manchester or Transport for London to building your roads and your cycling. So if it helps with that extra bit of motivation, to get out of bed on a kind of cold January morning to kind of, you know, get cycling or walking to work, then, you know, we’ve done our job.

Carlton Reid 32:57
Isn’t there an argument and I am playing devil’s advocate here a little bit, council employee, a transportation but oh, maybe a councillor could actually use your data, which shows us lots and lots of people using a certain road? At a certain time? Yeah. And you would say,

to a council?

Officer? Well, look, we need to improve this route. Because look, how many cyclists are using it, we need to improve that. So it’s more comfortable besides blah, blah, blah. But, you know, a councillor could use that exact same argument and say, Well, why do we need to improve anything? You’re just telling me there’s loads of cyclists using this road? Great, job done?

Tom Knights 33:44
Well, I think the answer that is the kind of the theory that maybe, you know, a lot of highways and motorways around the world have used, which is what more lanes will fix it. And what did what happens when you get one more loan, we’ll fix it, you get more cars driving? Well, I think the principle for that applies in terms of, if you keep fixing and increasing the number of cycle paths and bike lanes, then you’ll see an increase in even more cyclists on there. So that would be my kind of caveat to say is, you know, the same way that we saw, you know, mass growth of roads and kind of infrastructure around the country, the same way that you could, if you keep investing, you’ll, you’ll see those increases come even more, as well. So it’s just the start. I think this is the kind of the key point. And, you know, this has only really been what I’ve been in the industry for what five or six years intended, specifically around the world of transportation planning. And I’ve, I’ve read your in as another student of history, read your history of bike lanes, and what we’re seeing is nothing new. You know, this obviously happened in the 1920s, as you’ve written about, it’s happened, you know, the early 1950s. And we hope that obviously, this bike boom is going to continue, but we know that the secret to that is obviously infrastructure, but the extra secret sauce and I’m gonna say this with my Strava hat on so apologies is that you know,

other people keep other people motivated. And that’s where Strava comes into it as a motivation machine.

Carlton Reid 35:06
So that game, gamification of it almost. Exactly, which is a good segue, thank you very much into my next question, which will be at the White House. So that’s a that’s a gamification, so, so just tell me exactly I know it’s not UK, but this is a, this is a podcast that goes … it’s very popular in America. So Strava, not Strava Metro, but Strava is working with the White House on something. So just tell us what what you’re doing. And then the gameifacation angle of that?

Tom Knights 35:34
Yeah. So from obviously, my understanding internally of the team that’s been working on that is very similar to other kind of projects or campaigns, or let’s say gamification, or challenges that we would work on this time, though, there’s obviously a social impact cause attached to it, I think what’s happened and from what I understand is that the White House, obviously have a campaign or a kind of cause that they’re looking to mobilise the community on, they had a commercial partner in work, which is, you know, obviously, kind of, I suppose, helping to kind of measure that through the through the wearable side. But the White House is partnering with Strava, to support physical activity, as part of its challenges to end hunger and build healthier communities. Now, as part of the social impact strategy, let’s say the call to action is to raise awareness of that campaign through movement. And obviously, that movement there is on Strava. And it’s very similar to lots of other campaigns that we might work with, from brands, but also also other charities, you know, that might want to also mobilise their community on Strava, through that kind of challenge format.

Carlton Reid 36:38
So that’s a US initiative. Obviously, it’s the White House as in the White House. What other stuff might you be doing UK or maybe even worldwide, similar to that?

Tom Knights 36:50
Well, I think ultimately, it’s if if we’ve done our job, right, and you know, the more people that learn about these challenges for good for social impact, we hope that people will start to see Strava as a platform, where they can actually start to tell their message to what’s a very engaged community. You know, like I say, not every cyclist is on Strava. But we do have, you know, in the UK, again, I’m going to correct myself on every one in seven adults has joined Strava, or something around 15% of the population. So that’s not everyone, but it is a very engaged audience. It’s bonkers, actually. So how many What’s that in millions? Is that like 10 million downloads or something, I will come back with some specific figures. And James can help with that.

On on, on our team, but Yeah, certainly, we obviously are in the millions of users in the UK. And of course, that’s a really engaged community who are using Strava a for their movement, but also then can attach that through a challenge for a social impact campaign, or brand campaign. And again, these challenges are completely optional for people to dive into should they wish to. And I think that’s one of the kind of key things to get at the Strava community, you know, having that say and what they do, and that’s what’s probably kept people coming back stronger over time, is that they get they have a choice in what they can join. And the challenges that the the team in Bristol, who in the UK run those operations for similar to the White House challenge, they do a fantastic job of making sure that there’s some really exciting challenges to come onto the platform and keep people motivated.

Carlton Reid 38:26
So can you now tell me

the different pricing options, so people are like, they’ve got the free version? They maybe like me that don’t.

They will now start using the free version a bit more for the reasons we’ve discussed before. But if you wanted to up the game, what would you be paying? And what would you be getting?

Tom Knights 38:46
So for UK based users, obviously Strava premium is an option and that it costs £8.99 per month, or £54.99 per year. Obviously, there’s a freemium model, in terms of the kind of ability to join Strava and not have to, like, say, necessarily choose to subscribe. But again, the compelling products, and the opportunity that the product team in the US and all the amazing kind of engineers that work on Strava have built an experience that should you wish to subscribe. There’s a really compelling reason to mostly through our amazing routing, mapping discovery tools, looking at new routes to explore. Obviously, like saying you’ve got access to

technical data, should you wish to kind of see things like your heart rate and health and kind of segments and leaderboards, etc. So there’s something on Strava for a lot of folks, and of course, you know, that community element and clubs and groups is really exciting. And another way for local authorities and governments to really drive engagement back to Metro, for example.

Carlton Reid 39:54
And then you got things like integration with fat map so you can like do all sorts of stuff with that as well because it’s

Strava. Did you buy fat map? Is that was that?

Tom Knights 40:02
Yeah, so there was a strategic acquisition of fat map and you know, the the, that’s

the exact date has been going on for the last year. So again, all these amazing tools and some mapping tools are such a good driver for people to discover the world around them. And I think that’s what’s really exciting is that, you know, yes, you might go on a bike ride and you know, kind of cycle from A to B on one of the cycle highways. But at the weekend, that same bike hopefully, is being used to then go, that that route is quite interesting, or I saw my friend do that route. You know, the other day that looks like I could probably do that I’ve got a spare couple of hours. And it’s basically just keeping people active. Again, you’ve probably heard this one for every minute spent on Strava, you can attribute 30 minutes of activity back to your kind of daily life. So rather than that, and that’s because you could you look at heat map, you see, you’re in an unusual destination, you don’t you’re you’re at your bike, and you fire up the heat map. It’s like, everybody’s gone that way. That way, then is that what you mean? Yeah, essentially, you know, like I say, you might, or it might just be on your activity feed that, you know, kind of been suggested a route or suggested a, an area to kind of move through. And I think that’s what’s really exciting is when you get somewhere new, you know that there’s a community, because obviously, we’re a global community that has cycled there before. And I say you can either look at the heat map, or you might be able to see someone’s route. And they’ve recommended it as a kind of place to ride. That inspiration you get from not just

like, say, scrolling through maybe another social network or Doom scrolling, should I say, hopefully, that movement and inspiration of people being active for something that’s going to be a positive driver for people being, you know, engaged on Strava.

Carlton Reid 41:44
There is another active travel analogy, which sometimes gets wheeled out. And that is, you can’t tell

why you need a bridge from the number of people swimming across the river. Because they aren’t going to swim across the river with a bike, they probably aren’t going to swim across the river full stop. But when you put a bridge in it suddenly get, you know, the heat map would go crazy. But once you put the bridge in, so is any of your cleverness your your text, can any of it can I spot? Well, if you only had something here, it would open up, you know, is this something that you can pinpoint that you can say that a bridge analogy can be used?

Tom Knights 42:25
Absolutely. And thank you so much for asking that, because that’s something we just updated last year in our metro product that obviously the planners and the transportation teams can see. And a lot of it ties back into some of the the kind of accessibility transportation equity, environmental racism that we talked about. What we’ve shown is that, when you put a pin on the map, we’ve also been able to kind of draw almost like a kind of circle around what’s accessible within say, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, etc. And people can see data within that kind of circle, which, again, will show you that where there’s a massive motorway with no bridge crossing, that’s that part of the community can’t access the park on the other side of it, or where there’s, for example, a big brownfield site where there’s been industrial use, it’s not safe to cycle through. So people have kind of diverted around it, we had a really good example, actually, recently in Germany, where, you know, there was a curb on the side of a bike lane. And you could see very clearly actually three desire lines on the on the actual grass and the verge that people were kind of going off this curb through the woods to kind of cut out maybe a mile. And again, using Strava, Metro, this German transportation team who are based in Frankfurt, actually, I’ll share the example with you because it’s fascinating see how even at a really small local level, these little changes can make a massive difference. And they’re not expensive to do, I think it only cost them something a couple of 1000 euros to drop the curb, because they then saw that that was having an impact on where people were then cycling. So you know, the famous analogy of when it snows, you can really see the designs of cars. Actually, when you look at the design on the heat map, and then in turn, look at that on Strava, you can start to see Oh, that’s interesting. And again, another great example that was Hartfordshire county council had a bicycle counsellor in one location. And they realised that the Strava count was actually higher than the bicycle counter. And they thought well hold on what’s happening there. And actually, there was a kind of dangerous crossing just slightly further up from this bicycle counter. And they were able to then use the Strava data to kind of, I suppose understand that actually, people were going this way because it was a safer journey. And that’s the these are the kind of insights that yes, we want to do the big high level projects and you know, make sure that we get new infrastructure and cycleways across major cities. But actually the really exciting ones when local advocacy groups or local councils who don’t necessarily have big budgets for you to accessing data can make these small changes and really improve these kind of everyday life for their community.

Carlton Reid 44:56
Can the Netherlands which obviously every week, look

Up to is like, the absolute nirvana of cycling. Do you like do you have like, Dutch people go, Oh, we could use this. It’s like, Jesus, they even removing even more, you haven’t done so. So basically, can you improve the Dutch cycle network?

Tom Knights 45:15
Yeah, definitely. And actually, we’ve had some interesting conversations with the folks over in Copenhagen, and obviously, in Amsterdam, and across the Netherlands as well. So not just Denmark and Holland. But, of course, the Netherlands is such a stays a bellwether of the cycling industry, but they’re always looking at new ways to improve, you know, the technology that they’re using and counting data. We are in Leuven, just at the end of November for the policy network events. And again, we are understanding that the kind of technical university they are leaving, we’ve been using metro to kind of understand, you know, and this is a really forward thinking Belgium city, which has got great cycle access, but they still need data to understand and counter. So rather than, you know, developing another app to count people, and getting the community to download it, they’ve seen that correlation between actually Strava and Strava, Metro.

So again, they don’t need to necessarily go and kind of reinvent the wheel, so to speak with, you know, building another kind of engagement tool with local community to get them to join, because Metro is hopefully fulfilling that service.

Carlton Reid 46:20
Brilliant, Tom that’s been absolutely fascinating. And we could go on for a good amount of time, probably on Classics literature, even while we discussed, what’s your Roman Empire? Yes, exactly.

But we can’t, because we people just won’t listen to 10 hours of us chatting away.

Tom Knights 46:42
I’m sure they will.

Carlton Reid 46:43
Now, could you tell us where people can find out? I’m sure people know where you can get onto Strava. But how they find out about Strava Metro, and and maybe how they can contact you?

Tom Knights 46:56
Yeah, definitely. So the best way to get in touch with myself and travel metric is on metro.strava.com. And then on that website, you’ll be able to learn more about case studies about how cities how researchers, communities have used the actual kind of practical steps of the data. There’s also some frequently asked questions on there about you know, privacy and how the data is used, etc. And then most importantly, there’s an apply button. So you can click apply for access. And then what we ask is that a you’re a organisation that is involved in working to improve active transportation. If you’re a consultancy, or an engineering firm, we also accept those applications as well. As long as you’re under contract with say, for example, the local government or the city authority, we know that Metro kind of appearing as a line item as it were.

And then, again, like saying, at its source, transportation planners around the world can can access, we ask that you use a work email, not a Gmail email. So normally an org or dot.gov, etc. And then just a short abstract, essentially, of how you’re going to use the data. And so then we know that it’s being used for a positive kind of cause, and then you will give you access to the area of interest that you’ve selected. Be it London, Birmingham, Somerset, wherever it is, as long as there’s been Strava activity, you can start to really start to see trends and patterns, then hopefully feed that into other datasets to build the infrastructure.

Carlton Reid 48:20
And Nick.Ferrari@LBC.co.uk or whatever his email address will just be rejected out of hand, that’s nefarious use?

Tom Knights 48:28
Yeah, I reserve the right not to comment on on LBC and Nick.

Carlton Reid 48:34
Thanks for listening to Episode 349 of the Spokesen podcast brought to you in association with Tern bicycles. Show notes and more can be found at the-spokesmen.com The next episode – 350 – will be out next month. Meanwhile, get out there and ride …

March 10, 2024 / / Blog

10th March 2024

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 348: Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett of Komoot

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUEST: Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett

TRANSCRIPT

Carlton Reid 0:13
Welcome to Episode 348 of the Spokesmen cycling podcast. This show was engineered on Sunday 10th of MARCH(!) 2024.

David Bernstein 0:28
The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider. Whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That’s t e r n bicycles.com to learn more.

Carlton Reid 1:03
I’m Carlton Reid. And this is the fourth in a five part series digging into bike navigation apps. There have been shows with folks from Ride With GPS, Bikemap, Cycle.travel, and today it’s the turn of Komoot.

although as you’ll soon hear, in this nearly 90 minute chat with Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett, we also talk a great deal about travelling the world by bike. And that’s before, of course, there were smartphone apps to guide you.

Jonathan, welcome to the show. And presumably you’re you’re in London,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:51
thank you very much for having me. It’s a real pleasure. And yeah, I’m in London, South London to be precise on a very beautiful sunny February morning.

Carlton Reid 2:01
It’s kind of nice in Newcastle as well. So we’re blessed. Now the reason I said that was because a your name. So we can get looking we can discuss that in a second and you can show me how you’re you can tell me how to pronounce your, the Danish part of your name correctly. But also because cuz because we’re talking here about Komoot and Komoot is a German company. But first of all, how do i pronounce your name correctly?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 2:29
My name is pronounced Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett.

And it’s actually not a Danish surname. It’s a Faroese surname from the Faroe Islands. So I am I a half British, my father’s English my mother is Danish, but my mother is half Faroese, her grandma, my grandmother’s from the Faroe Islands, and the Faroe Islands for anyone listening who isn’t sure exactly where they are, is a bunch of islands about halfway between Scotland and Iceland. And on the southern most of those islands, called Suðuroyu. There’s a kind of like a mountain ridge, behind the village where like my gran and her family are from called CamScanner. And that’s where that name is from. So yeah, it’s it’s ferries surname via Denmark. Wow. Okay, good explanation.

Carlton Reid 3:26
And because I didn’t know any of that, I then didn’t go back and check on your, your global world. Crossing cyclist. So I noticed that you went from Iceland? Did you go via the Faroe Islands at all? Yeah.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 3:45
So many, many years ago. Now, I spent three years cycling around the world, which was a whole kind of story in episode in itself. And at the very end of that, I wanted to go and seek because my great grandmother was still alive at the time, and she was alive and kicking the pharaohs. So towards the end of this, this, this free journey, I really wanted to go to Iceland cycle there wasn’t particularly advisable in the depths of winter, but had a wonderful time nonetheless. And from there, you can take a ferry to the pharaohs. So I did go. I did after sort of not really seeing any family for about three years. I did go and see my great grandmother, which was amazing. It’s an incredibly beautiful place. By that point, I had seen an awful lot of devote the world and the pharaohs. You know, just like truly spectacular. And it was really wonderful that I got to go and see my great grandma because she passed away a few months later. So it was all kind of perfect. A really nice kind of like final stop before I returned to the UK. So

Carlton Reid 4:52
I will admit I haven’t read every single one of your blog posts from back then but I’ll go backwards and I’ll go back and read that one because I’m sure that Under brilliant because I hadn’t spotted the Faroese part.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 5:04
Yeah, it was a really lovely thing that I got to and then at the very beginning of my, the very beginning of this huge cycle, I left home said goodbye to my dad, my mum lives in Copenhagen. So I started that cycle around the world. I mean, at the time I had, I had no idea. It would be that big a cycle. I was just trying to see how far east I could get. But I wanted to go and visit my mum in Copenhagen. So that was kind of the beginning of the journey. So it was quite nice that I had like pitstop early on, you know, visiting family and it was quite nice that again, towards the very end, I also had a pit stop visiting fan for going home.

Carlton Reid 5:42
That’s your mum also came out and visited you like you as your beach bumming whether that was in somewhere in Indonesia or was in Thailand. Yeah, that’s

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 5:50
right. She came and visited me in. I guess I was in in Thailand, often having seen her for probably a year and a half at that point. So we had a little, very nice, relaxing beach holiday, catching up, and most importantly, not doing any cycling at the time.

Carlton Reid 6:07
And I’m sure she’s treating you as well. It was, yeah, yeah. Know that for a fact, because we treated our son when he was doing stuff like that. Right. So let’s get back to what we’re meant to be talking about here, Jonathan, that is Komoot. So before we do that, I mean, give us the history of Komoot, because, you know, would you have used it on your? So yeah, this is 2015 to 2017. Yeah, yep.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 6:37
So I think I was unfortunately, I was a little bit too early. Cuz it’s been around the apps been around for about a decade now. Set up by six, six friends from Germany and Austria. They have, I guess they will kind of united by a love of both tech. And also nature, they will come from the fringes of like, beautiful parts of Europe. But a very clever bunch. Yeah, excited about like the future of tech and where it intersects with, like, you know, all aspects of reality in our day to day lives. So Komoot is a German company. But going back to your your opening comment is a German company, but we consider ourselves very much a global or at least a European company, people, the people who work for Komoot are spread out across all of Europe. So we have quite an international outlook on the world, I would say.

Carlton Reid 7:39
Was that right from beginning? Or was it very localised to begin with, and then only gradually did become international?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 7:45
Definitely, it was a gradual thing. I think Komoot I can’t quite was before my time, the point because Komoot’s fully remote. So one point switched and thought, Well, why not sort of recruit from across the entire continent instead of one country. And for a good number of years Komoot has been conscience consciously, international. So like had the app, the product translated to English a long time ago, we now have it available in half a dozen languages. So like, that obviously takes time and resources, but it’s quite important for us to allow as many people as possible around the world to like, understand and interact with and interact with the app. So in terms of my own journey in cycling, I was kind of a bit too early on in the process is quite, it’s quite funny actually, when I, when I first left, I really was not a cyclist. In 2015, when I left home, it all came together very quickly. And this was sort of the blogging, end of those blogging, glory years, I think around 2010 to the mid teens. So anyway, I found some resources online, and people were saying, Oh, you can buy a cycling computer and use that. I didn’t really have much cash at the time. So I picked the cheapest cycling computer that looked like it might do the job. And it was this. This Garmin device, I can’t quite recall what it was called. But you couldn’t load base maps onto it, you could create a route somewhere and export a GPX file and then you could have this line to follow it. And I I was just following the North Sea coast coastline, on the way up to Scandinavia. And I spent a lot of time getting very lost. And after about three weeks on the road, I met someone who was was like, you know, you can just use your phone for this. And I didn’t have mobile data across Europe. It was like before, it was quite so easy to connect to everywhere. But it hadn’t even occurred to me that I could use my phone as a GPS device that it had this functionality, which feels a bit silly in hindsight, but why would I have I lived a sort of normal city life where I was always online at the time. And I hadn’t realised that I could download load these map files from Open Street Map. And so I could kind of work out where I was at all times. So when I had that revelation, it was kind of blew my mind and things became a lot easier. And as we might discuss later, fast forward almost 10 years, it’s now even easier than ever to have this these good quality maps offline and also to sync them with devices. But it’s funny to look at where computers now, compared to my very rudimentary experiences, yeah, almost a decade ago.

Carlton Reid 10:30
So the first time I came across, Komoot in certainly, you know, seared into my consciousness when my son was cycling back from China. Yeah. And I had all sorts of other ways of doing routes. But he was insistent that he was using Komoot. So all the way back from from China in some pretty hairy paid places, but parts of the world some of which I can see that you’ve cycled through as well. He was using Komoot and I need to ask him why he was he was using it but he did found it find it very valuable and certainly very valuable in those hairy parts of the world because it was drawing down some pretty ok maps. And it was giving him obviously really good information. So here’s the pitch. Jonathan, why why use komoot? Why Why would world tourists use Komoot and why would that non well tourists want to use Komoot just you know, bumbling around the the Yorkshire lanes or the Norfolk coast towards why those two users might might wait. They want to use Komoot.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 11:41
It’s really that’s really cool to hear that just used Komoot for that. I’ve watched his like video of that long journey. It’s so amazing. And they’re very nice to Komoot was able to help that little bit. And I know that you’ve travelled a lot by bike as well, I think is funny. You know, especially with bikes, and especially with bike touring, it’s been around, you know, it’s been a thing for a very long time. It wasn’t really that long ago that people were relying on paper maps. But that’s in the same way that people used to, you know, drive around with British people with A to Z you know, in the car. And that already feels like such a such an outdated thing. I think a lot of very young people will this is probably a fact that a lot of young people don’t know how to read maps in the same way that older generations do. So I would say for bike touring, it’s, it’s kind of like I sometimes why would you not embrace the technology that we have now, when I was cycling around the world, I did not really do any complex route planning on my phone. But now, we have commute and some similar apps and products. It’s incredibly easy. The commute app is really intuitive, the algorithms are very sophisticated, it’s very easy to find multiple options, but to find very suitable options, from A to B, even in parts of the world, where some of the map data is, is less comprehensive. And you can do all of this from your phone really easily. You don’t have to drag paper maps around, you can very easily forecast how long it will take to get from A to B, you can very easily find out where might be a nice detour to take. There’s just a lot less guesswork involved. So for the bike tour, it’s a really powerful tool. But I would also say for the recreational user popping around the local lanes in the British countryside, for example, or a beginner, we have, we have a lot of tools that make it really easy to find a suitable route based on your ability. So while we have the route planner, which is great for finding ATV rides, whether that’s like 100 miles, or whether that’s 2000 miles across a continent, for the casual users who are doing like, you know, regular recreational loops. On our discover interface, we have, within just a few clicks, you can find routes that are based on your preferred sport type, whether you’re gravel riding or road cycling, if you like hilly, hilly routes or flatter routes, or whether you’re a hiker as well, because we accommodate for, you know, hiking as well. So you have these options that are tailor made for your needs within just a couple of clicks. And you can go and someone who’s cycling across a continent probably understands how maps work probably enjoys looking at them, probably enjoys the process of, of stitching a route together. But for a lot of other users. That’s not a priority for them. They just want to spend the time outside, having a good time without anything to worry about.

Carlton Reid 14:55
There are a number of navigation apps some some of which seem to you know, be very popular in North America. Akka and some that are more popular in, in Europe. So that ecosystem seems to be very, very healthy. There are a number of apps going for the same kind of thing you know, from, you know, including one man bands like Cycle.travel. So, all of these different apps that are out there, how are people choosing? Do you think people are going through a list? And they’re gonna go, Oh, I’ve tried that one, try that we’re all like this one? Or do you think they just find one? And then they just keep on using that one come? What may? How do you think this ecosystem works?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 15:39
Gosh, that’s a very good question. And a very big question. I think for a lot of people, it’s probably a question of what they used first. And that’s, that goes beyond just these, like app based kind of routing platforms, if someone is very used to using was successful, use paper maps for decades, or if someone in the UK is, you know, swears by Ordnance Survey. And they’ve always had, you know, good experience doing that, there’ll be unlikely to change unless you give them a very compelling argument or a good example. So I think a lot of people, what they first start using, becomes the thing that they become familiar, familiarity is so important, same of a lot of like tech or products that we use day to day, we’re quite hesitant to change our routines. I also think within that ecosystem, people’s preferences probably change quite a lot based on if they have a bad experience as well. Same with all types of different, you know, products that we consume, you know, there’s probably many things that you’ve used day to day for years, and suddenly when it breaks or something goes wrong, you decide I want to try something different. And then I would also say the local element probably plays a significant part in it. You mentioned in like other regions, or for example, North America, the market is in a different, like perhaps different status for us or you know, different other products that are available for people, I think a lot of it depends on the local side of it has to do with your peers. So like who you explore with you trusting your your recommendation of those you go out with, or the people who give you a great experience outdoors. But also whether or not the product is is localised and translated into your language that also makes a big difference people find rightly so it’s reassuring when the product is as easy to understand gives a different level of trust. So I think those are a few of the factors, that that kind of changed the state of play. But overall, I would say that it’s really, it’s a good thing. There are a lot of incredible, incredibly bright minds and have great innovative companies in a kind of overlapping space, often with a slightly different objective. And, you know, that’s, that’s just great for the consumer, because it means that we’re all kept on our toes, constantly looking for ways to improve those

Carlton Reid 18:08
variety of companies out there, some are chosen by for instance, you know, cycle travel companies. So when you go on a on a cycle holiday, they will, they will choose to partner with a navigation app company, and then they will send you all the routes on that. So you’re basically you’re almost tied in on that particular holiday to that particular navigation app. Good thing, bad thing. So is that something that it’s incredibly important to discover who are actually giving these links out and and calm them? Because you know, you go on a North American owned psychology company in say, Italy. And even though you’re in Europe, you’re using in effect and American app, because it’s an American company that’s leading those tours. So is that something that you are you as in Komoot? Or your your, your your colleagues and commute are actively trying to partner with these key companies? Yeah,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 19:15
there are. I mean, there are a lot of ways that we might sort of acquire new users. And by that, I mean, like reaching people and giving them their first experience on commute, those kinds of partnerships. I guess they probably represent like a smaller percentage of the ways to reach people. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not important. Particularly because if that partner whether it’s a tour operator, or you know, a hotel or someone who’s running a hotel, or even an event organiser, if they trust in Khumbu, and you know, I would say in Europe is you’re far more likely to find that stuff that information presented to you via commitment than anyone else. That’s great. because it’s just reassures the, you know, the user that people look for that kind of reassurance from those those kind of places of authority. So those partnerships are really important to us. And we do work with a lot of tourism organisations, maybe even like hotels, tour operators, we do have quite a lot of active partnerships. And it’s great for us because we reach that audience. But it’s really good for us, we put a lot of effort into the people that do choose to work with us on educational tools, so that they understand it coming inside out, and can then give their users good experience. And that remains like super important for any of those types of partnerships

Carlton Reid 20:39
can notice. If you get a bradt guidebook, a cycling guidebook, and it’s you know, to the lanes of East Anglia, or whatever have you Yeah. Well, you’re flicking through this, this book. And there’s a little QR code. You open that up, I know, there’s your route in Komoot via the Bradt guidebook. So what else have you got? Who else are you apart from Bradt, what else you out there in like a published terms?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 21:10
Well, it’s just a good question off the top of my head. And when I struggle to think of them, but quite a lot of I mean, of course, is difficult because we are so you know, across the whole of the continent. There are some amazing publications and magazines that we’ve partnered with across Germany, France, Italy, Spain. And I think one thing that’s really nice at the stage that commutes that is, particularly within certain segments, in Europe, we are, it would almost be strange for the user to have the route presented to them in a different way. Because they’re so familiar with commute. That’s what they use for their group rides. That’s what they use for the events they sign up to. That’s what they do for their day to day riding. And so a lot of those partners like they will present stuff on Komoot, regardless, like we’d always like to help them present the stuff in the best kind of best way possible. But they’re still going to be reaching out and using Komoot, simply because it’s a really nice, easy way to share and present routes with your kind of users or participants.

Carlton Reid 22:16
And what do you do for Komoot? So what is the community part of your job title? What is what is? What does that involve? Yes, so

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 22:25
I’m the global community manager komoot. The global part is, well, global, but it’s in particular, it’s about the gaps between. So we have a team of community managers spread out. In some of the markets where we have more kind of community oriented stuff going on, we have more people. So there’s, there’s a couple of two or three people in Germany, we have a couple of community managers in the UK, I’m kind of filling in the gaps between a lot of the markets that are growing for us, but aren’t quite at the same same kind of stage just yet. And then the community, part of it is kind of two things. One thing is our external partnerships. So that could be with events and event organisers that could be with the kind of inspiring individuals that we work with, because they have, you know, a great platform, or they have a very inspiring story to tell, or they’re great at motivating people that that follow them. And then on the other side of that, I have a lot of focus, particularly these days on our core community. So Komoot is, while we’re really lucky that we have such a huge audience, audience, we’ve got about 37 million users. So there’s a lot of people. And not all of those people are, you know, active every day or using commute to connect with other people and share their stories within the community. But we have millions of people who are and I spend a lot of time, as do my colleagues on how do we give these people? Like how do we reward them for their contributions? How do we motivate them to share more? How do we make sure that people are getting fed the right inspirational content based on their preferences? So elevating our kind of, and looking after our core community is also a significant part of my role.

Carlton Reid 24:22
So can you is it gonna kind of go slightly backwards into your background as well, if you if you are going to set out on a kind of track that you started in 2015? Are you going to do that now? For instance, could you open up Komoot and say, you know, do me a route from London all around the world back again? Or do you have to do it in stages? How would you use if you’re going to be doing it again? How would you use commute?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 24:55
I think I think doing a route around the world probably possible but That’s an awful lot of information for for one file. So I will probably break it down into smaller segments, which is to be fair, exactly what I did when I cycled around the world, and what most people probably would. And so when I when I left home, and sometimes thinking about cycling around the world is quite kind of overwhelmingly big kind of concept to navigate. But I would break it down into really small parts. So I knew that I wanted to cycle from London to Copenhagen. I knew that I wanted to visit a friend in Amsterdam, for example. So to begin with, I would focus on how do I get from London to Amsterdam, that’s a kind of more sensible, you know, if you break it down to blocks, the whole thing becomes a lot more manageable, both in terms of logistics, but also mentally. So I will do the same on Komoot. One thing that sets you apart from some similar, some similar platforms is that we have a variety of different sport types you can choose from. So if you go on the route planner, you’ll see that even for cycling, there’s a few variations. There’s like road cycling, gravel riding, bike touring, mountain biking. And that’s really important because well, even even within bike tours, people have different preferences. If someone wants to get to Amsterdam, in you know, two or three days, on a road bike, credit card, touring, staying in hotels, they might want to be thinking, you know, they want to have the mindset of a road cyclists, they want to choose quick, efficient routes, they’re on 25 mil tires, they don’t really want to be going down toe puffs, no matter how they’re graded. So these different algorithms think slightly differently, which I think is is really important. I would personally I would, for the way I was touring leisurely, I would be on the bike touring mode. But no, that’s it’s just important to point out there’s different types based on your kind of bike and you’re writing preferences. We have a tool called the multi day tour planner, so I could pick from London to Amsterdam. And then I could divide it up into let’s say, I want to do it in four days, or I know that I want to do about six hours of cycling a day, I can divide it up and it takes into account the elevation on the way. So it has like a kind of consistent breakdown, which is really helpful when you’re trying to forecast when you might get to a certain location. The other tool that I would definitely would be using on the route planner. One of our features is the sport specific overlays. And then you can overlay the long distance or National Cycle routes, which is super helpful. I do this and I’m always toggling between these wherever I’m out hiking or cycling, it just means at a cursory glance, I can see the long distance routes. So for example, I was at the time following loosely one of the EuroVelo. The common which number is the one that goes up along that coast. Well, I can see that overlaid on the map. And so I can compare that against the route that I’m plotting, I can make sure that I’m like loosely following it that that makes a real big difference. Both when I’m long distance touring, or if I’m even just kind of out exploring in the south of England. So those are a few of the main tools that I would use. The final thing I would add, I wouldn’t have such a rudimentary cycling computer, I would still have, I’d still have one. The Garmin that I have now is far more modern and has base maps. And we actually have an app designed for Garmin specifically. And with that, I can create the date the routes on my phone. And I can just press one button send to device and I can load up the IQ app on my Garmin device. And the route will just go bing. And here it is. And if I want to change my route, halfway through the day, I can now just update it on commute on the app on my phone and press updates. And I’ll get a little notification and my route will be updated. So if I wanted to cut my day short, we’ll go to a different hotel or campsite an evening. And that feature is so cool. And I think if I’d had that all those years ago, there would have been a lot less faffing involved, which would have been wonderful.

Carlton Reid 29:14
Yeah, I use that the other day, in fact. So I had a Garmin unit and I had I was navigating with Komoot hadn’t actually changed the route because I just got on my bike after 70 miles because the wind was about 50 miles an hour ahead of me. But still, I was using it and it was neat that so I agree. So the map, I’ve got the app open here now and in other apps, you have a choice of quite a few maps. But here I don’t I see the the Komoot map. I see a satellite map but then there’s no like Ordnance Survey for the UK. So because your is that because you were an international brand and that’s just what on market, yeah, there’s no point just offering an OS just for one market. I mean,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 30:03
you could obviously you could argue for it. And in the UK, a lot of people aren’t really familiar with and put a lot of trust into Ordnance Survey, commutes sort of core foundation revolves around OpenStreetMap, we are such committed believers of the Open Street Map Project. And it’s really at the core of everything we do. And we are constantly looking for ways that, you know, we can help to enrich the data that’s there or help to facilitate improvements to it. And you’re right, I think, because we are active in so many different countries, we could protect, we could try and add all of these different national maps. But the the user experience would become quite convoluted. You know, if I travel a lot using commute, I quite like knowing that I can get my head around the commute render of OpenStreetMap, which is our like, primary map, and then we have satellite map. I like being familiar with it, I like knowing that the sort of routing algorithms will give me consistent results in different places. And that’s quite important to ask that we still give people like a quite a not simple, but like, you know, familiar user experience that doesn’t become overwhelming or confusing for them. But we really, we really, I should stress that we like, especially in the markets where we are most active in the quality of the OpenStreetMap data is is really amazing. And it’s always improving. And it always is, yeah, enough for us to give people a really good experience.

Carlton Reid 31:40
Maybe it’s it’s an age thing then because I mean, I grew up with OS maps, maybe people who are younger than me and not so hide bound, you know, as you could you have seen before, you know, people are no longer using paper maps, if I’ve grown up as a user of paper maps, and I no longer use paper maps, but I use the Ordnance Survey maps on my, my phone, it generally tends to be if I’m like trying to visualise an area, then me will as somebody who has grown up with that kind of Ordnance Survey mind map, I would I would default to Ordnance Survey as that’s how I explain, you know, my, my where I am. So to me that’s like, wow, I need I need, you know, I need iOS to know exactly where I am. It’s great to have the Open Street Map. It’s lovely. And the commute version of it. But still like, Yeah, but where am I? And I need that something’s very familiar. But that might just be you know, people have an older generation. And that that is obvious to my son to Josh, that had zero relevance. And he probably wouldn’t know his way around and OS map, but you don’t know his way around, you know, the Komoot map really well. So do you think that’s just telling me Jonathan, is this just me? Is it just me because I’m very, very old?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 33:00
If I frame my answer, as well, to be careful, I think your Ordnance Survey specifically as a very particular place in the British sort of, well, the psyche of how we spend how we map the country, is equivalent in other countries. I’ll give you an example because I sometimes almost feel like as a outdoorsy person who likes Grim Adventures and is British and spends a lot of time exploring the British outside. I, you know, I should be more familiar with Ordnance Survey I confess, I have grown up in London. I didn’t kind of do much outdoorsy stuff at school. Honestly, I’ve never really used Ordnance Survey I am, when when I started to explore, there was sort of these phone based solutions available for me right away sort of 10 years ago, revolving around OpenStreetMap. I do spend a lot of time hiking and walking for leisure. And I’ve just never found that I that I needed it. I’m super familiar with OpenStreetMap. I’m now an expert in how Komoot works. And so it’s just funny, I think it’s like different types of people, for sure, especially in the UK, but I would say also globally, is just very different, like different generations who have grown up, especially have the sort of, you know, even for example of Google Maps is sort of omnipresent in our exploring of the world and navigating I’m talking about everything now from public transport to driving. And even like the sort of sat nav, the satnavifacation, I’m sure that’s not a word, but how we drive a car around the world has now had a massive influence on on people hiking and cycling. A lot of people would prefer to hike with turn by turn instructions on their phone and find that far more easy to get their head around than navigating from a paper map and pen The people could argue that that’s, that’s not as good. But I think if you embrace, you know, the quality of the map data and you embrace it, this actually helps a lot more people explore because there are less boundaries or sorry, less. Yeah, sort of less friction points. So less obstacles for them to to get over to outside. I’m not sure that’s necessarily such a bad thing.

Carlton Reid 35:23
And let’s go slightly backwards in that. The name Komoot is a pun on commute. So when it was originally developed, was it as an internal city thing? Or was it always, you know, this is meant to explore the world with or was that explore the world with just something that came afterwards and is the name a bit of a misnomer,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 35:56
is actually a bit of a misnomer, partly because it’s actually like a Komoot is derived from, I think it’s called the Valsa dialect, which is the region that the founders are from and it’s just like as far as I understand it, a casual greeting means something like simple and practical. And so it’s a it’s actually slightly misleading, because that’s the origin of Komoot, obviously, was

Carlton Reid 36:22
Nothing at all to do with commute. Well,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 36:25
I don’t, I mean, it’s not sure if it’s a good or a bad thing that they’re so similar, but that’s the origin of the name Komoot. It doesn’t, and the sort of the product and the philosophy doesn’t come from commuting at all, it’s about spending time outside. Of course, you could probably interpret that in many ways. Perhaps this is an alternative way of you know, commuting in nature. As it happens, many people use commute as part of their commute within town because they want to find a more scenic way of getting from A to B. But that’s not the that was never the objective of the company and and still that isn’t the case.

Carlton Reid 37:05
Right? Interesting. So I got that wrong that Well,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 37:10
I also had one for a very long day if that makes you feel better.

Carlton Reid 37:15
It does Thank you very much.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 37:17
I’m afraid now that you’ll really struggle to pronounce Komoot without saying Komoot because it’s only a matter of time before for that becomes a riddle itself.

Carlton Reid 37:26
Well, of course Google isn’t I think it’s a mathematical term isn’t it? So would have been familiar to some people but most people it’s not it’s not familiar terms. It’s just these unusual term. So anything that’s slightly unusual is better for a website you know name so the fact that you kind of spelling this and you people think it means there’s but doesn’t but they remember anyway so that’s that’s the trick just remembering it. So if it’s if it helps some people doing all that must be Komoot Oh, yes, he spelt with a K. And other people’s know it as a, you know, a greeting in a certain language. That’s also okay. So it’s however you get your name remembered?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 38:03
Yeah, very much so.

Carlton Reid 38:06
So at this point, I’d like to actually cut away and let my colleague take over and we’ll be back in a few minutes. So take it away, David.

David Bernstein 38:16
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Carlton Reid 39:17
Thanks, David and we are back with with with Jonathan of Komoot we’ve discovered that it doesn’t mean commute and that’s it you want it to mean commute. It can mean whatever you want. But Jonathan is he’s the community Global Community Manager for Komoot and he’s if anybody’s going around the world on their bicycle or wandering around the world on the bicycle and they wanted to use commute then then clearly Jonathan would be a good guy to to learn from Andy certainly in a pretty good job for for the kind of company commute is because Jonathan, you went round the world well, we have touched on this but now let’s let’s explore this in in greater detail. So we’ve got the Komoot out of the way. Let’s let’s, let’s talk about what where you’ve come from and why are you working for for Komoot? So we laughed before. Could you mention the fact that when you started, you were much of a cyclist? And I was kind of thinking, Yeah, that’s right, because of what the amount of kit you took to begin with is the kind of the classic. And I made this exact same mistake when I started my cycle touring adventures many, many, many years ago, you take too much kit. So you had an enormous amount of kit. And you had a kind of an old school bike, you were you on steel, you’re on a bicycle that I would have been familiar with in the 1980s, you know, a Dawes Super Galaxy, classic touring bike of a while ago. And then you you you’ve, you’ve clearly learned a lot. In that time that you’re away, but you started reading your blog, you basically picked this bike, you didn’t seem to know much about cycling, and then like, a week later, you’re, you’re off touring the world. So describe it. Have I got that? completely correct, you were pretty much a novice, and then you went cycled around the world.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 41:18
That is, that is pretty much it. It’s almost embarrassing to admit how little preparation or knowledge I had prior to leaving, but I think I was just blessed with youthful naivety time, and I didn’t have high expectations at all, I just wanted an adventure. And there are very few simpler ways of finding one than grabbing a bike and kind of just heading off without a plan.

Carlton Reid 41:44
Or when it’s classic, absolutely classic, the way the way that kind of developed. But let’s let’s find out what were you doing at the time? How long were you expecting to do? You didn’t have any plans at all. We literally tried to go around the world, we didn’t know how long was going to take? Or were you just going to cycle and see where you got to and then just what you might give up at some point. What What were you doing? How old were you and what were you doing at the time.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 42:08
So if I rewind a little bit further, we touched upon it at the beginning of the call. I grew up I grew up in London, but my my Yeah, my father’s British, my mother’s Danish. We never cycled or I never cycled for fitness. I never cycled for leisure or for exploring. However, I did grow up riding bikes, it was just very much like a functional tool to get around. London is not bike friendly city. But it’s a very practical city to get around and manoeuvre by bicycle. So I grew up cycling. I studied music at university. And when I returned to London, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do next, like I’m sure plenty of young people. Now, early 20s have the same sort of existential crisis. I was quite fortunate that I’d been working the whole time I was studying and, and while I had an awful lot of debt, I had somehow ended up with, you know, a few grand in the bank accounts saved up so I kind of had this incredible, I was in this incredibly privileged position where I could kind of yeah, go and explore a little bit without having to take the next the next most serious steps in life. I had always travelled a lot that had been a high priority for me, I had done a bit of long distance walking, I was kind of prepared for another long hike. And then kind of had this this moment, this epiphany I suppose, where I thought well, what about cycling that could be I was really interested in human power, not human powered, rather, I was interested in overland travel. So I became kind of fixated by this idea of, of cycling and then bike touring. And, and these were, I think, a wonderful period on internet where you could find all these incredible blogs that were so relatable and so inspiring and so informative as well. And so the sort of recommendations I found online, people said, those galaxies a good bike, found one on on eBay bought it was a good pannier to take Balsam or leave panniers from Argos and got all of this around Christmas. And I left two weeks later and the plan at the time, I’d been sort of telling my peers and family I was gonna cycle to Australia, but it was it was a it was a pipe dream. But it was kind of a joke as well. It was a good way of like picking something so outlandish that people wouldn’t take it seriously at all, which was fair enough given that I had never cycled further than about 10 miles. And so I I set off as I said to go and visit my mother, and I said if if this goes well, I will continue heading east and I had a fantastic first month and I continued writing to Turkey. I became very good at living, I would say extremely cheap on the road. I realised that I could probably get quite a long way. And, and yeah, I ended up going all the way to Australia, by which point I was completely broke. But I got a job and worked for a few months there. And then at that point, I, it became very clear to me that I wanted to continue and make it around the world cycle. And so I did that. And Nick got home, just under three years after having left probably having clocked around 50,000 kilometres, which is kind of a mind boggling number when I say out loud,

Carlton Reid 45:32
huh? There’s some people kind of do that in three weeks. I’m exaggerating a little bit, but they do it fast. And, you know, some Komoot users, Markus Stitz, for instance, did on a single speed, etc, etc. But you took three years. Now, it’s not that you weren’t doing some big mileages, you know, there was there was, you know, I read on your blog, you know, some days you’re doing 145 kilometres. And then other days, clearly, you’re, you’re just doing nothing, because you’re just enjoying the location. So you never had any plan to do it in a certain amount of time, you would just basically ebb and flow. It was just whatever the live through it you you kind of did that.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 46:17
Yep. And thank goodness, I personally like that. Because otherwise, I think it would be overwhelming to think about and those people who cycle around the world planning on it or trying to break records, I think it must just require so much. That’s no fault and pressure, I really was just kind of going for a ride, there was never any pressure, no expectation. If I went home, whenever I was bored, that would have been fine. No one would have judged me. So I was really making up as I went along. And when I left, I had absolutely no plan to spend anywhere near that long on the road knows that I have any plans to cycle all the way around the world. I am a Tura. At heart cycling at that pace is and I’ve done a lot of more, sort of a dyno extreme bikepacking. I’ve done a lot of ultralight cycling, I’ve even tried a few ultra endurance races. But touring at that kind of pace, for me is just the most kind of beautiful ratio in life. Hmm.

Carlton Reid 47:20
So notice, you’ve done the Transcontinental. So you have done these, these, these races, but your forte is basically just pootling along.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 47:30
Definitely. And if I if I continued to my cycling trajectory in between cycling around the world, and ending up doing what I’m doing currently at Komoot, when I returned home, having spent all of this time on the road, I actually worked as a bicycle courier in London for a short period, which was there’s no better way to re calibrate and reintegrate into city living having spent so much time on the road and to get paid to cycle around delivering stuff and exploring, you know, a city even if it’s your home city by bike. And I then started working at a company called Apidura. And I know that you’re familiar of a producer, because I believe you interviewed the founder of Apidura in this past few years. And I was there for a few years. And that was really, I mean, obviously made sense. I had a lot of touring experience. But that was in 2018, which was really when this hugely significant kind of shift in interest from bike touring to bikepacking. Which you can interpret in many ways. But, but this this shift was really kind of about to explode, and then get even more exaggerated through the pandemic. So I, I had learned so much about travelling by bike and then I learned so much about the benefit of ultralight cycling and these new packing systems that were so different to taking for panniers on a loaded bike. And so I spent four years at the Jura did the roller coaster that was COVID 19. And and that was sort of the segue that led me to Komoot because Komoothas been so involved with bike packing bikepacking as an established but also an emerging sport in the last few years. Because

Carlton Reid 49:19
you looking at your your bike setup. Back then with the with the Dawes Galaxy, and the bags you had on that was very much old school. And then I can completely identify with that because I’m clearly old school. And that’s where I started. So you know, for panniers at least loads of stuff and caring too much, etc, etc. And you look at that now and you think no, you would have the upward Eurostyle you know you’d have the bike packing bags, you probably wouldn’t be carrying quite as much Kip, although some of the place you went to. You know I’m thinking of you like your Australia video. and stuff where you’re obviously having to pack. I mean, when you go across the desert, you having to pack you know, an enormous amount of water, you’ve got to have all of the bug kit, you know, you’ve got to have all of the stuff that’s protecting you from the nasties. So you had some times you have gotten better how many it’s not an old school versus new school thing. It’s just you have to have a lot of kit in some places and and there’s no two ways about that. You know? Even if you’re doing a transcontinental style, you know, fast route across somewhere, you would still need a fair bit of of kit. But when you were when you started out, okay, actually good point. Did you finish on the same bike?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 50:43
I did, I finished on the same bike and I still ride that same Dawes Galaxy as my day to day pub, one around bike.

Carlton Reid 50:51
Excellent. So it’s but it’s like Trigger’s Broom, you’ve got you know, you’ve replaced tonnes of things, or it’s still largely the same bike

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 50:58
is the same frame, the same fork. And that is nice. All That Remains of the original bike.

Carlton Reid 51:05
So that’s pretty good going well done Dawes Super Galaxy.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 51:09
Yeah, there’s a lot to be said. Having modern bike so us so reliable in general. But yeah, I’m very much of the steel fan club. That bike has a lot of battle scars, from various sort of unfortunate collisions with other vehicles or just the road or ice. But it’s still yet it’s still going strong. And, and you’re right, I’ve had the been very lucky to experience travelling by bike in very different forms from the kind of old school bike touring sense where you carry basically your entire house, to super ultra light, you know, bike travel, where you just have a bivy bag, and you sacrifice all levels of comfort. I’ve also done a lot of off road sort of mountain bike touring, I think the thing that I find so wonderful about bicycle travel in general, is that there’s always a new way to do it. And there’s absolutely no right or wrong way of doing it, I think it’s very easy to get caught up in the the idea of I must be a lightweight bike packer, or I must do it in this particular way. But really, there’s no right or wrong way of doing it. We’re all very different, we all travel for very different reasons. And there’s different ways of, of packing for it. And, and even if I refer back to commute and the way that we’re set up, we give people the tools to, to pick, you know, they can pick the fast road route, if they want, or they can pick the meandering route, they can pick the most direct one, or they can pick the most leisurely one up over the mountains. I think this whole kind of space is really set up for the user to be able to customise you know, what they’re doing, and how they’re carrying it based on what their objectives is. And I think that’s what’s really kind of charming about the whole two wheeled travel thing.

Carlton Reid 53:02
See, I’m a historian of many things, but including cycling, and Thomas Stevens, if you hadn’t if you’ve come across that name in in the past, but he was basically a big wheel rider. So what would people would call Penny farthings. And this is 1880s. And the kit he had, the amount of kit he had and how it was packed is very much like bikepacking You know, it’s the big pannier bags, that’s pretty much the 70s and 80s thing, you know, really, really old and I was calling that old school, but genuinely old school. So 1880 stuff is you know, Apidura-style, incredibly lightweight, hard to carrying anything at all kind of touring. So that’s that’s kind of where cycle touring started. And we’ve kind of come full circle in many ways. And so people are going out there with incredibly minimal bits of of kit and somehow surviving. So when you did your your your your cirumnavigation, and you had all this enormous kit, where you jettison bits as you’re going along. And just in case you didn’t you don’t really need this you pick it up basically you became an expert. Just cook you’re having to carry this stuff. And because you haven’t to carry it, you quickly learn I don’t need that Chuck it

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 54:30
Yeah, and I did get rid of an awful lot of stuff. I had some some very questionable belongings with me. Like I had my my, I mean, I was on quite a budget when I left and and while I was going so it’s sort of just what am I sacrificing a bit of weight for a cheaper option, but I had like my, my mother’s old coat which was this like not anything resembling a down jacket, this monstrous thing that took up half a pannier. I had a pair of jeans with me to wear like when I was off the bike. So much unpractical. kind of clothing thing, I even had like a sort of smart casual shirt, I thought I would like to dress up like a non bike person when I was in town for a weekend, or things that I would never do now. And I did get rid of a lot of this stuff slowly. And as time went on out kind of improved things a bit as they broke. But then there was a lot of things that I wouldn’t change, like I travelled with, I mean, I had like a cutting board with me so that I could chop vegetables up when I was camping, and had little film canisters, filmed of spices and a proper source bird. And so I could like, eat well, and, and I wouldn’t, again, a lot of bikepackers could turn a nose up at that and think God’s this person’s just sort of like a moving kitchen. But I you know, for such a long period of the bike, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t change that at all. And on and I know that the sort of, especially at the moment with the sort of influences bikepacking has had on on taking existing cyclists and making them realise what they can achieve on the bike. I still am a big believer in taking a bit more stuff if your legs can handle it. And if you’re not in a hurry, you know, riding up a mountain with the extra weight on your bag, it’s not going to do your fitness any any disservice. If you can get up it. I think a bit of both comfort is quite okay. And while in general, I’m a minimalist these days, I think there’s plenty of space for carrying a few extra luxury items whenever you’re travelling.

Carlton Reid 56:30
But did you come back? Not you but did the bike and the kit come back a lot lighter. So by the time you’d finish, because I know you you’d have to badmouth the bags that you had. But you certainly changed your your your bags halfway around because of various reasons. And other notes on your blog, you do kind of, say a few choice words about the brand you had. But did you come back with? Did you come out with a lot more lightweight than you went? On much more lightweight?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 57:00
I would say I might have shaved off like a kilo. Like in general, I pretty much had the same amount of stuff with me. And yeah, it couldn’t have bothered me that much. Because otherwise I would have gotten rid of an awful lot of stuff. So no, I actually, I actually think I returned with a fairly similar amount of weight on my bike. That’s

Carlton Reid 57:22
interesting, because that’s totally opposite to the way I did it. So when I started out, I had so much kit, I had like a wooden hammer for hammering in the tent pegs I had, like, we just get a rock, you know, I had so many things that I just I was chucking stuff you know, from the very, very start and you’ve kind of quickly got used to you know, what was necessary and what wasn’t. And you don’t know that until you’re actually on the road. So I was ended up with with a lot less kit. So I taught myself minimalism, just because, cuz, whereas you’re saying you don’t, it doesn’t matter, you can just pedal up a hill, I was the opposite as like, No, I’m not the crane brothers. Famously, when they went up Kilimanjaro and their stuff, they they would, you know, drill holes in toothbrushes, I was never that extreme. But I would definitely want to be lightweight, as much as possible. And so I am kind of interested in taking a chopping board. So I wouldn’t have done that. This is interesting about how different people approach these things. And like, I have come down to the minimalist and caring such a little like I wouldn’t, personally I wouldn’t, not even going on like a camping trip. Now. I won’t take cooking equipment, for instance, I will generally buy what I need, and eat that and then have to then scrambled to get, you know, fresh supplies. And I know it’s much more efficient to take rice and what have you and then be able to boil this up. But to me just carrying any amount of cooking equipment to me in my head, just that’s too much weight, I can do this much lighter. And clearly you’re you’re not you’re a different each to their own, isn’t it? It’s just different people want to do different things. And that’s fine. Definitely.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 59:22
And we need to make sure that we always sort of accommodate that. Because people are so different. And and I think it’s difficult, you know, in life, for example, in the cycling industry, it’s a consumer driven industry, we need to convince people we brands need to convince people that they need to do things in a different way or a better way or an improved way. But really all of it comes down to like giving people options so they can do things in the way that they want to do it. And you know, there is absolutely no reason why one type of bike travelling is superior than another. They are yeah complete The different ways of doing things for different people. So ever people navigate in one particular way, if they choose one kind of route, it’s not about that it’s about giving people the options. And the same, like if someone wants to go on a road bike really fast with nothing on their bike, that’s totally fine. And if someone wants to chuck for massive panniers on their bike, they’ll probably be a bit slower. But that’s, but that’s totally okay.

Carlton Reid 1:00:26
And so what are you doing now? During what what? How would you describe your riding, and your adventuring now,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:00:33
my, I still try. And when I travel, I always want to be on a bike. If I’m not on a bike, I’ve fully compromised a little bit. But I also like spending time walking around being a normal person, especially if I’m on holiday with my with my girlfriend. But I do try and have one or two bike trips, big bike trips a year. Over the last few years, I’ve developed a sort of real love for exploring, I guess, capturing the essence of a big adventure closer to home. But in general, I’m sort of a casual cyclist I like to get out for provides every once a week if I can. I think working at QMU is quite is wonderful, but a bit dangerous for someone like me who enjoys spending time looking at maps, because the list of places to visit is evergrowing. But commute has this amazing interface. We have this route planner, which is wonderful gives people all these advanced tools to make informed decisions about where they’re going and how they get there. But we also have this discovery interface where you can have these these created routes for you based on your sort of parameters, the smart, this kind of smart solutions, and does have a really big impact on me, since we launched it last year, I’m much more inclined to take a train out from London to a random station and say, load it up on commute and say, Hey, I’m in a new area. I’ve got three hours, give me something. So while I’m going on less epic adventures, and finding new kind of creative ways of exploring familiar places. I’m doing that a lot at the moment. And I’m extremely excited about doing more of that as the weather improves.

Carlton Reid 1:02:19
And is that a curated thing? Or is that an algorithm thing. So

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:02:24
it’s a kind of a combination of stuff. commute, we have so much user data, because we have millions and billions and billions of of users, the number of recorded tours is kind of such a big number. It’s it’s kind of hard to get your head around. So we’re able to give people these. These like personalised suggestions so I can take the train out if I’m with a no fun with friends go out for a walk at the weekend, I can look at which train line takes me to a village that looks somewhere Scenic. I don’t own a car. So I can just say I’m at this station, it will see where the people who use Komoot are heading when they record their tours. So it’s very easy to get a feel for where people actually walk. Where do people go for their recreational weekend straws. And it will give me a clever or suitable solution to get kind of onto that, navigate the route and then return to the train station. And it’s incredibly clever how it works. If I go on where I live now and say I want to go for a four hour cycle, starting for I live. I’ve lived in London for a long time and I’ve cycled in London for a long time. I know what all of the common roadie routes are that people take wherever they’re going off to Windsor or Kent or sorry, Essex and, and if I let Komoot do this for me automatically. It’s kind of amazing how it basically gives me the routes that people most commonly do. But it won’t just give me three or four options, it will give me hundreds of options, which means I can go out for a new ride. And I can always find something that’s slightly different to what I’ve done in the past. And I find that really inspiring for my, like motivation to explore.

Carlton Reid 1:04:12
And then if you were in Iran, would it do the same? Or was it does it need that you know, lots and lots of people have done this before or kind of just glower three people who’ve done this, okay, that’ll be the route we curate for this. This person has just ended up in Iran, for instance, such as yourself a few years ago. Yeah, you

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:04:28
need to have the use of data because it’s based on what people actually do. So if we didn’t have that it wouldn’t we only want to do it when we’re confident we give people a good experience. Otherwise, no one benefits from it. You can obviously still use the route panoramic, your own tool in Iran. The what I would say in certain regions where there is less user data, we have an editorial team that make it they’re the the we create the content so we’ll find what are the classic like walking routes based on like variety of sources, we have an extensive editorial team that will add this content. And they will add suitable highlights, which is what we call the contributions that the community creates to add on to the map. So that this is an amazing viewpoint, this is a great cafe to stop out if you’re a cyclist, this is a really beautiful, rich line stroll. So we will help to populate the map so that the people who are used to kind of a circular thing, the better the map data is, the better that the attributions are on commute, the more local people will find, have a good user experience. And then the more they use it, the more they’ll contributes. And that’s how we kind of launch in in new places where there’s less of an active community, if that makes sense.

Carlton Reid 1:05:48
Yes, your heat mapping then, in effect, so you’re you’re working out where people are going, and you see you perhaps, you know, and your your fellow app. This this ecosystem we talked about before, you know, where people are cycling, you know, like the Strava, type heatmap.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:06:06
Exactly. So we can I mean, it’s all obviously, like, it’s only when people choose to share stuff publicly. It’s all like completely anonymized. But you know, we have so much data, we’re just trying to harness it. And yes, we do know where people cycle we have that information that’s great is quite hard to sort of digest. But if you can take that and turn it into something actionable, the end result for the user is that they can say, I’m a beginner, I’ve got two hours, I’ve got a new phone mount to go on my handlebars, I can select this tool, I can just press go. And I can head off and have an amazing bike ride for two hours. And we can be really confident that it’s going to be suitable because that’s what other people are doing when they, for example, select bike touring as a sport type. And the same for hiking, we won’t have people won’t be walking down the road, because we’ll only be looking at data that’s come from hikers. It’s a very Yeah, it’s an incredible solution is very clever. And I think it’s just a great way of mobilising people, whether they’re like really experienced cyclists who are just looking for something new and and bored of doing the same kind of loop over and over again, or newbies who need their handheld a little bit. And once I have a solution that they can just go off and do with five minutes of planning instead of an hour of planning for a two hour excursion.

Carlton Reid 1:07:33
Now right now the bike and I don’t know how much you know, this, but the bike industry, certainly in the UK, and in many other places in the world is is suffering just incredibly bad. It’s just it is it is dire out there at retail. It’s dire out there for suppliers, you know, post COVID, we basically just got a huge, huge, low a complete slump. You know, I did a story on Forbes of the day talking about how to 40 year low in the UK. You know, the last time we were as low as this in bike sales was in 1985. So 39 years. And that’s that’s that’s pretty poor. Do. Do you recognise that? Is that something you can look at and say, oh, people aren’t writing as much? Or is that just purely at retail and people still riding that is not buying?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:08:24
Is a good? It’s a good question. I actually saw that Forbes article and is it’s definitely bleak reading. But I’ve worked in the bike industry for a number of years. It’s like, I know many people who share the same kind of anecdotal experiences that things are changing. It is a problem with retail and definitely like have these hangover kind of effects from the pandemic that still making it really hard for people to forecast well. And, and it’s just been so unpredictable for a few years now. Komoot is lucky because we don’t deal with a physical product. But we are subject to the same the same kind of you know, these kind of cultural shifts, whether people are collectively interested in exploring or cycling, we’re not immune to that we might not have the same issues that a bike manufacturer has, but we still get impacted by the same changes. And it’s hard for us to predict these major shifts in usage in the same way that it’s hard for anyone in the cycling industry. One thing that I think is is great for Komoot. Well, I think partly compared to a lot of physical stuff in the cycling space. It’s quite an affordable price point and you can do an awful lot for free. So that’s less of a barrier when people have less disposable income. We are international so if one you know we have we’re active in plenty of markets, but we are, I guess subject to like, international shifts in usage. rather than, you know, locked in and reliant on one particular place, and also, we have a product that is set up for different sport types. So we can, you know, we can we’re not sort of reliant on we’re not just a road cycling company. So if people overnight decided not interested in road cycling, that would be very unfortunate, it would be a very sad thing. But we have plenty of other you know, markets and user types. And even within road cycling, for example, there’s people who’ve been, you know, the people who’ve been road cycling for many years in Italy decide to stop Well, there’s an entire, you know, there’s there’s millions of people who are maybe new to the sport, or could become interested in the sport, if you approach them in the right way. So yeah, it’s particularly in the UK is quite a bleak landscape at the moment, but I think it’s quite lucky in in where we are positioned, we’re not completely Yeah, stuck in the middle of that.

Carlton Reid 1:11:03
So tell us how much it costs to go for the pro version. And what you get with the pro version, better than just going for the free version.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:11:16
So I will try and do a concise summary of our pricing, you can do an awful lot on commute for free, you can find these routes that I referred to in our discover section, you can build our own routes, a lot of the functionality is there for free users. And when you sign up, you get free region bundle, so that you can explore a particular region and these region bundles, you can either purchase like an individual region, so like London, perhaps would be one that’s gonna be like a one those all like one time purchases. So you can buy region for £3.99 and region bundle a collection of them for 8.99. Or you can get the whole world pack for 29.99. Same whether it’s pound sterling, euros or or USD. And when you have a region unlocked you, you can then use offline maps. So you can take the download the map, or you can follow the tour without needing internet, you also get voice navigation. And you also get turn by turn navigation, whether you’re doing on your phone or more on your cycling computer or smartwatch. So those are all one time purchases. And then we also have a premium, like pricing tier, which is 4.99 a month 59.99 for the year. And then we premium, you get a whole host of extra features and functionality, you get the whole world available offline. So those features I mentioned earlier, you get all of that included, you also are able to make collections, which means you can group together, either your planned tours. By that I mean that your plan routes, so you want to do hiking or cycling, or once you’ve completed so like if I cycled around the world, I could add all of the daily bits into one nice collection to show that my car five, I’ve cycled while I was away. You also get sports specific overlays, which I referred to earlier. So you can overlay the light, long distance hiking or cycling routes, you get on tour weather, which is really cool, you can see where you’re estimated to be when the sunsets or when the rain arrives, or the winds looking like you get live tracking, you get the multi day planner, which I also refer to earlier. If you have a really long route, you can divide it into like segments. And as accommodation stops for each, you know, each daily part. And finally, you get 3D maps. So they’re all a bunch of features that are really amazing, really cool. I guess we pitch it as for people who wants to go further, so people who who require a little bit of extra extra features, and we’re constantly trying to add new features to enrich that.

Carlton Reid 1:14:07
Great. So to wrap up, give us a URL. I mean, it’s reasonably obvious. I agree. I’ll even spelled out during that during the recording now, however, give us the URL, and then the URL for for where people can have now obviously put in the show notes. But where people can can follow your your adventures in 2015 through 2017. And then you’ve done subsequent rides and you’re updating your blog for a while so so to basically give us your URL for the blog and for Komoot.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:14:39
We can spell out one more time for luck. It’s just Komoot.com. On the web browser. You can also find the app on both iOS and Android. If you want to give it a go and get started myself You can find me on LinkedIn. If you can manage to spell my surname, you can add it into the podcast notes. I have a link there to my Komoot profile, should you be interested in following my adventures there? My blog is called JKB’s bike ride, which is Jk B. S, my initials. If you want to read some of my, my rambling thoughts from a long time ago, all my photography from the many bike trips I’ve been on. And if you find me there, you can, you can find me on other social media platforms. And I would just say if you have any, if anyone listening has any questions about the things that we’ve discussed today, or any questions about commute, or bike touring travel in general, you’re very welcome to send me an email at jonathan@komoot.com Always happy to hear from people and talk about adventures

Carlton Reid 1:15:55
during this time. Excellent. Thank you very much. Now, as expected, this was meant to be about Komoot. It was it was Komoot. And Jonathan it was like this afternoon to measure exactly how much is is how much was Komoot and how much was Jonathan. But I kind of expected that as soon as you know that. I want to interview you then it’s like, Okay, we’re gonna be talking about bike touring. And we’re bringing Komoot here and there. So that hopefully I mean, you are very clever, you are dragging commute back in as much as possible, which is absolutely fine. And good, because that’s what ostensibly what we’re meant to be talking about. Anyway, that’s been fascinating. And thank you ever so much for for well, we recorded this and it was an hour and 16 minutes, and it flew by. So Jonathan, thank you ever so much.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:16:41
That was a real pleasure. I really enjoyed. Yeah, I really enjoyed going through whole range of subjects with you.

Carlton Reid 1:16:48
And we could have I mean, I could have gone blog by blog posts and blog posting and tell me about the flies here in Australia and stuff. But we didn’t but I do recommend people go read your blog, look at your videos, and work out whether Do you really want to cycle around the world. Or maybe Jonathan’s bug experiences and farting monks and stuff will will actually inspire you to go and do your own stuff. So anyway, thank you very much.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:17:10
It was a good teaser. Yeah, thank you very much for your time.

Carlton Reid 1:17:13
Thanks for listening to Episode 348 of the Spokesmen cycling podcast brought to you in association with Tern Bicycles. Show notes and more can be found at the-spokesmen.com. The next episode will be a chat with Tom Knights of Strava Metro. That show will be out next weekend. But meanwhile, get out there and ride.

Episode Details

Status: Published
Release Date: Mar 10, 2024
Author: Carlton Reid
Episode Type: Full
Episode: 348
Rating: Clean
File Info: audio/mpeg | mp3 | 63MB
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Episode Description
10th March 2024

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 348: Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett of Komoot

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUEST: Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett

LINKS:

https://www.ternbicycles.com

https://www.komoot.com/user/655260825794

https://jkbsbikeride.com

TRANSCRIPT
Carlton Reid 0:13
Welcome to Episode 348 of the Spokesmen cycling podcast. This show was engineered on Sunday 10th of MARCH(!) 2024.

David Bernstein 0:28
The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider. Whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That’s t e r n bicycles.com to learn more.

Carlton Reid 1:03
I’m Carlton Reid. And this is the fourth in a five part series digging into bike navigation apps. There have been shows with folks from Ride With GPS, Bikemap, Cycle.travel, and today it’s the turn of Komoot.

although as you’ll soon hear, in this nearly 90 minute chat with Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett, we also talk a great deal about travelling the world by bike. And that’s before, of course, there were smartphone apps to guide you.

Jonathan,

welcome to the show. And presumably you’re you’re in London,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:51
thank you very much for having me. It’s a real pleasure. And yeah, I’m in London, South London to be precise on a very beautiful sunny February morning.

Carlton Reid 2:01
It’s kind of nice in Newcastle as well. So we’re blessed. Now the reason I said that was because a your name. So we can get looking we can discuss that in a second and you can show me how you’re you can tell me how to pronounce your, the Danish part of your name correctly. But also because cuz because we’re talking here about Komoot and Komoot is a German company. But first of all, how do i pronounce your name correctly?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 2:29
My name is pronounced Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett.

And it’s actually not a Danish surname. It’s a Faroese surname from the Faroe Islands. So I am I a half British, my father’s English my mother is Danish, but my mother is half Faroese, her grandma, my grandmother’s from the Faroe Islands, and the Faroe Islands for anyone listening who isn’t sure exactly where they are, is a bunch of islands about halfway between Scotland and Iceland. And on the southern most of those islands, called Suðuroyu. There’s a kind of like a mountain ridge, behind the village where like my gran and her family are from called CamScanner. And that’s where that name is from. So yeah, it’s it’s ferries surname via Denmark. Wow. Okay, good explanation.

Carlton Reid 3:26
And because I didn’t know any of that, I then didn’t go back and check on your, your global world. Crossing cyclist. So I noticed that you went from Iceland? Did you go via the Faroe Islands at all? Yeah.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 3:45
So many, many years ago. Now, I spent three years cycling around the world, which was a whole kind of story in episode in itself. And at the very end of that, I wanted to go and seek because my great grandmother was still alive at the time, and she was alive and kicking the pharaohs. So towards the end of this, this, this free journey, I really wanted to go to Iceland cycle there wasn’t particularly advisable in the depths of winter, but had a wonderful time nonetheless. And from there, you can take a ferry to the pharaohs. So I did go. I did after sort of not really seeing any family for about three years. I did go and see my great grandmother, which was amazing. It’s an incredibly beautiful place. By that point, I had seen an awful lot of devote the world and the pharaohs. You know, just like truly spectacular. And it was really wonderful that I got to go and see my great grandma because she passed away a few months later. So it was all kind of perfect. A really nice kind of like final stop before I returned to the UK. So

Carlton Reid 4:52
I will admit I haven’t read every single one of your blog posts from back then but I’ll go backwards and I’ll go back and read that one because I’m sure that Under brilliant because I hadn’t spotted the Faroese part.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 5:04
Yeah, it was a really lovely thing that I got to and then at the very beginning of my, the very beginning of this huge cycle, I left home said goodbye to my dad, my mum lives in Copenhagen. So I started that cycle around the world. I mean, at the time I had, I had no idea. It would be that big a cycle. I was just trying to see how far east I could get. But I wanted to go and visit my mum in Copenhagen. So that was kind of the beginning of the journey. So it was quite nice that I had like pitstop early on, you know, visiting family and it was quite nice that again, towards the very end, I also had a pit stop visiting fan for going home.

Carlton Reid 5:42
That’s your mum also came out and visited you like you as your beach bumming whether that was in somewhere in Indonesia or was in Thailand. Yeah, that’s

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 5:50
right. She came and visited me in. I guess I was in in Thailand, often having seen her for probably a year and a half at that point. So we had a little, very nice, relaxing beach holiday, catching up, and most importantly, not doing any cycling at the time.

Carlton Reid 6:07
And I’m sure she’s treating you as well. It was, yeah, yeah. Know that for a fact, because we treated our son when he was doing stuff like that. Right. So let’s get back to what we’re meant to be talking about here, Jonathan, that is Komoot. So before we do that, I mean, give us the history of Komoot, because, you know, would you have used it on your? So yeah, this is 2015 to 2017. Yeah, yep.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 6:37
So I think I was unfortunately, I was a little bit too early. Cuz it’s been around the apps been around for about a decade now. Set up by six, six friends from Germany and Austria. They have, I guess they will kind of united by a love of both tech. And also nature, they will come from the fringes of like, beautiful parts of Europe. But a very clever bunch. Yeah, excited about like the future of tech and where it intersects with, like, you know, all aspects of reality in our day to day lives. So Komoot is a German company. But going back to your your opening comment is a German company, but we consider ourselves very much a global or at least a European company, people, the people who work for Komoot are spread out across all of Europe. So we have quite an international outlook on the world, I would say.

Carlton Reid 7:39
Was that right from beginning? Or was it very localised to begin with, and then only gradually did become international?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 7:45
Definitely, it was a gradual thing. I think Komoot I can’t quite was before my time, the point because Komoot’s fully remote. So one point switched and thought, Well, why not sort of recruit from across the entire continent instead of one country. And for a good number of years Komoot has been conscience consciously, international. So like had the app, the product translated to English a long time ago, we now have it available in half a dozen languages. So like, that obviously takes time and resources, but it’s quite important for us to allow as many people as possible around the world to like, understand and interact with and interact with the app. So in terms of my own journey in cycling, I was kind of a bit too early on in the process is quite, it’s quite funny actually, when I, when I first left, I really was not a cyclist. In 2015, when I left home, it all came together very quickly. And this was sort of the blogging, end of those blogging, glory years, I think around 2010 to the mid teens. So anyway, I found some resources online, and people were saying, Oh, you can buy a cycling computer and use that. I didn’t really have much cash at the time. So I picked the cheapest cycling computer that looked like it might do the job. And it was this. This Garmin device, I can’t quite recall what it was called. But you couldn’t load base maps onto it, you could create a route somewhere and export a GPX file and then you could have this line to follow it. And I I was just following the North Sea coast coastline, on the way up to Scandinavia. And I spent a lot of time getting very lost. And after about three weeks on the road, I met someone who was was like, you know, you can just use your phone for this. And I didn’t have mobile data across Europe. It was like before, it was quite so easy to connect to everywhere. But it hadn’t even occurred to me that I could use my phone as a GPS device that it had this functionality, which feels a bit silly in hindsight, but why would I have I lived a sort of normal city life where I was always online at the time. And I hadn’t realised that I could download load these map files from Open Street Map. And so I could kind of work out where I was at all times. So when I had that revelation, it was kind of blew my mind and things became a lot easier. And as we might discuss later, fast forward almost 10 years, it’s now even easier than ever to have this these good quality maps offline and also to sync them with devices. But it’s funny to look at where computers now, compared to my very rudimentary experiences, yeah, almost a decade ago.

Carlton Reid 10:30
So the first time I came across, Komoot in certainly, you know, seared into my consciousness when my son was cycling back from China. Yeah. And I had all sorts of other ways of doing routes. But he was insistent that he was using Komoot. So all the way back from from China in some pretty hairy paid places, but parts of the world some of which I can see that you’ve cycled through as well. He was using Komoot and I need to ask him why he was he was using it but he did found it find it very valuable and certainly very valuable in those hairy parts of the world because it was drawing down some pretty ok maps. And it was giving him obviously really good information. So here’s the pitch. Jonathan, why why use komoot? Why Why would world tourists use Komoot and why would that non well tourists want to use Komoot just you know, bumbling around the the Yorkshire lanes or the Norfolk coast towards why those two users might might wait. They want to use Komoot.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 11:41
It’s really that’s really cool to hear that just used Komoot for that. I’ve watched his like video of that long journey. It’s so amazing. And they’re very nice to Komoot was able to help that little bit. And I know that you’ve travelled a lot by bike as well, I think is funny. You know, especially with bikes, and especially with bike touring, it’s been around, you know, it’s been a thing for a very long time. It wasn’t really that long ago that people were relying on paper maps. But that’s in the same way that people used to, you know, drive around with British people with A to Z you know, in the car. And that already feels like such a such an outdated thing. I think a lot of very young people will this is probably a fact that a lot of young people don’t know how to read maps in the same way that older generations do. So I would say for bike touring, it’s, it’s kind of like I sometimes why would you not embrace the technology that we have now, when I was cycling around the world, I did not really do any complex route planning on my phone. But now, we have commute and some similar apps and products. It’s incredibly easy. The commute app is really intuitive, the algorithms are very sophisticated, it’s very easy to find multiple options, but to find very suitable options, from A to B, even in parts of the world, where some of the map data is, is less comprehensive. And you can do all of this from your phone really easily. You don’t have to drag paper maps around, you can very easily forecast how long it will take to get from A to B, you can very easily find out where might be a nice detour to take. There’s just a lot less guesswork involved. So for the bike tour, it’s a really powerful tool. But I would also say for the recreational user popping around the local lanes in the British countryside, for example, or a beginner, we have, we have a lot of tools that make it really easy to find a suitable route based on your ability. So while we have the route planner, which is great for finding ATV rides, whether that’s like 100 miles, or whether that’s 2000 miles across a continent, for the casual users who are doing like, you know, regular recreational loops. On our discover interface, we have, within just a few clicks, you can find routes that are based on your preferred sport type, whether you’re gravel riding or road cycling, if you like hilly, hilly routes or flatter routes, or whether you’re a hiker as well, because we accommodate for, you know, hiking as well. So you have these options that are tailor made for your needs within just a couple of clicks. And you can go and someone who’s cycling across a continent probably understands how maps work probably enjoys looking at them, probably enjoys the process of, of stitching a route together. But for a lot of other users. That’s not a priority for them. They just want to spend the time outside, having a good time without anything to worry about.

Carlton Reid 14:55
There are a number of navigation apps some some of which seem to you know, be very popular in North America. Akka and some that are more popular in, in Europe. So that ecosystem seems to be very, very healthy. There are a number of apps going for the same kind of thing you know, from, you know, including one man bands like Cycle.travel. So, all of these different apps that are out there, how are people choosing? Do you think people are going through a list? And they’re gonna go, Oh, I’ve tried that one, try that we’re all like this one? Or do you think they just find one? And then they just keep on using that one come? What may? How do you think this ecosystem works?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 15:39
Gosh, that’s a very good question. And a very big question. I think for a lot of people, it’s probably a question of what they used first. And that’s, that goes beyond just these, like app based kind of routing platforms, if someone is very used to using was successful, use paper maps for decades, or if someone in the UK is, you know, swears by Ordnance Survey. And they’ve always had, you know, good experience doing that, there’ll be unlikely to change unless you give them a very compelling argument or a good example. So I think a lot of people, what they first start using, becomes the thing that they become familiar, familiarity is so important, same of a lot of like tech or products that we use day to day, we’re quite hesitant to change our routines. I also think within that ecosystem, people’s preferences probably change quite a lot based on if they have a bad experience as well. Same with all types of different, you know, products that we consume, you know, there’s probably many things that you’ve used day to day for years, and suddenly when it breaks or something goes wrong, you decide I want to try something different. And then I would also say the local element probably plays a significant part in it. You mentioned in like other regions, or for example, North America, the market is in a different, like perhaps different status for us or you know, different other products that are available for people, I think a lot of it depends on the local side of it has to do with your peers. So like who you explore with you trusting your your recommendation of those you go out with, or the people who give you a great experience outdoors. But also whether or not the product is is localised and translated into your language that also makes a big difference people find rightly so it’s reassuring when the product is as easy to understand gives a different level of trust. So I think those are a few of the factors, that that kind of changed the state of play. But overall, I would say that it’s really, it’s a good thing. There are a lot of incredible, incredibly bright minds and have great innovative companies in a kind of overlapping space, often with a slightly different objective. And, you know, that’s, that’s just great for the consumer, because it means that we’re all kept on our toes, constantly looking for ways to improve those

Carlton Reid 18:08
variety of companies out there, some are chosen by for instance, you know, cycle travel companies. So when you go on a on a cycle holiday, they will, they will choose to partner with a navigation app company, and then they will send you all the routes on that. So you’re basically you’re almost tied in on that particular holiday to that particular navigation app. Good thing, bad thing. So is that something that it’s incredibly important to discover who are actually giving these links out and and calm them? Because you know, you go on a North American owned psychology company in say, Italy. And even though you’re in Europe, you’re using in effect and American app, because it’s an American company that’s leading those tours. So is that something that you are you as in Komoot? Or your your, your your colleagues and commute are actively trying to partner with these key companies? Yeah,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 19:15
there are. I mean, there are a lot of ways that we might sort of acquire new users. And by that, I mean, like reaching people and giving them their first experience on commute, those kinds of partnerships. I guess they probably represent like a smaller percentage of the ways to reach people. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not important. Particularly because if that partner whether it’s a tour operator, or you know, a hotel or someone who’s running a hotel, or even an event organiser, if they trust in Khumbu, and you know, I would say in Europe is you’re far more likely to find that stuff that information presented to you via commitment than anyone else. That’s great. because it’s just reassures the, you know, the user that people look for that kind of reassurance from those those kind of places of authority. So those partnerships are really important to us. And we do work with a lot of tourism organisations, maybe even like hotels, tour operators, we do have quite a lot of active partnerships. And it’s great for us because we reach that audience. But it’s really good for us, we put a lot of effort into the people that do choose to work with us on educational tools, so that they understand it coming inside out, and can then give their users good experience. And that remains like super important for any of those types of partnerships

Carlton Reid 20:39
can notice. If you get a bradt guidebook, a cycling guidebook, and it’s you know, to the lanes of East Anglia, or whatever have you Yeah. Well, you’re flicking through this, this book. And there’s a little QR code. You open that up, I know, there’s your route in Komoot via the Bradt guidebook. So what else have you got? Who else are you apart from Bradt, what else you out there in like a published terms?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 21:10
Well, it’s just a good question off the top of my head. And when I struggle to think of them, but quite a lot of I mean, of course, is difficult because we are so you know, across the whole of the continent. There are some amazing publications and magazines that we’ve partnered with across Germany, France, Italy, Spain. And I think one thing that’s really nice at the stage that commutes that is, particularly within certain segments, in Europe, we are, it would almost be strange for the user to have the route presented to them in a different way. Because they’re so familiar with commute. That’s what they use for their group rides. That’s what they use for the events they sign up to. That’s what they do for their day to day riding. And so a lot of those partners like they will present stuff on Komoot, regardless, like we’d always like to help them present the stuff in the best kind of best way possible. But they’re still going to be reaching out and using Komoot, simply because it’s a really nice, easy way to share and present routes with your kind of users or participants.

Carlton Reid 22:16
And what do you do for Komoot? So what is the community part of your job title? What is what is? What does that involve? Yes, so

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 22:25
I’m the global community manager komoot. The global part is, well, global, but it’s in particular, it’s about the gaps between. So we have a team of community managers spread out. In some of the markets where we have more kind of community oriented stuff going on, we have more people. So there’s, there’s a couple of two or three people in Germany, we have a couple of community managers in the UK, I’m kind of filling in the gaps between a lot of the markets that are growing for us, but aren’t quite at the same same kind of stage just yet. And then the community, part of it is kind of two things. One thing is our external partnerships. So that could be with events and event organisers that could be with the kind of inspiring individuals that we work with, because they have, you know, a great platform, or they have a very inspiring story to tell, or they’re great at motivating people that that follow them. And then on the other side of that, I have a lot of focus, particularly these days on our core community. So Komoot is, while we’re really lucky that we have such a huge audience, audience, we’ve got about 37 million users. So there’s a lot of people. And not all of those people are, you know, active every day or using commute to connect with other people and share their stories within the community. But we have millions of people who are and I spend a lot of time, as do my colleagues on how do we give these people? Like how do we reward them for their contributions? How do we motivate them to share more? How do we make sure that people are getting fed the right inspirational content based on their preferences? So elevating our kind of, and looking after our core community is also a significant part of my role.

Carlton Reid 24:22
So can you is it gonna kind of go slightly backwards into your background as well, if you if you are going to set out on a kind of track that you started in 2015? Are you going to do that now? For instance, could you open up Komoot and say, you know, do me a route from London all around the world back again? Or do you have to do it in stages? How would you use if you’re going to be doing it again? How would you use commute?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 24:55
I think I think doing a route around the world probably possible but That’s an awful lot of information for for one file. So I will probably break it down into smaller segments, which is to be fair, exactly what I did when I cycled around the world, and what most people probably would. And so when I when I left home, and sometimes thinking about cycling around the world is quite kind of overwhelmingly big kind of concept to navigate. But I would break it down into really small parts. So I knew that I wanted to cycle from London to Copenhagen. I knew that I wanted to visit a friend in Amsterdam, for example. So to begin with, I would focus on how do I get from London to Amsterdam, that’s a kind of more sensible, you know, if you break it down to blocks, the whole thing becomes a lot more manageable, both in terms of logistics, but also mentally. So I will do the same on Komoot. One thing that sets you apart from some similar, some similar platforms is that we have a variety of different sport types you can choose from. So if you go on the route planner, you’ll see that even for cycling, there’s a few variations. There’s like road cycling, gravel riding, bike touring, mountain biking. And that’s really important because well, even even within bike tours, people have different preferences. If someone wants to get to Amsterdam, in you know, two or three days, on a road bike, credit card, touring, staying in hotels, they might want to be thinking, you know, they want to have the mindset of a road cyclists, they want to choose quick, efficient routes, they’re on 25 mil tires, they don’t really want to be going down toe puffs, no matter how they’re graded. So these different algorithms think slightly differently, which I think is is really important. I would personally I would, for the way I was touring leisurely, I would be on the bike touring mode. But no, that’s it’s just important to point out there’s different types based on your kind of bike and you’re writing preferences. We have a tool called the multi day tour planner, so I could pick from London to Amsterdam. And then I could divide it up into let’s say, I want to do it in four days, or I know that I want to do about six hours of cycling a day, I can divide it up and it takes into account the elevation on the way. So it has like a kind of consistent breakdown, which is really helpful when you’re trying to forecast when you might get to a certain location. The other tool that I would definitely would be using on the route planner. One of our features is the sport specific overlays. And then you can overlay the long distance or National Cycle routes, which is super helpful. I do this and I’m always toggling between these wherever I’m out hiking or cycling, it just means at a cursory glance, I can see the long distance routes. So for example, I was at the time following loosely one of the EuroVelo. The common which number is the one that goes up along that coast. Well, I can see that overlaid on the map. And so I can compare that against the route that I’m plotting, I can make sure that I’m like loosely following it that that makes a real big difference. Both when I’m long distance touring, or if I’m even just kind of out exploring in the south of England. So those are a few of the main tools that I would use. The final thing I would add, I wouldn’t have such a rudimentary cycling computer, I would still have, I’d still have one. The Garmin that I have now is far more modern and has base maps. And we actually have an app designed for Garmin specifically. And with that, I can create the date the routes on my phone. And I can just press one button send to device and I can load up the IQ app on my Garmin device. And the route will just go bing. And here it is. And if I want to change my route, halfway through the day, I can now just update it on commute on the app on my phone and press updates. And I’ll get a little notification and my route will be updated. So if I wanted to cut my day short, we’ll go to a different hotel or campsite an evening. And that feature is so cool. And I think if I’d had that all those years ago, there would have been a lot less faffing involved, which would have been wonderful.

Carlton Reid 29:14
Yeah, I use that the other day, in fact. So I had a Garmin unit and I had I was navigating with Komoot hadn’t actually changed the route because I just got on my bike after 70 miles because the wind was about 50 miles an hour ahead of me. But still, I was using it and it was neat that so I agree. So the map, I’ve got the app open here now and in other apps, you have a choice of quite a few maps. But here I don’t I see the the Komoot map. I see a satellite map but then there’s no like Ordnance Survey for the UK. So because your is that because you were an international brand and that’s just what on market, yeah, there’s no point just offering an OS just for one market. I mean,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 30:03
you could obviously you could argue for it. And in the UK, a lot of people aren’t really familiar with and put a lot of trust into Ordnance Survey, commutes sort of core foundation revolves around OpenStreetMap, we are such committed believers of the Open Street Map Project. And it’s really at the core of everything we do. And we are constantly looking for ways that, you know, we can help to enrich the data that’s there or help to facilitate improvements to it. And you’re right, I think, because we are active in so many different countries, we could protect, we could try and add all of these different national maps. But the the user experience would become quite convoluted. You know, if I travel a lot using commute, I quite like knowing that I can get my head around the commute render of OpenStreetMap, which is our like, primary map, and then we have satellite map. I like being familiar with it, I like knowing that the sort of routing algorithms will give me consistent results in different places. And that’s quite important to ask that we still give people like a quite a not simple, but like, you know, familiar user experience that doesn’t become overwhelming or confusing for them. But we really, we really, I should stress that we like, especially in the markets where we are most active in the quality of the OpenStreetMap data is is really amazing. And it’s always improving. And it always is, yeah, enough for us to give people a really good experience.

Carlton Reid 31:40
Maybe it’s it’s an age thing then because I mean, I grew up with OS maps, maybe people who are younger than me and not so hide bound, you know, as you could you have seen before, you know, people are no longer using paper maps, if I’ve grown up as a user of paper maps, and I no longer use paper maps, but I use the Ordnance Survey maps on my, my phone, it generally tends to be if I’m like trying to visualise an area, then me will as somebody who has grown up with that kind of Ordnance Survey mind map, I would I would default to Ordnance Survey as that’s how I explain, you know, my, my where I am. So to me that’s like, wow, I need I need, you know, I need iOS to know exactly where I am. It’s great to have the Open Street Map. It’s lovely. And the commute version of it. But still like, Yeah, but where am I? And I need that something’s very familiar. But that might just be you know, people have an older generation. And that that is obvious to my son to Josh, that had zero relevance. And he probably wouldn’t know his way around and OS map, but you don’t know his way around, you know, the Komoot map really well. So do you think that’s just telling me Jonathan, is this just me? Is it just me because I’m very, very old?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 33:00
If I frame my answer, as well, to be careful, I think your Ordnance Survey specifically as a very particular place in the British sort of, well, the psyche of how we spend how we map the country, is equivalent in other countries. I’ll give you an example because I sometimes almost feel like as a outdoorsy person who likes Grim Adventures and is British and spends a lot of time exploring the British outside. I, you know, I should be more familiar with Ordnance Survey I confess, I have grown up in London. I didn’t kind of do much outdoorsy stuff at school. Honestly, I’ve never really used Ordnance Survey I am, when when I started to explore, there was sort of these phone based solutions available for me right away sort of 10 years ago, revolving around OpenStreetMap. I do spend a lot of time hiking and walking for leisure. And I’ve just never found that I that I needed it. I’m super familiar with OpenStreetMap. I’m now an expert in how Komoot works. And so it’s just funny, I think it’s like different types of people, for sure, especially in the UK, but I would say also globally, is just very different, like different generations who have grown up, especially have the sort of, you know, even for example of Google Maps is sort of omnipresent in our exploring of the world and navigating I’m talking about everything now from public transport to driving. And even like the sort of sat nav, the satnavifacation, I’m sure that’s not a word, but how we drive a car around the world has now had a massive influence on on people hiking and cycling. A lot of people would prefer to hike with turn by turn instructions on their phone and find that far more easy to get their head around than navigating from a paper map and pen The people could argue that that’s, that’s not as good. But I think if you embrace, you know, the quality of the map data and you embrace it, this actually helps a lot more people explore because there are less boundaries or sorry, less. Yeah, sort of less friction points. So less obstacles for them to to get over to outside. I’m not sure that’s necessarily such a bad thing.

Carlton Reid 35:23
And let’s go slightly backwards in that. The name Komoot is a pun on commute. So when it was originally developed, was it as an internal city thing? Or was it always, you know, this is meant to explore the world with or was that explore the world with just something that came afterwards and is the name a bit of a misnomer,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 35:56
is actually a bit of a misnomer, partly because it’s actually like a Komoot is derived from, I think it’s called the Valsa dialect, which is the region that the founders are from and it’s just like as far as I understand it, a casual greeting means something like simple and practical. And so it’s a it’s actually slightly misleading, because that’s the origin of Komoot, obviously, was

Carlton Reid 36:22
Nothing at all to do with commute. Well,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 36:25
I don’t, I mean, it’s not sure if it’s a good or a bad thing that they’re so similar, but that’s the origin of the name Komoot. It doesn’t, and the sort of the product and the philosophy doesn’t come from commuting at all, it’s about spending time outside. Of course, you could probably interpret that in many ways. Perhaps this is an alternative way of you know, commuting in nature. As it happens, many people use commute as part of their commute within town because they want to find a more scenic way of getting from A to B. But that’s not the that was never the objective of the company and and still that isn’t the case.

Carlton Reid 37:05
Right? Interesting. So I got that wrong that Well,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 37:10
I also had one for a very long day if that makes you feel better.

Carlton Reid 37:15
It does Thank you very much.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 37:17
I’m afraid now that you’ll really struggle to pronounce Komoot without saying Komoot because it’s only a matter of time before for that becomes a riddle itself.

Carlton Reid 37:26
Well, of course Google isn’t I think it’s a mathematical term isn’t it? So would have been familiar to some people but most people it’s not it’s not familiar terms. It’s just these unusual term. So anything that’s slightly unusual is better for a website you know name so the fact that you kind of spelling this and you people think it means there’s but doesn’t but they remember anyway so that’s that’s the trick just remembering it. So if it’s if it helps some people doing all that must be Komoot Oh, yes, he spelt with a K. And other people’s know it as a, you know, a greeting in a certain language. That’s also okay. So it’s however you get your name remembered?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 38:03
Yeah, very much so.

Carlton Reid 38:06
So at this point, I’d like to actually cut away and let my colleague take over and we’ll be back in a few minutes. So take it away, David.

David Bernstein 38:16
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Carlton Reid 39:17
Thanks, David and we are back with with with Jonathan of Komoot we’ve discovered that it doesn’t mean commute and that’s it you want it to mean commute. It can mean whatever you want. But Jonathan is he’s the community Global Community Manager for Komoot and he’s if anybody’s going around the world on their bicycle or wandering around the world on the bicycle and they wanted to use commute then then clearly Jonathan would be a good guy to to learn from Andy certainly in a pretty good job for for the kind of company commute is because Jonathan, you went round the world well, we have touched on this but now let’s let’s explore this in in greater detail. So we’ve got the Komoot out of the way. Let’s let’s, let’s talk about what where you’ve come from and why are you working for for Komoot? So we laughed before. Could you mention the fact that when you started, you were much of a cyclist? And I was kind of thinking, Yeah, that’s right, because of what the amount of kit you took to begin with is the kind of the classic. And I made this exact same mistake when I started my cycle touring adventures many, many, many years ago, you take too much kit. So you had an enormous amount of kit. And you had a kind of an old school bike, you were you on steel, you’re on a bicycle that I would have been familiar with in the 1980s, you know, a Dawes Super Galaxy, classic touring bike of a while ago. And then you you you’ve, you’ve clearly learned a lot. In that time that you’re away, but you started reading your blog, you basically picked this bike, you didn’t seem to know much about cycling, and then like, a week later, you’re, you’re off touring the world. So describe it. Have I got that? completely correct, you were pretty much a novice, and then you went cycled around the world.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 41:18
That is, that is pretty much it. It’s almost embarrassing to admit how little preparation or knowledge I had prior to leaving, but I think I was just blessed with youthful naivety time, and I didn’t have high expectations at all, I just wanted an adventure. And there are very few simpler ways of finding one than grabbing a bike and kind of just heading off without a plan.

Carlton Reid 41:44
Or when it’s classic, absolutely classic, the way the way that kind of developed. But let’s let’s find out what were you doing at the time? How long were you expecting to do? You didn’t have any plans at all. We literally tried to go around the world, we didn’t know how long was going to take? Or were you just going to cycle and see where you got to and then just what you might give up at some point. What What were you doing? How old were you and what were you doing at the time.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 42:08
So if I rewind a little bit further, we touched upon it at the beginning of the call. I grew up I grew up in London, but my my Yeah, my father’s British, my mother’s Danish. We never cycled or I never cycled for fitness. I never cycled for leisure or for exploring. However, I did grow up riding bikes, it was just very much like a functional tool to get around. London is not bike friendly city. But it’s a very practical city to get around and manoeuvre by bicycle. So I grew up cycling. I studied music at university. And when I returned to London, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do next, like I’m sure plenty of young people. Now, early 20s have the same sort of existential crisis. I was quite fortunate that I’d been working the whole time I was studying and, and while I had an awful lot of debt, I had somehow ended up with, you know, a few grand in the bank accounts saved up so I kind of had this incredible, I was in this incredibly privileged position where I could kind of yeah, go and explore a little bit without having to take the next the next most serious steps in life. I had always travelled a lot that had been a high priority for me, I had done a bit of long distance walking, I was kind of prepared for another long hike. And then kind of had this this moment, this epiphany I suppose, where I thought well, what about cycling that could be I was really interested in human power, not human powered, rather, I was interested in overland travel. So I became kind of fixated by this idea of, of cycling and then bike touring. And, and these were, I think, a wonderful period on internet where you could find all these incredible blogs that were so relatable and so inspiring and so informative as well. And so the sort of recommendations I found online, people said, those galaxies a good bike, found one on on eBay bought it was a good pannier to take Balsam or leave panniers from Argos and got all of this around Christmas. And I left two weeks later and the plan at the time, I’d been sort of telling my peers and family I was gonna cycle to Australia, but it was it was a it was a pipe dream. But it was kind of a joke as well. It was a good way of like picking something so outlandish that people wouldn’t take it seriously at all, which was fair enough given that I had never cycled further than about 10 miles. And so I I set off as I said to go and visit my mother, and I said if if this goes well, I will continue heading east and I had a fantastic first month and I continued writing to Turkey. I became very good at living, I would say extremely cheap on the road. I realised that I could probably get quite a long way. And, and yeah, I ended up going all the way to Australia, by which point I was completely broke. But I got a job and worked for a few months there. And then at that point, I, it became very clear to me that I wanted to continue and make it around the world cycle. And so I did that. And Nick got home, just under three years after having left probably having clocked around 50,000 kilometres, which is kind of a mind boggling number when I say out loud,

Carlton Reid 45:32
huh? There’s some people kind of do that in three weeks. I’m exaggerating a little bit, but they do it fast. And, you know, some Komoot users, Markus Stitz, for instance, did on a single speed, etc, etc. But you took three years. Now, it’s not that you weren’t doing some big mileages, you know, there was there was, you know, I read on your blog, you know, some days you’re doing 145 kilometres. And then other days, clearly, you’re, you’re just doing nothing, because you’re just enjoying the location. So you never had any plan to do it in a certain amount of time, you would just basically ebb and flow. It was just whatever the live through it you you kind of did that.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 46:17
Yep. And thank goodness, I personally like that. Because otherwise, I think it would be overwhelming to think about and those people who cycle around the world planning on it or trying to break records, I think it must just require so much. That’s no fault and pressure, I really was just kind of going for a ride, there was never any pressure, no expectation. If I went home, whenever I was bored, that would have been fine. No one would have judged me. So I was really making up as I went along. And when I left, I had absolutely no plan to spend anywhere near that long on the road knows that I have any plans to cycle all the way around the world. I am a Tura. At heart cycling at that pace is and I’ve done a lot of more, sort of a dyno extreme bikepacking. I’ve done a lot of ultralight cycling, I’ve even tried a few ultra endurance races. But touring at that kind of pace, for me is just the most kind of beautiful ratio in life. Hmm.

Carlton Reid 47:20
So notice, you’ve done the Transcontinental. So you have done these, these, these races, but your forte is basically just pootling along.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 47:30
Definitely. And if I if I continued to my cycling trajectory in between cycling around the world, and ending up doing what I’m doing currently at Komoot, when I returned home, having spent all of this time on the road, I actually worked as a bicycle courier in London for a short period, which was there’s no better way to re calibrate and reintegrate into city living having spent so much time on the road and to get paid to cycle around delivering stuff and exploring, you know, a city even if it’s your home city by bike. And I then started working at a company called Apidura. And I know that you’re familiar of a producer, because I believe you interviewed the founder of Apidura in this past few years. And I was there for a few years. And that was really, I mean, obviously made sense. I had a lot of touring experience. But that was in 2018, which was really when this hugely significant kind of shift in interest from bike touring to bikepacking. Which you can interpret in many ways. But, but this this shift was really kind of about to explode, and then get even more exaggerated through the pandemic. So I, I had learned so much about travelling by bike and then I learned so much about the benefit of ultralight cycling and these new packing systems that were so different to taking for panniers on a loaded bike. And so I spent four years at the Jura did the roller coaster that was COVID 19. And and that was sort of the segue that led me to Komoot because Komoothas been so involved with bike packing bikepacking as an established but also an emerging sport in the last few years. Because

Carlton Reid 49:19
you looking at your your bike setup. Back then with the with the Dawes Galaxy, and the bags you had on that was very much old school. And then I can completely identify with that because I’m clearly old school. And that’s where I started. So you know, for panniers at least loads of stuff and caring too much, etc, etc. And you look at that now and you think no, you would have the upward Eurostyle you know you’d have the bike packing bags, you probably wouldn’t be carrying quite as much Kip, although some of the place you went to. You know I’m thinking of you like your Australia video. and stuff where you’re obviously having to pack. I mean, when you go across the desert, you having to pack you know, an enormous amount of water, you’ve got to have all of the bug kit, you know, you’ve got to have all of the stuff that’s protecting you from the nasties. So you had some times you have gotten better how many it’s not an old school versus new school thing. It’s just you have to have a lot of kit in some places and and there’s no two ways about that. You know? Even if you’re doing a transcontinental style, you know, fast route across somewhere, you would still need a fair bit of of kit. But when you were when you started out, okay, actually good point. Did you finish on the same bike?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 50:43
I did, I finished on the same bike and I still ride that same Dawes Galaxy as my day to day pub, one around bike.

Carlton Reid 50:51
Excellent. So it’s but it’s like Trigger’s Broom, you’ve got you know, you’ve replaced tonnes of things, or it’s still largely the same bike

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 50:58
is the same frame, the same fork. And that is nice. All That Remains of the original bike.

Carlton Reid 51:05
So that’s pretty good going well done Dawes Super Galaxy.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 51:09
Yeah, there’s a lot to be said. Having modern bike so us so reliable in general. But yeah, I’m very much of the steel fan club. That bike has a lot of battle scars, from various sort of unfortunate collisions with other vehicles or just the road or ice. But it’s still yet it’s still going strong. And, and you’re right, I’ve had the been very lucky to experience travelling by bike in very different forms from the kind of old school bike touring sense where you carry basically your entire house, to super ultra light, you know, bike travel, where you just have a bivy bag, and you sacrifice all levels of comfort. I’ve also done a lot of off road sort of mountain bike touring, I think the thing that I find so wonderful about bicycle travel in general, is that there’s always a new way to do it. And there’s absolutely no right or wrong way of doing it, I think it’s very easy to get caught up in the the idea of I must be a lightweight bike packer, or I must do it in this particular way. But really, there’s no right or wrong way of doing it. We’re all very different, we all travel for very different reasons. And there’s different ways of, of packing for it. And, and even if I refer back to commute and the way that we’re set up, we give people the tools to, to pick, you know, they can pick the fast road route, if they want, or they can pick the meandering route, they can pick the most direct one, or they can pick the most leisurely one up over the mountains. I think this whole kind of space is really set up for the user to be able to customise you know, what they’re doing, and how they’re carrying it based on what their objectives is. And I think that’s what’s really kind of charming about the whole two wheeled travel thing.

Carlton Reid 53:02
See, I’m a historian of many things, but including cycling, and Thomas Stevens, if you hadn’t if you’ve come across that name in in the past, but he was basically a big wheel rider. So what would people would call Penny farthings. And this is 1880s. And the kit he had, the amount of kit he had and how it was packed is very much like bikepacking You know, it’s the big pannier bags, that’s pretty much the 70s and 80s thing, you know, really, really old and I was calling that old school, but genuinely old school. So 1880 stuff is you know, Apidura-style, incredibly lightweight, hard to carrying anything at all kind of touring. So that’s that’s kind of where cycle touring started. And we’ve kind of come full circle in many ways. And so people are going out there with incredibly minimal bits of of kit and somehow surviving. So when you did your your your your cirumnavigation, and you had all this enormous kit, where you jettison bits as you’re going along. And just in case you didn’t you don’t really need this you pick it up basically you became an expert. Just cook you’re having to carry this stuff. And because you haven’t to carry it, you quickly learn I don’t need that Chuck it

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 54:30
Yeah, and I did get rid of an awful lot of stuff. I had some some very questionable belongings with me. Like I had my my, I mean, I was on quite a budget when I left and and while I was going so it’s sort of just what am I sacrificing a bit of weight for a cheaper option, but I had like my, my mother’s old coat which was this like not anything resembling a down jacket, this monstrous thing that took up half a pannier. I had a pair of jeans with me to wear like when I was off the bike. So much unpractical. kind of clothing thing, I even had like a sort of smart casual shirt, I thought I would like to dress up like a non bike person when I was in town for a weekend, or things that I would never do now. And I did get rid of a lot of this stuff slowly. And as time went on out kind of improved things a bit as they broke. But then there was a lot of things that I wouldn’t change, like I travelled with, I mean, I had like a cutting board with me so that I could chop vegetables up when I was camping, and had little film canisters, filmed of spices and a proper source bird. And so I could like, eat well, and, and I wouldn’t, again, a lot of bikepackers could turn a nose up at that and think God’s this person’s just sort of like a moving kitchen. But I you know, for such a long period of the bike, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t change that at all. And on and I know that the sort of, especially at the moment with the sort of influences bikepacking has had on on taking existing cyclists and making them realise what they can achieve on the bike. I still am a big believer in taking a bit more stuff if your legs can handle it. And if you’re not in a hurry, you know, riding up a mountain with the extra weight on your bag, it’s not going to do your fitness any any disservice. If you can get up it. I think a bit of both comfort is quite okay. And while in general, I’m a minimalist these days, I think there’s plenty of space for carrying a few extra luxury items whenever you’re travelling.

Carlton Reid 56:30
But did you come back? Not you but did the bike and the kit come back a lot lighter. So by the time you’d finish, because I know you you’d have to badmouth the bags that you had. But you certainly changed your your your bags halfway around because of various reasons. And other notes on your blog, you do kind of, say a few choice words about the brand you had. But did you come back with? Did you come out with a lot more lightweight than you went? On much more lightweight?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 57:00
I would say I might have shaved off like a kilo. Like in general, I pretty much had the same amount of stuff with me. And yeah, it couldn’t have bothered me that much. Because otherwise I would have gotten rid of an awful lot of stuff. So no, I actually, I actually think I returned with a fairly similar amount of weight on my bike. That’s

Carlton Reid 57:22
interesting, because that’s totally opposite to the way I did it. So when I started out, I had so much kit, I had like a wooden hammer for hammering in the tent pegs I had, like, we just get a rock, you know, I had so many things that I just I was chucking stuff you know, from the very, very start and you’ve kind of quickly got used to you know, what was necessary and what wasn’t. And you don’t know that until you’re actually on the road. So I was ended up with with a lot less kit. So I taught myself minimalism, just because, cuz, whereas you’re saying you don’t, it doesn’t matter, you can just pedal up a hill, I was the opposite as like, No, I’m not the crane brothers. Famously, when they went up Kilimanjaro and their stuff, they they would, you know, drill holes in toothbrushes, I was never that extreme. But I would definitely want to be lightweight, as much as possible. And so I am kind of interested in taking a chopping board. So I wouldn’t have done that. This is interesting about how different people approach these things. And like, I have come down to the minimalist and caring such a little like I wouldn’t, personally I wouldn’t, not even going on like a camping trip. Now. I won’t take cooking equipment, for instance, I will generally buy what I need, and eat that and then have to then scrambled to get, you know, fresh supplies. And I know it’s much more efficient to take rice and what have you and then be able to boil this up. But to me just carrying any amount of cooking equipment to me in my head, just that’s too much weight, I can do this much lighter. And clearly you’re you’re not you’re a different each to their own, isn’t it? It’s just different people want to do different things. And that’s fine. Definitely.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 59:22
And we need to make sure that we always sort of accommodate that. Because people are so different. And and I think it’s difficult, you know, in life, for example, in the cycling industry, it’s a consumer driven industry, we need to convince people we brands need to convince people that they need to do things in a different way or a better way or an improved way. But really all of it comes down to like giving people options so they can do things in the way that they want to do it. And you know, there is absolutely no reason why one type of bike travelling is superior than another. They are yeah complete The different ways of doing things for different people. So ever people navigate in one particular way, if they choose one kind of route, it’s not about that it’s about giving people the options. And the same, like if someone wants to go on a road bike really fast with nothing on their bike, that’s totally fine. And if someone wants to chuck for massive panniers on their bike, they’ll probably be a bit slower. But that’s, but that’s totally okay.

Carlton Reid 1:00:26
And so what are you doing now? During what what? How would you describe your riding, and your adventuring now,

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:00:33
my, I still try. And when I travel, I always want to be on a bike. If I’m not on a bike, I’ve fully compromised a little bit. But I also like spending time walking around being a normal person, especially if I’m on holiday with my with my girlfriend. But I do try and have one or two bike trips, big bike trips a year. Over the last few years, I’ve developed a sort of real love for exploring, I guess, capturing the essence of a big adventure closer to home. But in general, I’m sort of a casual cyclist I like to get out for provides every once a week if I can. I think working at QMU is quite is wonderful, but a bit dangerous for someone like me who enjoys spending time looking at maps, because the list of places to visit is evergrowing. But commute has this amazing interface. We have this route planner, which is wonderful gives people all these advanced tools to make informed decisions about where they’re going and how they get there. But we also have this discovery interface where you can have these these created routes for you based on your sort of parameters, the smart, this kind of smart solutions, and does have a really big impact on me, since we launched it last year, I’m much more inclined to take a train out from London to a random station and say, load it up on commute and say, Hey, I’m in a new area. I’ve got three hours, give me something. So while I’m going on less epic adventures, and finding new kind of creative ways of exploring familiar places. I’m doing that a lot at the moment. And I’m extremely excited about doing more of that as the weather improves.

Carlton Reid 1:02:19
And is that a curated thing? Or is that an algorithm thing. So

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:02:24
it’s a kind of a combination of stuff. commute, we have so much user data, because we have millions and billions and billions of of users, the number of recorded tours is kind of such a big number. It’s it’s kind of hard to get your head around. So we’re able to give people these. These like personalised suggestions so I can take the train out if I’m with a no fun with friends go out for a walk at the weekend, I can look at which train line takes me to a village that looks somewhere Scenic. I don’t own a car. So I can just say I’m at this station, it will see where the people who use Komoot are heading when they record their tours. So it’s very easy to get a feel for where people actually walk. Where do people go for their recreational weekend straws. And it will give me a clever or suitable solution to get kind of onto that, navigate the route and then return to the train station. And it’s incredibly clever how it works. If I go on where I live now and say I want to go for a four hour cycle, starting for I live. I’ve lived in London for a long time and I’ve cycled in London for a long time. I know what all of the common roadie routes are that people take wherever they’re going off to Windsor or Kent or sorry, Essex and, and if I let Komoot do this for me automatically. It’s kind of amazing how it basically gives me the routes that people most commonly do. But it won’t just give me three or four options, it will give me hundreds of options, which means I can go out for a new ride. And I can always find something that’s slightly different to what I’ve done in the past. And I find that really inspiring for my, like motivation to explore.

Carlton Reid 1:04:12
And then if you were in Iran, would it do the same? Or was it does it need that you know, lots and lots of people have done this before or kind of just glower three people who’ve done this, okay, that’ll be the route we curate for this. This person has just ended up in Iran, for instance, such as yourself a few years ago. Yeah, you

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:04:28
need to have the use of data because it’s based on what people actually do. So if we didn’t have that it wouldn’t we only want to do it when we’re confident we give people a good experience. Otherwise, no one benefits from it. You can obviously still use the route panoramic, your own tool in Iran. The what I would say in certain regions where there is less user data, we have an editorial team that make it they’re the the we create the content so we’ll find what are the classic like walking routes based on like variety of sources, we have an extensive editorial team that will add this content. And they will add suitable highlights, which is what we call the contributions that the community creates to add on to the map. So that this is an amazing viewpoint, this is a great cafe to stop out if you’re a cyclist, this is a really beautiful, rich line stroll. So we will help to populate the map so that the people who are used to kind of a circular thing, the better the map data is, the better that the attributions are on commute, the more local people will find, have a good user experience. And then the more they use it, the more they’ll contributes. And that’s how we kind of launch in in new places where there’s less of an active community, if that makes sense.

Carlton Reid 1:05:48
Yes, your heat mapping then, in effect, so you’re you’re working out where people are going, and you see you perhaps, you know, and your your fellow app. This this ecosystem we talked about before, you know, where people are cycling, you know, like the Strava, type heatmap.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:06:06
Exactly. So we can I mean, it’s all obviously, like, it’s only when people choose to share stuff publicly. It’s all like completely anonymized. But you know, we have so much data, we’re just trying to harness it. And yes, we do know where people cycle we have that information that’s great is quite hard to sort of digest. But if you can take that and turn it into something actionable, the end result for the user is that they can say, I’m a beginner, I’ve got two hours, I’ve got a new phone mount to go on my handlebars, I can select this tool, I can just press go. And I can head off and have an amazing bike ride for two hours. And we can be really confident that it’s going to be suitable because that’s what other people are doing when they, for example, select bike touring as a sport type. And the same for hiking, we won’t have people won’t be walking down the road, because we’ll only be looking at data that’s come from hikers. It’s a very Yeah, it’s an incredible solution is very clever. And I think it’s just a great way of mobilising people, whether they’re like really experienced cyclists who are just looking for something new and and bored of doing the same kind of loop over and over again, or newbies who need their handheld a little bit. And once I have a solution that they can just go off and do with five minutes of planning instead of an hour of planning for a two hour excursion.

Carlton Reid 1:07:33
Now right now the bike and I don’t know how much you know, this, but the bike industry, certainly in the UK, and in many other places in the world is is suffering just incredibly bad. It’s just it is it is dire out there at retail. It’s dire out there for suppliers, you know, post COVID, we basically just got a huge, huge, low a complete slump. You know, I did a story on Forbes of the day talking about how to 40 year low in the UK. You know, the last time we were as low as this in bike sales was in 1985. So 39 years. And that’s that’s that’s pretty poor. Do. Do you recognise that? Is that something you can look at and say, oh, people aren’t writing as much? Or is that just purely at retail and people still riding that is not buying?

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:08:24
Is a good? It’s a good question. I actually saw that Forbes article and is it’s definitely bleak reading. But I’ve worked in the bike industry for a number of years. It’s like, I know many people who share the same kind of anecdotal experiences that things are changing. It is a problem with retail and definitely like have these hangover kind of effects from the pandemic that still making it really hard for people to forecast well. And, and it’s just been so unpredictable for a few years now. Komoot is lucky because we don’t deal with a physical product. But we are subject to the same the same kind of you know, these kind of cultural shifts, whether people are collectively interested in exploring or cycling, we’re not immune to that we might not have the same issues that a bike manufacturer has, but we still get impacted by the same changes. And it’s hard for us to predict these major shifts in usage in the same way that it’s hard for anyone in the cycling industry. One thing that I think is is great for Komoot. Well, I think partly compared to a lot of physical stuff in the cycling space. It’s quite an affordable price point and you can do an awful lot for free. So that’s less of a barrier when people have less disposable income. We are international so if one you know we have we’re active in plenty of markets, but we are, I guess subject to like, international shifts in usage. rather than, you know, locked in and reliant on one particular place, and also, we have a product that is set up for different sport types. So we can, you know, we can we’re not sort of reliant on we’re not just a road cycling company. So if people overnight decided not interested in road cycling, that would be very unfortunate, it would be a very sad thing. But we have plenty of other you know, markets and user types. And even within road cycling, for example, there’s people who’ve been, you know, the people who’ve been road cycling for many years in Italy decide to stop Well, there’s an entire, you know, there’s there’s millions of people who are maybe new to the sport, or could become interested in the sport, if you approach them in the right way. So yeah, it’s particularly in the UK is quite a bleak landscape at the moment, but I think it’s quite lucky in in where we are positioned, we’re not completely Yeah, stuck in the middle of that.

Carlton Reid 1:11:03
So tell us how much it costs to go for the pro version. And what you get with the pro version, better than just going for the free version.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:11:16
So I will try and do a concise summary of our pricing, you can do an awful lot on commute for free, you can find these routes that I referred to in our discover section, you can build our own routes, a lot of the functionality is there for free users. And when you sign up, you get free region bundle, so that you can explore a particular region and these region bundles, you can either purchase like an individual region, so like London, perhaps would be one that’s gonna be like a one those all like one time purchases. So you can buy region for £3.99 and region bundle a collection of them for 8.99. Or you can get the whole world pack for 29.99. Same whether it’s pound sterling, euros or or USD. And when you have a region unlocked you, you can then use offline maps. So you can take the download the map, or you can follow the tour without needing internet, you also get voice navigation. And you also get turn by turn navigation, whether you’re doing on your phone or more on your cycling computer or smartwatch. So those are all one time purchases. And then we also have a premium, like pricing tier, which is 4.99 a month 59.99 for the year. And then we premium, you get a whole host of extra features and functionality, you get the whole world available offline. So those features I mentioned earlier, you get all of that included, you also are able to make collections, which means you can group together, either your planned tours. By that I mean that your plan routes, so you want to do hiking or cycling, or once you’ve completed so like if I cycled around the world, I could add all of the daily bits into one nice collection to show that my car five, I’ve cycled while I was away. You also get sports specific overlays, which I referred to earlier. So you can overlay the light, long distance hiking or cycling routes, you get on tour weather, which is really cool, you can see where you’re estimated to be when the sunsets or when the rain arrives, or the winds looking like you get live tracking, you get the multi day planner, which I also refer to earlier. If you have a really long route, you can divide it into like segments. And as accommodation stops for each, you know, each daily part. And finally, you get 3D maps. So they’re all a bunch of features that are really amazing, really cool. I guess we pitch it as for people who wants to go further, so people who who require a little bit of extra extra features, and we’re constantly trying to add new features to enrich that.

Carlton Reid 1:14:07
Great. So to wrap up, give us a URL. I mean, it’s reasonably obvious. I agree. I’ll even spelled out during that during the recording now, however, give us the URL, and then the URL for for where people can have now obviously put in the show notes. But where people can can follow your your adventures in 2015 through 2017. And then you’ve done subsequent rides and you’re updating your blog for a while so so to basically give us your URL for the blog and for Komoot.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:14:39
We can spell out one more time for luck. It’s just Komoot.com. On the web browser. You can also find the app on both iOS and Android. If you want to give it a go and get started myself You can find me on LinkedIn. If you can manage to spell my surname, you can add it into the podcast notes. I have a link there to my Komoot profile, should you be interested in following my adventures there? My blog is called JKB’s bike ride, which is Jk B. S, my initials. If you want to read some of my, my rambling thoughts from a long time ago, all my photography from the many bike trips I’ve been on. And if you find me there, you can, you can find me on other social media platforms. And I would just say if you have any, if anyone listening has any questions about the things that we’ve discussed today, or any questions about commute, or bike touring travel in general, you’re very welcome to send me an email at jonathan@komoot.com Always happy to hear from people and talk about adventures

Carlton Reid 1:15:55
during this time. Excellent. Thank you very much. Now, as expected, this was meant to be about Komoot. It was it was Komoot. And Jonathan it was like this afternoon to measure exactly how much is is how much was Komoot and how much was Jonathan. But I kind of expected that as soon as you know that. I want to interview you then it’s like, Okay, we’re gonna be talking about bike touring. And we’re bringing Komoot here and there. So that hopefully I mean, you are very clever, you are dragging commute back in as much as possible, which is absolutely fine. And good, because that’s what ostensibly what we’re meant to be talking about. Anyway, that’s been fascinating. And thank you ever so much for for well, we recorded this and it was an hour and 16 minutes, and it flew by. So Jonathan, thank you ever so much.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:16:41
That was a real pleasure. I really enjoyed. Yeah, I really enjoyed going through whole range of subjects with you.

Carlton Reid 1:16:48
And we could have I mean, I could have gone blog by blog posts and blog posting and tell me about the flies here in Australia and stuff. But we didn’t but I do recommend people go read your blog, look at your videos, and work out whether Do you really want to cycle around the world. Or maybe Jonathan’s bug experiences and farting monks and stuff will will actually inspire you to go and do your own stuff. So anyway, thank you very much.

Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett 1:17:10
It was a good teaser. Yeah, thank you very much for your time.

Carlton Reid 1:17:13
Thanks for listening to Episode 348 of the Spokesmen cycling podcast brought to you in association with Tern Bicycles. Show notes and more can be found at the-spokesmen.com. The next episode will be a chat with Tom Knights of Strava Metro. That show will be out next weekend. But meanwhile, get out there and ride.

February 24, 2024 / / Blog

24th February 2024

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 347: Richard Fletcher

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUEST: Richard Fletcher, Isle of Man

TOPICS: Cycling on the Isle of Man. Mark Cavendish and Matt Stephens. Bike Style bike shop, Douglas. Manxman ferry. Dot Tilbury’s funnel. TT racing. Mountain road. Pan-Celtic. Isle of Man Youth Tour.

TRANSCRIPT

Carlton Reid 0:13
Welcome to Episode 347 of the Spokesmen cycling podcast. This show was engineered on Saturday 24th of February 2020. For

David Bernstein 0:29
The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider. Whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That’s t e r n bicycles.com to learn more.

Carlton Reid 1:04
The plan was to record this interview while riding to Laxey on the Isle of Man with cycle guide and event organiser Richard Fletcher, pointing out the roads long used by fellow Manxman Mark Cavendish, but then weather! I’m Carlton Reid, and I was on the Isle of Man for the AGM of the British guild of travel writers. members could choose a one day fam trip activity. And while others chose spa and yoga retreats or cookery sessions, all indoors, I had asked to go cycling. I brought my road bike on the Steam Packet ferry from Heysham and was eager to hook up Richard with a radio mic and then chat, as we pootled along. The driving rain put paid to that idea. And after a bitterly cold two hour ride, we drip-dripped into a Douglas bike shop. Right. And I’ve just seen a photograph of you there that I took on the road, and you’re smiling. But there’s sleet. There’s rain, there’s basically we’re riding through it almost a river coming up through to Douglas. So that was pretty grim out there.

Richard Fletcher 2:23
Yes, as bad as it gets over here. But yeah, you’re out on your bike. And there’s the worst places to be. So as long as you don’t do more than an hour and a half in that sort of that sort of weather, then it’s fine. Right?

Carlton Reid 2:35
So warmed up, we had a cup of coffee, and a bit of cake in Noa’s bakery, and that’s Noa. And next door to that is Bike Style. The bike shops who are now sitting on very nice sofas here, in in a nice bike shop. I’d like to say overlooking, you know, the scenic wonders of Douglas, but we can’t actually see a great deal. And when we were out riding this morning, you you basically you took me out to some scenic places, but we didn’t actually see anything. So just describe the ride that we did this morning. What would we have seen if it would be a beautiful day? Because we’re kind of going towards Snaefell, weren’t we?

Richard Fletcher 3:12
Yeah, well, the hills, the route, we went on the hills all around it, basically. So and yeah, on a clear day, that’s what you see. You can you can see the island from sort of side to side and top to bottom only when you’re out it’s particularly if you get some height. But today, because it’s hilly, you get white-out effectively. So yeah, there’s quite low cloud and you don’t see a lot. But yeah, it would have been a nice ride if our view wise if it had been clear.

Carlton Reid 3:42
Because we did get pretty damn cold out there today. So the route you were originally planning to take me on would have been towards Laxey

Richard Fletcher 3:52
We’d have gone north of the east coast of the island. And you get some stunning views on the East coast. Well on all the coastal routes on the island, and the island basically has villages and towns dotted around the coastline. So as soon as you come in from the towns, you start climbing, and you go either over a hill into a valley and over another hill and back to the coast. The island is only 12 miles wide and it’s been its widest point, and 36 miles long. So you can cross from coast to coast or top to bottom in a day. But there’s lots of minor roads. I think some of the roads we went on. They were most of them were single carriageway roads to the benefit that is the nicer island because they’re quiet, very little traffic. But yeah, it’s just today was a rough day for it.

Carlton Reid 4:42
So if we had done that ride, which we’re planning to do towards Laxey would have basically written past Cav’s house, yeah?

Richard Fletcher 4:51
Well, he’s born and brought up in Douglas and Laxey still has a house in Laxey. And Laxey’s got a lot of history from it was an old mining village years ago not a big population there. It’s people have a possibly have an impression of Cav that because he’s a sprinter the same of the Tour de France with a sprint train that he’s a rider for the flatlands but the he was born and brought up over here where you there are hills everywhere you go. And in his amateur racing, I think you see that that he’s used to coping with that type of terrain.

Carlton Reid 5:29
And tell me about Dot Tilbury because Dot Tilbury you’re talking about basically before when we’re in the coffee shop about a big funnel of riders. Then at the bottom, you would spit out these well known riders that we’ve all heard of.

Richard Fletcher 5:42
Yeah, I mean, I’ve been cycling for 40. More well, more than 40 years and until Dot came around, and the cycling tended to be quite insular. And people would get into cycling because their parents had all their brothers or sisters. Dot started a children’s league on a Tuesday night, more than 20 years ago now. And it started attracting more and more children into it, who weren’t anything to do with the normal cycling scene. And within a relatively short space of time, it got to the stage where she was getting 200, then 250. And now 300 kids would turn up on a Tuesday night and be introduced to cycling as an activity. And that’s been going on now say for over 20 years. And I’d say for a small population out the Isle of Man 86,000 people, that’s the most directly cause of of the high standard of cycling because you use the word then there is a sort of wide funnel of kids becoming involved in cycling. And yes, there’s when they get to 14, 15, 16. And all the distractions come around or other activities come around, particularly in this day and age where there’s so many alternatives to to spend your time still a larger number drop out at the bottom of the funnel than would have if she didn’t run that league. And I think she’s the most direct link to the success of of elite cycling over here. I remember when did that exactly set that up? I don’t exactly 20, 20 something years ago be more than 20 years

Carlton Reid 7:20
Where Where does she where’s that is it’s just like an off road circuit?

Richard Fletcher 7:24
It’s on a perimeter road around the National Sports Centre. So it’s about half a mile round pan flat. And it’s like an oval, like a 600 metre version of an athletic track effectively, but it’s tarmac. And they race round there on a Tuesday night, they start when they’re almost just off balance bikes then through to when they’re 16. And they that’s where they get into cycling, and then as they get to the older age groups, and they then move into the more sort of traditional cycling. Dot also takes them away on trips. So they go to places like a day on the Manchester Velodrome they take part in the youth series that British Cycling runs. And we run around with that over here. So they get to perform on home soil as well. In fact that is coming up in April, this year, there’ll be over 200 kids come from the UK, the best 200 Kids in the UK will come over to ride in the Isle of Man. And about 50 of Dot’s kids will be in those races as well.

Carlton Reid 8:32
Because you’re one of the organisers of yeah, they used to it

Richard Fletcher 8:36
I recently do, the youth has been running for 14 or 15 years now. And last couple of years, the organisers sort of change over time, became involved and become involved. So Emma Dyer who has been involved for many years and organising it Rob Holden, ex professional cyclist and myself are the three main organisers but it’s a big team of people that put it together and it’s closed roads Yeah, we get Road Club full road closure which is one of the USPS if you like of them coming to the Isle of Man that the kids aren’t used to riding on closed roads they used to running on closed circuits around parks and things like that. And we get the national escort group guys come over so it’s quite a an atmosphere for the kids the it’s not to to France but it’s sort of to ride on closed roads with national escort and we bring Tony Barry’s neutral service cars over as well so they’ve they’ve actually got a almost like professional experience that they get and I think that’s why I like coming over for it.

Carlton Reid 9:39
And one of the ways you’re able to close the roads is the Isle of Man government is pretty well used to closing roads for the TT so is that part of it? You can you they are used to closing roads?

Richard Fletcher 9:53
Yeah, they are and there’s an acceptance by the public there’s always some resistance to close. as roads, whatever it’s for, and we try and minimise that. But yeah, the sort of structures and the policies and laws are in place to help you do that. The TT happens has happened for 100 years. 1907. Yeah. That that’s an established thing over here. What people probably don’t know as much about is that at this, the bicycle TT started in the 30s. And it was, again, it was because they couldn’t do it. on the Isle of Man; in the UK rather. So you had the I don’t know, whatever the governing body of cycling was then. And you had a breakaway group called British League of racing cyclists. And they, they got together with the Isle of Man. And we ran one of the first big mass start races over here in the 1930s last century. And that for a time that became the biggest race in Britain for cycling, so you had top names like Tom Simpson, and all the big riders at the time came over and race the Isle of Man, the International, before in this sort of following the Second World War,

Carlton Reid 11:12
when there was no nothing like that everybody was time trialling, yeah, famously and alpaca Yeah, you know, black alpaca going out in secret in the morning

Richard Fletcher 11:20
Yeah, so the road racing scene was established, cycling was established then right, and then became Manx International Cycling Week, which ran through till 2003, which was a week long festival where we close roads for two the whole week for cycling. That went into decline mainly because people’s habits changed. And they didn’t want to take a week off from their work holidays to come to Isle of Man for cycling when Majorca and other places were, were beckoning. So now we tend to have smaller scale races, we had the we’ve had rounds of the British National series for seniors. So the premier calendar, we’ve hosted the national championships. And consistently we’ve run the National Youth and junior two sets around the British youth series and around the British Junior series, the Peter Buckley series, which it’s still I still call it that. Peter Buckley was actually from the Isle of Man. And when the Commonwealth Games gold medal, and

you’re from the Isle of Man too, so you’re a born and bred Manxman

Yeah, I spent a little bit time off the island but mainly on the island. Yeah. My wife’s from the UK. And my dad was from the UK. So it’s, but yeah, it’s been my home is here.

Carlton Reid 12:40
And tell me a little bit about how you sort of semi funded Cav’s early career with some cash, but indirectly.

Richard Fletcher 12:51
Yes, that’s my claim. And I don’t think Mark would want to know about it or agree with it. But Mark’s mother. For many years, Adele ran a dance workshop, not far from this shop, actually. And both my daughters did ballet. So I spent quite a lot of money on pointe shoes over the years with with Adele. And so I say that and that was about the time Mark was getting into cycling. So yeah, I must have contributed in a small way to Yes,

Carlton Reid 13:16
yes. And he of course had a dance background at first.

Richard Fletcher 13:19
I believe so. I think I think a lot more is made of it than that. But yeah, when I think he was nine or 10 or 11, I think he did some ballroom dancing. So I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next three or four years, he appears on Strictly or something like that. Be a good candidate.

Carlton Reid 13:37
And he’s got a house, you said at Laxey. He’s got houses dotted around, but one of them. One of them is certainly here. So he would be a known figure here. And I’m here, obviously for the the AGM of the Travel Writers Guild, and even you know, the top big wigs. And when we had our gala dinner, they mentioned Mark Cavendish. Yeah, you know, so he he’s a known figure, quite apart from in the cycling scene, but he will appear and he will do local, local, right. He

Richard Fletcher 14:10
He comes up frequently to see his Mum and Dad, who both live on the island. And yeah, when you see, he goes out with the local lads on both training rides, and you’ll he’ll, he’ll pop up and do events as well. I run a sportif each year, and I haven’t had any contact with him. But the British Cycling entry system that was used, the entries pop up in your email inbox and there’s one M Cavendish OBE, who just paid his entry fee and rocked up like any other rider to it to just make a big thing about you made the day because he’s turned up and he was late getting to the start and we sportifs quite relaxed. But when he got to start on when went round with the lads who were strong enough to ride with him, and he because he was They started you went past everybody in the event and it made the event all you could hear in the sort of coffee shop afterwards was because Cav passed me on this hill or Cav passed me here. So it’s great, but he does. He just slots in. And I think I think I don’t know, you have to speak to him. But I think he enjoys the fact you can just behave normally over here and go about his business without getting accosted for this, that and the other. So,

Carlton Reid 15:23
So we’re about on the roads before most of the people were getting with this wide berth. But we had a couple, and it was such atrocious weather. And they were coming past at speed. Yeah. And that wasn’t that wasn’t very nice. And you might have told one of the drivers they shouldn’t have been doing. And that was it was a horrible close pass. So how much respect do you generally get? And could it be some of it down to you’ve got that funnel of riders, and you’ve certainly got somebody as famous as Mark Cavendish, that, you know, the big wigs talk about him? So might there be some, even if it’s just a small bit of people’s brains? Like why can’t you know, close past those cyclists; one of them might be Cav and then I’m in the national news?

Richard Fletcher 16:10
It’s a bit subjective, my gut feel, because I do do quite a lot of riding off the island is my gut feeling. I think the drivers over here are a little bit more considerate than elsewhere in the in the in the British Isles is a bit subjective. But generally speaking, I think the overall rise in popularity of cycling, whether it’s here or in the UK, has also contributed to maybe people being a bit more aware. I don’t I don’t think it’s it’s not malice of people in cars. I think it’s it’s ignorance of, of the fact they’re inside us. steel box, and you’re not. So it’s not something that would ever I mean, I’ve been cyclists for many years, it’s not going to put me off cycling anyway. But I think it is the it’s still the main barrier to people taking up cycling who aren’t experienced cyclists. So it’s a bit of culture change people’s personalities change when they get in the car. And then that’s, I see to unbonded really, but no, it’s not too bad over here. And the roads themselves because they’re not big roads, people have to drive with a bit of care and attention most people to give you plenty of room.

Carlton Reid 17:23
So, okay, well, a few seconds ago you said British Isles rather than the UK. So Isle of Man isn’t in the UK isn’t in the EU, ever. It’s but it’s part of the British Isles, and it’s a crown dependency. There are different rules here. Because if you’ve got your own government and one of those rules, or lack of rules, is you can go as fast as you want in a car on certain roads. And that’s partly maybe a legacy of the, the TT that’s been going on. So if you’ve got this TT circuit, and even on Ordnance Survey maps, it says, you know, this is the TT course. But these are public roads. These are these are not not closed circuit at all apart from when it’s running in June, and the roads are closed. So at those roads being no speed limits, means some drivers, not all of them for some drivers are going to be going crackers on those roads, because then you can overtake a policeman, police car 200mph nand they can’t do anything about it. So does that mean cyclists avoid that, that course, that road?

Richard Fletcher 18:31
There’s only one section that most cyclists avoid. That’s the what’s called the mountain road. It runs through Ramsey over alongside Snaefell the only mountain on the island and drops down into Douglas. So whereas 20, 30 years ago I used to commute over that road. Most people would avoid it now and I would avoid now is because and there’s a number of reasons for that. One is that yes. A lot of drivers do put the foot down when they get on a mountain road. There are safe passing places on the mountain road. If you were doing excessive speed and you took a police car, they would still pull you in because it’s below there’s no speed limit. It’s allowing us to do art drive. Um, I’m not sure the legal definition but in a safe manner effectively. So it’s not unlimited speed, it’s driving to the road conditions and if you overtook them at 70 and it was misty, they put you in so it’s them. There’s there is some control over it. But particularly motorbikes because of the history. They like to really push it over the mountain. And it’s so I wouldn’t go up there on a bike now for two reasons. One, you can although we’ve got terrible weather today, and even in on a summer’s day, the mountain in patches can be misty. So you could set off from Douglas or Ramsey in bright sunshine. And once you get above 1000 feet or whatever in the mist, and the speed differential between a car even not absolutely ragging over the mountain, and the bicycle going uphill is such that you be at risk of being hit from behind. Because the driver just wouldn’t see you in time,

Carlton Reid 20:17
Do motorists avoid it, do they also seem motorists to go I’m not gonna get that because

Richard Fletcher 20:22
I mean, I say I lived in Ramsey and commuted to work in Douglas, for 20 years. And I could, I could probably drive the mountain road blindfold. But I do know some drivers and even taxi drivers who don’t like riding, because the because it’s the TT course there are no cat’s eyes in the middle of the road. So it’s actually quite a difficult road to drive in the mist. You need to know where the roads going up ahead. So yeah, there are some motorists avoid, as well.

Carlton Reid 20:54
So that’s a 37 mile stretch of, in effect, a triangle of roads that are marked on the OS map as the as the TT course. But the island has something like 688 miles, all other roads. So we’re talking, you know, 640 Odd miles of other roads. Yeah. So that’s something that right, avoid them. You don’t have to sometimes use that road to link up with other things, you can always avoid it.

Richard Fletcher 21:23
And the funny part is that the when we have bike races or their motorcycle races, there mountain road, because it’s very, there are maybe three businesses on the mountain, or I think you went to one victory cafe, that they were allowed actually to close the mountain road with very little resistance, because they’re alternative routes around the island for motorists. And there’s not many people live in the mountain road. So it’s it’s actually a lot, it’s a road you wouldn’t use when the roads are open, it’s for an event, you can often get a road closure on the mountain road quite quite easily because of that. But now the other road, most of the active cyclists, they wouldn’t use a TT course because they are effectively the island’s equivalent of sort of arterial roads. Most of the traffic is on those roads. But it means the roads the side I mean, we went on some of them today can’t learn without being able to see where we were. But they’re the roads that run alongside or crisscross those roads. And the traffic is fairly light. Still, we didn’t have a chance to go up to the north of the island where it’s the northern plane is flat. But that’s where virtually all the local racing takes place. Now because there’s very little traffic it’s mainly just farmland, but farms and fields.

Carlton Reid 22:48
At this point we’ll cut to a break. Take it away, David,

David Bernstein 22:52
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Carlton Reid 23:52
Thanks, David. And we are back with Isle of Man Mr. Cycling, Richard Fletcher. So describe where maybe Kev or Pete Kennaugh where they would have ridden where would they go? Do you think would they have a standard training ride? Or would they mix it up?

Richard Fletcher 24:09
No, they mix it up and I know Cav’s thing that he doesn’t like to repeat the same road on any training ride. I think he covered that when he did a piece over here with Matt Stevens. But they ride the ride all over basically. And you can it’s for small island, there are a lot of roads, you can you can mix it up. And you tend to look at the weather and see which way the winds blowing and decide a new route then rather than have a planned route, but they will know both those two and any boys have been involved in cycling over here you get to know every road on the island basically. So

Carlton Reid 24:51
you would link it up in your head and then just kind

Richard Fletcher 24:54
of criss cross and go where the coffee is really

Carlton Reid 24:59
and then Then on this trip, maybe they’re just pulling our leg I don’t know. But the bus driver everybody who’s been talking to us on this trip has been stressing the folklore element of the Isle of Man, which I wasn’t really terribly familiar with at all. So everybody is stressing, you know, you’ve got to when you go across the Fairy Bridge, you’ve got to say hello to the fairies. How much of this is would you tell that to the tourists? And how much of that is no people on the island genuinely, you know, believe in this stuff.

Richard Fletcher 25:36
I don’t know if I believe in it. A lot of a lot of the people buy into it.

Carlton Reid 25:42
And why?

Richard Fletcher 25:44
Because I’m I’m not one of those I’m not a superstitious person. But there is. I mean, there is a big Celtic background the history of the Isle of Man is interesting. So don’t buy into all the folklore stuff. The background history of the island where the Vikings were heavily involved in the Isle of Man if you look at it geographic on a map, you can see that if you’re military strategist, where would you base yourself if you want to rape and pillage all over the British Isles, you got the Isle of Man because you can bet your base here and strike out and hit violent Wales England or Scotland from it. So the Vikings were have a big influence on the islands. Longer history. And then because of that, the Scottish Lords got rid of the Vikings and then the Lords of Darby took over from the Scots. So there’s a lot of not folklore that but there’s a lot of good, meaty history about the island. The the other stuff? I don’t know, I think it’s it’s the stuff about mythical creatures and fairies is, is probably because you then you’ve got a small island race basically. So you get myths and things from a an environment like that. But yeah, it’s uh, it’s, it sells a lot of gin. Yes.

Carlton Reid 27:17
Definitely good stories. Yeah. And we’ve been given, you know, books of folklore. And so you’ve got to say, hello to the fairies

Richard Fletcher 27:25
doesn’t mean the other Celtic nations have similar things. So Irish, Irish methylene and Welsh and Scottish as well. That so there is quite a strong Celtic presence here. And there are quite, there’s quite a lot of exchanges between, particularly in the arts around the Celtic side, so you’ve got them Normandy, Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and they do get together, particularly in the art side and, and share the same sort of music and poetry and everything else. It doesn’t overlap as much in into sport. Although we’ve got a really interesting event coming over here in July this year, called Pan-Celtic, which is like an ultra endurance event. And I was amazing guy, I didn’t know anything about the event until earlier this year. And the guy who organised a guy called Matt Ryan, who lives in north Wales, the opening entries for it and had to close them within 48 hours later because he’d filled the field and it’s people from all over the world coming. We completely coincidentally bumped into a German couple on a cycling holiday and they said Are you from Alabama? We’re coming for the pan Celtic this year. And so they’re flying in, mins booked to Gatwick and Gatwick to here to do this event that starts does 100 mile loop around the Isle of Man and they’re getting on the ferry and they go off to Scotland right around there.

Carlton Reid 28:59
You know the route and what they what are they doing loose route

Richard Fletcher 29:03
it’s about like it’s about 1500 miles in total. It’s one of these ultra distance the other man is strange and it’s been set as the because we got very right it’s been set as the first stage they’ve been classed as a time trial. It’s not it is a race and it isn’t a race it’s a it’s a race where nobody wins anything is the way that if the organisers describes it, but it’s a personal challenge thing so when the clock starts normally on the pan Celtic it doesn’t stop until you get to the very end whereas for this year because the argument is being used the first stage they don’t do a ride through the night here and then get their morning ferry over to patient and then ride I think they go north then and ride around Scotland for the rest of it. But I’m seeing the rest of the room

Carlton Reid 29:48
because normally on the pan Celtic it’s if you get to the ferry port late well you’re gonna get the ferry the next day and that’s that’s added to your time. Yeah, where is this one? And usually they’re gonna stop the times there is like a time drive.

Richard Fletcher 30:04
Yeah, because it’s a three to four hour journey over I think so yeah, they’re they’ve got they’ve got a big enough window the starting at seven o’clock on Saturday evening and they’ve got to do better thing is boundary and five miles. So the very least 8.45 next day so I can’t see anybody missing that that they should have a little bit sleep actually

Carlton Reid 30:27
do what route they’re doing actually on yeah went

Richard Fletcher 30:30
through the route with the organiser because he we’ve actually got another big cycling event the next day. So we needed to avoid clashing with that. And it basically does a big loop of the island round round the perimeter mainly but they cut into they’ve got the participants left some interesting clients did it as well they go burn the client pool faulty will, which is effectively going up the mountain it’s not the mountain road TT causeway but it’s the it’s a, it’s a nicer if you can have a nice climb, it’s a nicer climb than the TT course one

Carlton Reid 31:07
and they are avoiding the TT course completely. There’s not not not hitting it at all

Richard Fletcher 31:11
on it for about a mile. And that’s it because when you get to the top of that climb, you actually go backwards along with TT good for you then go back into the interior. But that’s that’s fine. It’s then it’s the middle of summer it’ll be the middle of the night when they get there as well. So there won’t be a lot of traffic on that road.

Carlton Reid 31:31
So that’s it as you’re saying before there’s there’s there’s no cat size on that road. So that’s a road that maybe people avoided that night anyway.

Richard Fletcher 31:37
Um, yeah, this well. There are alternative routes. So yes, you will, they will fit in on if there’s not misty then you would go that way. Because the quickest way from north to say, most direct way. But generally speaking in nighttime, it’s quiet anyway.

Carlton Reid 31:55
So last night, we had a talk from Milky Quayle. Who’s one of these guys who who averages 186 miles an hour on his motorbike as he’s going around the corner, sometimes hitting 200 miles an hour. And he was one of the questions I asked him was, you would die if you hit a pothole at 30 miles an hour, nevermind 200 miles an hour. So the local authority, the government must be pumping a huge amount of money into keeping that road. absolutely pristine. And there’s never going to be a pothole on that road. However, does that mean that other roads, the roads, maybe the cyclists are on? Does that mean they’re getting short shrift there because they’re getting roads where there’s gonna be potholes, and then all the money has been pumped into that mountain road?

Richard Fletcher 32:46
The don’t know the answers are so the there’s a perception certainly that the TT course will not upset from the TT course it has a priority. And it is always, as you say, perfectly maintained. And it has to be actually sculptured sometimes to accommodate the motorcycling. So the the course has probably got faster over the years, because it’s been improved. There’s a on the mountain road section, there’s a couple of places where the road is actually been that not banked. But is lends itself to is certainly not off camber for it that way. So that there is a lot of money spent on the TT course. But that’s justified by the fact that the TT races are revenue generating. So whether the, whether that means it whether that’s to the detriment of other roads is a moot point. Some people locally would say, definitely, whether it’s financial or just resource wise, in terms of the time spent. And generally speaking, I think our roads are fairly good. I tend to ride a gravel bike now anyway, so on You seek out rough road sometimes. So it’s not as I don’t think we certainly don’t think we’re the roads elsewhere. The roads outside of TT girls over here are certainly not any worse than UK roads now. And I’d say overall, slightly better than a lot of areas of the UK. So be it as much the time I think is nCn calm the isn’t more than the money you’ve got limited resources to do road maintenance. So if you’re spending quite a lot of that time on a TT course you’ve you’ve a limited timeframe.

Carlton Reid 34:40
By the same token, you probably got some pretty good experts who are probably using some pretty good scientific equipment to spot potholes forming and that might benefit.

Richard Fletcher 34:52
Maybe not seeing that but we’ve got the we’ve got reporting so you can report potholes and they do that for very quickly to them when you report them. When it’s inevitable, you’ll get where and turn around. Look at the weather today. It’s there’ll be, I’m sure when this week is out, there’ll be a lot more potholes than they were last week.

Carlton Reid 35:15
So, so far, we’ve talked about road cycling, and you’ve talked a little bit about gravel cycling there. What about mountain biking?

Richard Fletcher 35:22
Mountain biking is is a growing thing. It’s been under exploited. I think

Carlton Reid 35:26
in that get in the bank shop here. I’m just turning my head. It some of this road bikes over there. But there’s a tonne of mountain bikes. Yeah.

Richard Fletcher 35:33
I mean, the there are 26 plantations over here

Carlton Reid 35:37
are found they are what we would call Forestry Commission. Yeah, yeah, Department

Richard Fletcher 35:41
of the Department of Government that looks after them and uses them for growing trees, basically, and harvesting those trees. But within those plantations, a lot of them have had over the years. sanctioned and unsanctioned trails built, they tended to be built, historically, they’ve tended to be built. And then forgiveness, asked afterwards, rather than permission to go and build the trails. And the government, the barn has been quite friendly in that respect, in that they generally want to encourage access to those plantations. The we tried to formalise that in the last couple of years and recognise that we’ve probably got as many trails and the quality of those trails and the accessibility Australia is just as good as some of the sort of identified cycling parks in particularly in Wales, Scotland and Ireland more recently, but we’ve never really produced a a tourism product that, and we’ve never really joined them all up. So there’s been quite a big effort in the last two years to do that. And there’s a there’s a scheme, just kicking off at the moment government agreed funding in October last year, to produce effectively a, an Isle of Man trail Park. And that’s taking a cluster of seven plantations that are quite close to Douglas, and joining them together, they’re about they’re only about four road crossings to join them together, because they either abort each other or they’re, there’s a road crossing to get into the next one. So that’s a project that’s, that’s starting now. To join those up. And then I think it will be used as a as a tourism product, but also be of great benefit to local population. And then you’re involved in that. Yeah, the I’m involved in advising the government on it. The the rise of gravel cycling as well, because a lot of it. Within those plantations, you have forestry, roads, fire fire roads. And so we’re going out from this bike shop actually, on Saturday and on a gravel ride, and we’ll take in at least two of the plantations during that if the weather improves.

Carlton Reid 38:03
So the government is pumping money into into these plantation rides. It recognises all the big wigs recognise Mark Cavendish, or they use Mark Cavendish as something to talk to a general audience and there’s not wasn’t a noise of scientists at all. It’s an audience of, of just general travel writers who they were talking to. So is their awareness that cycling is important to the economy and potentially could become even more important in future. Yeah,

Richard Fletcher 38:35
it’s growing thing that the Isle of Man’s tourism product has changed over the years. If you go back to my childhood, it was a bucket and spade tourism, where the the mill towns of the Northwest would shut down for a week and the there was Scottish week, there was Irish week. And it was that type of holiday that fell away when the trips to Spain and things like that came about. So that was one section. Then it it moved on to basically in more niche tourism, such as around the heritage railways and things like that. And that became very popular. More recently, so last three, four years. All the studies and reports that have been done around the future tourism on the island says actually that generation is these strong say flatlining because that flood that is declining. The new demographic, a tourism want the outdoors and that’s what the Ironman has got in spades. So, the activities such as I think the government does now realise that activities particularly such as walking, cycling, golf as well, there are numerous golf courses over here. And then anything, the more sort of general, outdoor and active type of activities are they will be the future tourism on the island. So cycling and walking in particular are being focused on we’ve got some I’m not a hill Walker at all. But the the that is as an asset over here this does access all around us there’s an 82 mile coastal path, go the route route fall on them that is under use is it’s not known about really, but it’s there. And it doesn’t need a lot of work to make it a top rate tourism product, like some of the the Pennine routes that you have in the UK. And cycling wise. Yes, the there’s mountain biking has been absolutely recognised and the see the money has been allocated to do that. And I think that will become a product and I think gravel and sort of lead you into road as well. So I mean, the challenge that mean chance, I think is is for cycling is getting a bike go via

Carlton Reid 41:02
the ferry. I mean, some people might fly but the ferry it’s a brand new ship. Yeah,

Richard Fletcher 41:07
they use those pretty friendly with the bikes. I mean that there’s room yeah, there’s actual

Carlton Reid 41:12
room where you put your bike? Yes, and you hang them up. And it’s like what most varies, even in fact, I don’t know any ferries where there’s a room where you put your bike? Well, that’s come about

Richard Fletcher 41:20
because I say about three or four years ago, there was a recognition that the future lay in those niche, outdoor active elements, the various brand new so we did a gap analysis effectively. And what’s the difference between the Isle of Man and an established cycling destination to take the weather out of it because if you comparing, say Croatia to the Isle of Man or basically to the weather booked the other things, the more the more basic things are the same. It’s they’re having cycling friendly accommodation, which can be the most basic thing where you don’t get looked at as if you’re from a different planet when you turn up in lycra with a bike through to the proper cycling friendly hotels, which would have secure bike storage, maybe a little workshop, side tap to clean your bike, that type of thing. So looking at the combination in the Government Department concerned has now a registered recycling friendly hotels and gives them advice as to what they need to do. In terms of that. The very youth was another one where back in my day, the crew were really friendly, but you’d roll up down the ramp and it says sticky bike over there mate. And it’d be just put against the side of the deck where all the cars work. Now as you see the new ferry the Manxman has got a dedicated cycle storage park so it’s that type of messaging if you like people coming over that actually cycling is welcome here the big ticket items are things like putting together a proper trail Park product the route became in on blinded by rain in the last couple of miles went past what’s called a nunnery estate which is an older stately home and been in talks with the owners of that put a close road title circuit in it. And they’re quite keen on that funding won’t be an issue. But but that so there is recognition particularly around so I think that it’s it’s a it can become an an important tourism product.

Carlton Reid 43:31
And when people are laughing they because maybe not in February

Richard Fletcher 43:36
no I don’t think and there’s a big push to try and encourage visitors to the island in what they call the shoulder periods. But no if I was I’m blunt about these things when people ask about the Ironman and cycling cyclists more enjoyable in good weather. It’s as simple as that. So yeah, you would come in the not this year the high season but he come between April May June July August September. I wouldn’t I personally wouldn’t do a trip outside those months I’d be them a lot of people would say well there’s no such thing as bad weather just blanket but

Carlton Reid 44:14
we had some good kit on today and we still got cold I

Richard Fletcher 44:18
know yeah the the sort of you were you can tweak the sides a bit on now are around mountain biking because you what we tend to do with the locals anyway. On a day like this, if you were going to go out you go on a mountain bike in the plantations and you don’t hear the wind and basically So building that mountain bike trail Park product could actually extend the season because yes, you still gonna get money, but you don’t get score and worse because you there’s just no wind in plantations. That’s where I would probably do my gravel riding or mountain biking Not quite not quite as bad as this but you can extend it a little bit in that respect I think

Carlton Reid 45:05
so people listening to this they thought right definitely not in February but in the months that you’ve just recommended summer basically they want to come across they want to see this this fantastic very with its dedicated bike room they want to do the same roads that cab has done and other top local riders they want to do the plantations maybe on a mountain bike How did they find out about this and how do they find out about you? So what social media and what websites can they go look at will the

Richard Fletcher 45:41
there is a cycling website we’re trying to build up quite a lot now called https://www.cycling.im and that will become hopefully one of the main portals to visit Isle of Man website as well has quite a lot of information. But nowadays a loop it’s not totally reliable you can easily find on Strava or rider GPS routes on the island that aren’t somebody’s commuter route, but they are actually a decent ride. So it’s quite so much easier nowadays I think to find you yourself new routes or or you can you can hire a guide but it’s small enough Island to find your way around. What where it’s more difficult I think and that’s why we’re putting the work into is on the mountain bike side. I go out with mountain bike I’m because I’m mainly road cyclists. I’ll go to mountain bikers and I’ll go trails I never would have found if I hadn’t gone out with the group that did the old time. So the idea with trail Park is that it will just be on trail forks are one of the products like that it will actually be very well signposted. So that you can the the network we’ve designed is it’s about 64 kilometres of trails. And we agree right start the project actually although it might seem cosmetic, the most important thing is the signage. So people can without a guide or or necessarily GPS files that they can find their way around and find the know where the coffee shop or the toilet block or whatever on their ride. So that’s it’s probably going to take 18 months to complete it but the aim is we’ll have that a credible product for people wanting to do that for the start of the 25 season.

Carlton Reid 47:38
So famously Majorcar is a destination without cycling product and clearly part of the attraction of of New Yorker is nice weather yeah early season well yes or late season one and but also beautiful road but the certainly the nice weather is a is a is a pool, but here could become a cycling paradise could become either a cycling paradise in many ways already, but could become even bigger in the future, especially with like short haul stuff you having to be necessarily, you know, in the future, we’re gonna have to start basically holiday much closer to home. Yeah, I don’t like climate change and not flying everywhere. And taking a ferry is much more ego than flying to Majorca. So cyclists could come to the Isle of Man and not go to Majorca

Richard Fletcher 48:33
and I think to say the weather is important factor. But yeah, it is more the hassle of I mean, I’ve done it all my life cycles since I was 15. Taking your bike on a plane is a faff, it’s now because I’m old and grumpy when I go I do still do a lot of cycling outside of the UK. But it was hired by want to do that. Now if I go to France of France, alright, well, France is different. Unfortunately I’ve got a friend lives in France with a house and I leave a bike there. But I’m gonna go anywhere else Spain or Italy or further afield I was hired by because I don’t like the faff of going through airports and boxing it up and unboxing it and wondering whether we’ll get there. The ferry is a lovely way to do that you can just literally ride on the boat. So yeah, that that is the best way for cyclists to get the Isle of Man is to bring it to bring their bike on the ferry. That and yeah, I think it is a viable alternative is going it’s going overseas without going too far.

Carlton Reid 49:38
You’re going out of the UK,

Richard Fletcher 49:41
You are going out of the UK and the rod. There are a variety of road to get here is quite fun. That to me. The sweet spot for a visitor is about a three or four day trip. And then you can ride different roads every day and enjoy them in that way. Say they it’s been record week, we spoke to a few of the tour on cycling tour operators because one of the other things in sort of gap analysis that was done is it the Arman is not on in the portfolio of a lot of tour operators. Some like there’s a company that I’ve done some work with bikeadventures.co.uk, they, they’ve got the Isle of Man because I did a trip for them, basically, and, but a lot of the larger ones don’t have the Ironman as a destination. So we need to convince them that the Ironman should be a destination on their portfolio, and then put together the trips for them to do. So that’s another sort of initiative that needs to

Carlton Reid 50:42
get across here before those companies put it on and they become saturated. And it’s another Majorca. Yeah,

Richard Fletcher 50:48
it’s we’ve got we’ve got lots of space that we could handle.

Carlton Reid 50:53
Thanks to Richard Fletcher there and thanks to you for listening to Episode 347 of the spokesmen podcast brought to you in association with Tern bicycles. Show notes and more can be found at the-spokesmen.com. The next episode will be about the bike navigation app Komoot, but it soon veers off to a discussion of a round the world cycle trip. That show will be out at the beginning of March. Meanwhile, get out there and ride …

February 20, 2024 / / Blog

20th February 2024

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 346: Monica Garrison

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUEST: Monica Garrison of Black Girls Do Bike

20th February 2024

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 346: Monica Garrison

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUEST: Monica Garrison of Black Girls Do Bike

TOPICS:

LINKS:

https://www.ternbicycles.com

https://www.blackgirlsdobike.org

TRANSCRIPT

Carlton Reid 0:13
Welcome to Episode 346 of the spokesmen cycling podcast. This show was engineered on Tuesday 20th of February 2024.

David Bernstein 0:29
The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider. Whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That’s t e r n bicycles.com to learn more.

Carlton Reid 1:03
I’m Carlton Reid and today’s episode is a half hour chat with Monica Garrison of Black Girls Do Bike a Pennsylvania nonprofit now in its 11th year of group rides and more for black women and girls. And yeah, I should have checked out the weather map before I asked the first stupid question. Have you been riding today?

Monica Garrison 1:28
Oh, no! There’s snow everywhere. We had a big storm yesterday. Yeah, yesterday.

Carlton Reid 1:35
I should have checked your weather. Okay. So how much of the year can you not cycle in Pittsburgh?

Monica Garrison 1:43
Pretty much November to March is pretty snowy and rainy, and cold. So we have a nice big offseason here, though some folks ride through the winter. I’m not one of those people.

Carlton Reid 1:57
So you kind of come say March, April, you’re kind of really desperate to get out on your bike, that kind of thing.

Monica Garrison 2:05
Oh, yeah, the mid March The weather seems to shift and and cyclists return full force and and then we’re good. I mean, we get pretty hot in August and July, you know, it’s a bit unbearable and humid. So there’s some time there where it’s not so pleasant to be out on the bike, but pretty much yeah, the rest of the year we’re riding.

Carlton Reid 2:27
So I really should have checked the weather. Because that was such a stupid question, wasn’t it if you’re deep in snow, and of course. That’s okay. So the rest of the year. tell me about the rest of the year in Pittsburgh. What’s it like riding in Pittsburgh?

Monica Garrison 2:43
So Pittsburgh is notorious for its hills. It’s a very hilly city. So it’s not for the faint of heart. Literally. I think over the last 10 years, we’ve had a really good programme, Bike Pittsburgh is our local Bike Ped organisation. And they’ve done a really good job of creating infrastructure that connects. So there are large parts of the city that are interconnected for commuters and everyone else on bikes. So that’s nice. We have what we call the gap trail here, which is a Great Allegheny Passage. And it starts here in Pittsburgh, and you can ride it all the way to Washington, DC. So a lot of local cyclists put that on their list of things to do in the spring and summer, before it gets too hot. And our we have Port Authority, which is our local bus transportation here. And they made an effort a few years ago to outfit all of the buses with bike racks on the front. So no matter where you’re headed, you can take your bike with you

Carlton Reid 3:52
Now, we’re very jealous. When when we see Americans with, with buses with that on the front, we get very jealous, we’ve got very few services that will will do that. So I’ve seen photographs on your, on your website, where it’s like the media images where you can get these the photographs you’re allowed to use. And there’s you and your kids, and there’s a bike lane in Pittsburgh. So I can visualise extremely well, the bike lane that you were talking about there, but your kids. So not only are you getting women of colour, and you’re getting people just generally onto bikes. You’re we’ll talk about your chapters in a minute, but you’re getting your kids onto bikes. That’s something that you wanted to do. That’s something that just happened what so how have you managed to get your kids on bikes?

Monica Garrison 4:46
I mean, when I was a kid, I loved riding my bike, so I just assumed that they would too. And I you know happened to me correct. But what I did was honestly I started them riding really early like my son and daughter for probably pedaling bikes at the age of four. And so the earlier you get them in, The more consistent you are with them wearing helmets, then it just becomes a part of their life. And so you know, when, when Black Girls Do Bike started, it was a time where I was riding my bike a lot more than I had in the past. And so I just invited them to come along, and they they kind of got bitten by the bug. I will say my, my daughter, my son is probably the one who goes with me the most these days, we’ll load up the bikes and drive to like our downtown area and spend a couple hours riding around when the weather’s nice. And that’s really fun to do. So yeah, it’s just a no, no, it’s, it’s a fun thing to do as a family. Cycling is great for me as a solo sport. But I also like bringing folks along and you know, showing them how fun it can be.

Carlton Reid 5:55
So you have all these chapters across I mean, this one is the one that’s in London, is that still going?

Monica Garrison 6:01
it’s still going but we have, we have a leadership vacuum, there we are our leaders who started the group stepped down to do another project. So we’re actually looking for someone to kind of step in and, you know, rejuvenate the chapter.

Carlton Reid 6:17
Tell me about the chapters in in the US than them and how big did they get? Which are the biggest ones? What’s the chapter story?

Monica Garrison 6:25
Sure, we have 103 chapters here in the US. So as you can imagine, pretty much every major city here has a chapter every almost every state has has at least one chapter. The smallest chapters are, you know, a few 100 ladies and our largest chapters have anywhere from 1500 to 2000 members. I will honestly say that I we’ve never gotten 2000 out on a bike at once. But generally our rides are, you know, anywhere from five ladies to maybe 40 to 50 ladies.

Carlton Reid 7:04
Is it a kind of Facebook private group organised is that? Is that how you get in touch with everybody?

Monica Garrison 7:10
Yeah, I think Facebook’s been the easiest way. I mean, we’re 10 years into this journey. So Facebook was a lot more robust 10 years ago, but it’s still the best way to kind of organise people. And yeah, so each each chapter has its own Facebook, private Facebook group. And then so folks who are interested can go to BlackGirlsDoBike.org and then they can click on chapters, and then they can find the nearest chapter for them.

Carlton Reid 7:36
You’ve got very, very strong, bold graphics. Is that something that was there from the get go? Or is that something that evolved? Did you have members who are graphic artists? How have you managed to be really bold and distinctive?

Monica Garrison 7:53
That’s a good question. So it was always the intention from the beginning. Or I should say soon after, there’ll be an increase. So the plan really wasn’t to have chapters and have t shirts and jerseys and all this, these things all came organically as people began to ask for them. But, but once we started to design gear, I yeah, I think, you know, I was a business major. So I have a little bit of insight into, you know, what makes for good advertising. I’m also a photographer, so I’m visually built to, you know, built to appreciate things and design. I do most of the design myself, I usually just have an idea, and then I’ll collaborate with artists who can bring it to life. And I just, I There are a couple of reasons, I think, because as a Black woman, I know that, you know, our skin tone, generally looks really nice with bright colours, it’s kind of they complement each other. So I never shied away from bright colours and in, you know, variety in that respect, but also in terms of getting the message out, I think, you know, if someone’s wearing a shirt, and it’s visually appealing, and it catches the attention, then you’re more likely to spread your message and have people ask, what’s this about? You know, I’ve never seen this before. So I do think the the visual part of it is a huge part of our success.

Carlton Reid 9:20
And I kind of guessed why I kind of surmise that you’re a photographer because you’ve got your credit on some of the photographs. And there’s obviously a studio lights going on there. There’s some serious photography going on behind the scenes there. That’s like some pretty impressive stuff.

Monica Garrison 9:36
Thank you. Yeah, I think that’s been one of my favourite parts of this process is I’ve been able to flex my photography and video videography muscles a little bit. And, you know, in terms of like posting on our social media, that’s that’s it’s a nice way for me to be creative and not get too caught up in the day to day things.

Carlton Reid 10:01
So before that 2013 You’ve been going now this is your 11th 11th. Yeah, yeah. So So back, it was 2016 There was an article in bicycling it was by Elly Blue. Elly was the person who had the idea for bikenomics. So that’s me and Elly have spoken a lot over the years. So I know who Elly is. But there’s, there’s a quote in there, which I’d like to quote back to you. I mean, it is 2016. I’m not expecting you to remember this. But I just want you to riff on this really. And that is, so this is a quote and this is from you “know that my journey to riding may be completely different than yours. Know that my experience while riding, and even how I am perceived, while riding will be different to yours.” So Monica, clearly I cannot even start to imagine what it must be like for you as a Black woman on a bicycle because it bicyclists famously kind of like we’re out there sometimes when we’re not the most favourite people have lots and lots of what can I outcasts in many respects, even now. So you kind of take that, and then you take the fact that you’re a woman. And then you add on you’re Black. So you’re, you’re really stacking it against yourself here. So so kind of riff on what you said there about how the perception, your perception of you when you’re riding is going to be so so?

Monica Garrison 11:44
Yeah. Yeah, thanks for kind of breaking that down. It’s, so I do remember the quote, now that you read it, it’s, it comes back to me, I still believe it to be true. So you have a couple of things. So most women who are women of colour even plus size women, which is a category I fit into, we’re not expected to be cyclist, right. No one expects us to pull up on a bike. So you the first thing you overcome is the expectation of from the outside world, like, where did you come from? And what are you doing on the bicycle? And we could also have those internalised things just from our community. When folks say, Well, you know, why, why do you own a bike? Or how’d you get how’d you get into that? So there’s expectation. And you mentioned drivers on the road. That’s a big thing. For me, I prefer not to ride on the road, I try to ride on the trails as much as possible. But that’s just it’s a comfort level thing. And I think it varies from city to city and because all cities aren’t the same, but you know, as a woman cyclist you have, you might have men catcalling you, drawing attention to you physically when you’re on the bike from from a car, as a cyclist of colour. I know some cyclist, I can’t speak for all but some cyclists of colour feel less safe on their bikes. Because you know, the person behind the will, could have ill intentions for you. And, you know, an automobile always wins that contest, right? So if someone does want to do your do you harm or at least intimidate you, you know, you could be in a vulnerable, a more vulnerable position if someone doesn’t appreciate you being on the road as a cyclist, but then also has a problem with the colour of your skin. So I feel like I feel like most cyclists of colour feel that pressure as well.

Carlton Reid 13:46
Sorry, sorry. If you’re in a car and you experience racism, you’re in a car, you’ve got locked windows, you can you can kind of hide. But if you’re on a bicycle, you can’t hide, your skin is out there, you’re really like making sure that people know you’re there and that must be very vulnerable.

Monica Garrison 14:06
It does feel very vulnerable. It’s almost like you feel like a sitting duck, right? So if you put yourself in that position, I imagine you want to feel like you are equipped maybe to escape right? So physically, you may want to make sure that you have the strength, the stamina to get out of a tough situation. But yeah, when it comes down to it, as I said, the automobile is always going to win. So if someone does want to do you harm, not a whole lot you can do and that’s the scary part, as a cyclist and a cyclist of colour.

Carlton Reid 14:46
And then nothing all that I’m going to assume here that that’s one of the reasons why you would want to ride in a bunch of women, Black women together because you are not going to you want to get like there’s a group of you? You’re no longer alone?

Monica Garrison 15:03
Yeah, sure, safety in numbers. If you’re on the road, and they’re, you know, 10, 15 of you, then you’re drawing attention in the way of all the cars are going to see me. Right. So safety, but also there’s strength in numbers. So if something does happen, then you have folks there who are witnesses to report it. Hopefully, the the fact that there are multiple women, or people will deter someone from doing something, you know, negative. But yeah, certainly that I mean, there are many reasons why riding together is great and there are positives, but I think that’s definitely one of them.

Carlton Reid 15:40
At this point, we’ll cut from Monica to a short ad break. Take it away, David.

David Bernstein 15:46
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Carlton Reid 16:46
Thanks, David. And we are back with Monica Garrison of Black Girls Do Bike. So tell me about your Sheroes. Who are they?

Monica Garrison 16:56
Yes, Sheroes are women across the country who have volunteered their time to organise at least one monthly ride. They moderate the Facebook pages that we talked about earlier. And they keep you know, they keep it exciting. They also are plugged in, I’m plugged into the sheroes. So they let me know what folks are asking for or what things we need as an organisation or even get their opinions on, you know, designs, for instance, for cycling gear. But they’re just really enthusiastic women who who our boots on the ground, they’re doing the work that keeps the organisation moving forward. And they are really amazing. They’re like super fans of Black Girls Do Bike for the most part. And I’m very grateful to have them working on our side.

Carlton Reid 17:48
Now, how’s the industry been with you? Because famously, the industry is pretty white, is generally male. It’s kind of tech bro, but for bikes. So how has the industry? How does the industry perceive you? How is the industry maybe funded? You supported you? How have you done with the industry?

Monica Garrison 18:13
Sure. The I think in general, the statement would be that the industry has been very supportive. I was my first like introduction to the cycling community was the National Bike Conference in Washington DC many years ago. And I was really well received there. And then over the years, we’ve managed to have partnerships with probably Trek Bike was our first like manufacturer that would that partner with us for a couple of years. And they you know, they help support our national meet up one year and we all went to trek headquarters and participate in the Trek 100 we’ve been partners with REI, who’s a big outdoor supplier store here in the US. I don’t know if they’re overseas, but they’ve been a really nice strategic partner, not in terms of monetary support, absolutely. But also, you know, behind the scenes, finding out where our pain points are as an organisation and also connecting us with other orgs who are operating in the outdoors for minority groups. And, you know, for other activities like hiking and running and things like that. And then just along the way we we’ve had a number of other just companies who have stepped up from year to year to support us in different ways. But so yeah, overall, I think it’s been amazing. I’ve been in rooms that I never imagined I would be, you know, answering questions and helping with things like plus sizing for women in merchandise. You know, even even with designing bikes, I’ve given input with that. Notoriously women have Black women have issues getting cycling helmets that fit over their natural hairstyles. And I’ve been involved in, you know, some folks who want to change that. So I think overall, it’s been great. I’ve done lots of interviews through the years. And I think our message has, at least within the cycling community, I think our message has gotten out there. I think a lot of people are aware that we exist and know that we need support.

Carlton Reid 20:28
So imagine, you know, go back to 2013, when when this first kicked off, and now, have you seen any systemic changes? So you see, have you seen anything like, oh, wow, that’s so different to 10 years ago? Or is it this is going to be an uphill struggle? How do you how do you think it’s gone up? There’s 10 years? And how much of a difference maybe have you made?

Monica Garrison 20:52
Yeah, I think we’ve made really good strides. I think, when you when you show up to a bike event, now versus 10 years ago, there are a lot more women and people of colour at those events. I think I think obviously, we have a long way to go. But I definitely want to acknowledge the progress that we’ve made. And I hope that Black Girls Do Bike has been central and you know, letting people know of the concerns and issues that face our community, uniquely. But beyond that, I think, the most important thing, if you know, if we’re here, 10 years from now, still doing this work, is kind of the pain point has always been having people of colour in the decision decision making chairs, right, working at companies working in the industry, whether it be racing, whether it be you know, even other types of cycling, BMX, all of all the genres of cycling, I think we don’t have enough people of colour, who are working in those jobs, who can affect change from the inside. And as always, we’d love to see more bike shops that are owned by people of colour, which is a rare thing here in the US.

Carlton Reid 22:09
Monica, it’s gonna be a tough one to answer but but why is that? What Why? Why do you have to do what you do? Why Why isn’t it just normal for a black person to get out of bicycle? What’s what’s, what stopped black people from doing this?

Monica Garrison 22:27
That’s a good one, I think, well, I’ll speak for myself, but then I’ll go a little bit more broadly into it. So when I was a young person, I didn’t, there were no women in my family who rode bikes, I’ve never seen other than in my adult life, as a young person never saw my mom, you know, just casually get on a bike and ride it. So there’s that there is just not a norm in our community. Beyond that, I think you won’t really ride regularly, unless you have a bike that you enjoy riding that’s comfortable. And to get to that point, you have to spend some money, right to get a bicycle that is, you know, essentially fit to your body and, and is comfortable to ride. And so it could be just a matter of making the investment, there are a lot of sports that black people aren’t in because the barrier to entry be economic. And so here in the US, that’s, you know, the, there are a lot of black people below the poverty poverty line, who will never be able to enter some of these sports. And, and I think some people are just intimidated to walk into a room where they’re the only person that looks like them. Not everyone but but I think that is that can be a characteristic of people of colour, Black people. So you know, if you you may not want to show up to a ride, when you aren’t going to know anybody you anticipate it’s going to be all white guys who you may or may not have anything in common with, you don’t know how competitive the rides gonna be. So there are a lot of unknowns. And I think that alone is enough to keep you from trying something new. So that’s kind of where we come in, right? We we are pushing cycling as an activity that everyone can enjoy. But we’re also giving you a safe space, for lack of a better word, to to enter into it and to try it and see if you like it. You may try it and not like it never come back. But for some people, they show up they ride and they find that it’s you know, enjoyable and they and they continue to come and they discover something new. So we try to get that image intimidation factor out of the equation.

Carlton Reid 24:47
trying I’m trying to think if I have know the answer here, but in the Netherlands, where it’s a societal norm to ride a bike, Black people ride bikes. Asian people ride bikes, you know, Muslim women in their hijab ride bikes. It’s because it’s a cultural norm to ride a bike, because you were saying there before about, you know, you didn’t see your mom ride a bike. Well, in the Netherlands, all people will see their mom, their Auntie’s, their grandmother, the bank managers, everyone on bicycles. So there’s no real huge split in, in like a colour thing at all. It’s just it’s a cultural thing. And so, on the one hand, I’m asking you a question about being Black on a bicycle. But that question could be just as easily have asked of white people, generally, white people generally in the cultures, you know, in Britain, and in America and not in the Netherlands, but where we were out, it’s not a cultural norm to be on a bicycle. So that’s why people are on bicycles. And there is the colour aspect to it, of course, but it’s just generally, people aren’t on bikes. At the end of the day, and we are Monica, we are kind of weird.

Monica Garrison 26:03
No, you’re right, you’re right. It’s, it’s not a cultural norm to ride a bicycle in the United States, maybe with the exception of a few cities. I think, and I’ve heard this argument made, and I, for now, I agree with it until I hear a better one, which is, and I don’t know if this is true in the UK, as well. But here the infrastructure here is built around cars, right? So it’s car centric. So there is really a safety concern with being on a bicycle and on a lot of major roads in the US. And secondly, we value as a culture, individualism and we lead tie status to our car. So it’s the bicycle is secondary. The funny part is there was a time when bicycles were the main form of transportation here, right, and, and roadways were actually built a many of our fundamental roadways were built so that cyclists could get around and then at some point that that shifted, but I honestly don’t think we’ll ever move away from that maybe in 100 years, when, you know, cars are self driving, and it’s a lot more safe. And, you know, folks, their, their definition of success has changed. But for now, with a car centric society, I think cycling will always be a second class citizen,

Carlton Reid 27:29
just to end really, and that there’s a quote, another quote, I’m going to pick up from the Elly Blue article again, this is this is Monica by you. And I’d like you to riff on this a bit if you if you can. So, you said the cycling spectrum is a beautiful one. So what do you mean by the cycling spectrum?

Monica Garrison 27:46
I mean, the spectrum of personalities, and literally the types of people who ride bikes, I find as a as a general bunch, cyclists are extremely kind, gentle people. And, you know, anyone who appreciates the, you know, the value of getting on a bike and in finding that relaxing, I’m willing to be a friend to that person. But yeah, and even just a cycling in general, there are many types of cycling. So you can kind of there’s a phrase here you get in where you fit in. So once you decide that you like riding a bike, there’s so many things open to you in terms of the kind of cycling that you do, whether it’s long distance like cross country rides or cyclocross, gravel, BMX. You know, there’s so many things that you can get into.

Carlton Reid 28:40
Monica, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Can you please tell people where they can? I’m definitely going to plug the fact that you’re looking for London people, but just where can people get more information? About Black Girls Do Bike, I’m kind of giving it away back is going to be a bit anyway, just give us the URL?

Monica Garrison 29:02
Sure. Blackgirlsdobike.org is the best way to find us. And from there you can link to as it’s pretty easy to navigate so you can link to our shops, check out our gear, you can link to our chapter page and see all the cities that we’re in.

Carlton Reid 29:18
Thanks for listening to Episode 346 of the spokesmen podcast brought to you in association with Tern Bicycles. Shownotes and more can be found at the-spokesmen.com The next episode will be a fireside chat on the Isle of Man with Richard Fletcher. That’s out at the weekend. But meanwhile, get out there and ride …

January 28, 2024 / / Blog

14th September 2023

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 339: Balance bikes, Bikeability and the Saint Piran team at the Tour of Britain

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUEST: Ricci Pascoe

TOPICS: From mail order innovator to net zero hero: farmer’s son Ricci Pascoe founded Bike Chain of Cornwall in 1985 and created the UCI Continental team Saint Piran in 2016. It’s been quite the journey.

TRANSCRIPT

Carlton Reid 0:13
Welcome to Episode 339 of the Spokesmen cycling podcast. This show is engineered on Thursday 14th of September 2023.

David Bernstein 0:28
The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern Bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e bikes for every type of rider. Whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com That’s t e r n bicycles.com to learn more.

Carlton Reid 1:04
On today’s show, I talk with bike industry veteran Ricci Pascoe. We talked about the St Piran racing team he founded and which had such an amazing Tour of Britain last week with a young rider I’ve known since he was a very young rider, finishing high on general classification, just a few places behind famous World Tour professionals. We also talked about mental health, aiming for net zero and getting more people on bikes. I recorded Ricci remotely; he was talking from his bike shop’s cafe

Ricci Pascoe 1:44
Over the years, a bit of a fan. I liked what you produced like this mega I’ve been involved in the industry for 35 years I mean you’ll you’ll remember me probably is Ricci limited mail order maybe back in the day you know that type of thing.

Carlton Reid 2:00
I was actually going to start there because yes, I absolutely remember that because you were doing mail order long before you know in ads in the comic and Cycling weekly and long before there was internet ordering.

Ricci Pascoe 2:16
Oh, mate there was there was five of us that probably carved up the UK market Jack Parker, Ribblethey started Who else was there Oh Mel Bentley you know that type of thing.

Carlton Reid 2:27
So why so that was that was via that was via Ricci limited or was that via Bike Chain was that

Ricci Pascoe 2:32
Ricci Limited was always the mailorder side and then obviously we morphed or people couldn’t remember. Bike Chain was kind of the local name that are you horrible is just people could use yeah maybe understand bytecode well, but in fact up to the will not come a franchise in the UK I don’t know here writing Do you remember called Townsend limited? Oh yeah. Yeah, what was all its concept that there was a director there Steve Walsh been riding the CPU years we’ve been set up I remember it very well actually was in the 80s So I said look, if you’re going to multistore site in the 80s got it by chain if you do the data for the year in terms of the layout one thing that other members were doing several million turnover back then. And you could have bought 12 properties in the UK for example, Hardisty’s or you could go to 12 places bought the 6 million pound you could have had your turnover back within well within the year you could have your turnover back and then if you were the importer you read the 30% the retailer was making under 30% Within two years you’d about an asset they based on file stock to franchise so the reason why the two byte games we morphed the name for Ricci limited into bunkie who’s been a little bit innovative I suppose cropped it away and when the internet came along I yeah I didn’t really get I had no interesting notes I didn’t really impressed that we had quite a bit of volume and you know what what you got up Marwat you know what wiggle did or chain reaction or these they you know, they develop the computer programme to sell product or industry is very collaborative.

Carlton Reid 4:18
So you had the bike shop first before the mail order.

Ricci Pascoe 4:21
The mail order first, believe it or not, is from my parents, my parents farm so, you know, I was a racing cyclist, you know, an average elite racing so I raced there I went to live in France and never really saw the front of the bike race. So I’ve travelled and a lot of gutters and you know became because you know, we were we were actually making cycled clothing in in Red Rooster, any i 25 Girls do what the cool CMT were cut making trim. So we had our own clothing. And I was exporting that to France and then importing look pedals and then we became the importer plateau and back to clean and chizine And, you know, so we did a lot of that. And we moved from a parent’s farm down to the retail store, which is still there in red roof. Go back, Jane Reki, or we call it more service course now it’s more forgiving thinker and Service Course, as an identity. Yeah, and that’s the history of it, right? It’s just,

Carlton Reid 5:21
and then you also took a second unit in Bissoe.

Ricci Pascoe 5:25
Yeah, so sort of four or five kilometres away, we’ve got, again, I’ve either been inspirational or mad, I bought a place on an honour on a mineral tramway between the coast to coast, and I paid a lot of money for our border and my art rather than my head. It’s sort of 12 acre site. And, yeah, it was sort of cafe and higher. And just recently, in the last two or three years, we’ve really expanded the site, you know, we put a proper kitchen on with commercial pitch in with on Dean, he’s an ex macro finalist, and J and another shaft with a great food offering and hospitality, and it’s the headquarters. So we now call it some parent cafe. So again, you know, it’s another venue to visit, and, you know, exemplifies the values that you now see with the, with the team,

Carlton Reid 6:21
so the team was founded 2016, is that right?

Ricci Pascoe 6:24
Right. 2016. So, my passion has always been cycling, you know, a bit like yourself, and you know, how you know, how to get people, you know, similarly with cycling or out on bikes, and so on, and so forth. And, you know, mistakes over 30 years, in terms of how not to run things, or not outdo things. So, you know, the thing that’s really the embodiment of, you know, if I had enough money, I was mad enough to hopefully do something that’s really, really good, but not a broken model, you know, I wasn’t making sustainable, so no advertising. You know, we’re just giving young people opportunity of activities and deliver a press release. We just didn’t break bikes, right there and got them travelling away, and during the race in and you’re learning the craft, so that was the pattern around it. But it’s morphed into something, you know, a lot more fun, you know, a lot more students. So it was all about giving opportunity, young people, the anatomist at the beginning, and trying to get people on board with that message is, is kind of tough, or was tough. You know, and it’s taken seven years to get the point where now I will say people were an always on Corporation, we’ve been seen by 180 million people in two years. And, uh, now there’s been a sea of change for me in a much what I’d like to do is, is use it, you know, for good, and I’m poacher turned gamekeeper. I’m 58. And I’ve got a three year old. And I guess before, before Lowen was born, I probably didn’t really think about the planet or our future. And the minute he was born, I’m like, Oh, my God, what are we doing? You know, we, you know, this is worried I want to future from Assam. You know, I want to make this nice entity, an example of best practice, you know, wisdom, let’s, let’s amplify the voice let’s, let’s use it for something really good, you know, stick to our true family value. And so, you know, very, really now is about, you know, that opportunity is about telling people about great that we do and making people aware of, you know, our sustainability campaigns, making people aware of, you know, how we’ve on boarded a mental health partner in a deal, they get 24/7 All my staff writers get X 24 hour there. Haven’t had a breakdown personally 16 years ago when every thought had a successful life. But you know, I didn’t build on success. I felt that I failed at things through throughout my life, that people say, Oh, you got a successful business, but you know, I didn’t feel like I’m taking one at that or I didn’t feel well at relationships. I didn’t do well. I’ve done very well at sport. So whilst I felt my life was paralysed by failure, you know, it all came to a head with a with a a breakdown and I got some really great family care and psychiatric care went through a nine month period of really great care and caregiver side and it was, you know, it was with that desire to do something, you know, baby then cycling. Again, a bit like yourself, you. You said, look, the industry is great, but we’ve got to sort of help you know, what is the point of cycling, you know, what is good about cycling out and we’ll enjoy your benefit. diplomat. So we’re not trying to put our viewpoint across in a in a in a political way. We’re just saying that about people in many ways unlock themselves, you know, whether it be helpful ladder or Plaza, you know, of course, is the inspiration around the sport, you know, and if we’ve got an ability to talk about excellence, and our care programme and whatever progress before, let’s do it, but you know, we are we are from a grassroot. Now, do you know, many people in the world that’s, you know, elite programme, trying to showcase what can be done in and around a bicycle. So that’s kind of the background to

Carlton Reid 10:42
you contacted me before the Tour of Britain. And you asked if I’m following a turbine, and this year, I wasn’t because I didn’t actually come close enough to Newcastle. Normally, when it’s north north, I will go and follow it. But this year, it wasn’t. But then you had, obviously a stellar Tour of Britain, with Zeb who’s from from Newcastle, and is a my best my son’s best friend. In fact, Zen Oh, that’s how I was probably zaps. First, what are these first coaches? Because my son, when he was very young, and Zeb was very, very young, they would come to the go ride the British Cycling go ride club, I helped found a new castle. So that’s how I know that that’s when I said I’ll say hi to said that, that time knows that. But then obviously, you had a fantastic Tour of Britain, you then therefore also had a fantastic tour and just just tell us, tell us from your point of view, what the Tour of Britain was like for you? Because it was it was almost I mean, you had it. I know you had a good tour Britain last year, as well. But I think this is probably surpass that. So so just tell us how you found this year to a Britain?

Ricci Pascoe 11:54
It’s a great question. But if I’m out even one step further back, like, you know, I always talked about now, you know, what does success look like? What, you know, what is success for you? What is it? And anyway, we’ll come on to the magnificent achievements of the the team and the riders and everything in a minute. But success for me now is have we created a happy environment? Is there a smile on people’s faces? If and when anybody or the leisure organisations, whether they continue in the sport, or even if they say, look a family level through finer levels? Right, how we will find our level, you know, when we find our level, you know, is the person happy? Can we retain them in the sport? You know, can we, you know, if we’re on an upward trajectory, and we say, Look, you know, okay, the levels gone up, but would you like to be still part of the parent, and we’ve got development teams pulled out by those three, or we’ve got a frequent cycling club, to deliver the sport, as a potential living or pro rider, we want to retain you through deliberate, free to join on the website, the service course, some parents parents post, and join for free. For me, success is about happiness. It’s about the process that we do, and do it in the right way. And never forget where you come from, it becomes increasingly harder, because with the same measure of success, and we are inundated with with people don’t how did you do it? How can you do this? What you’ve done on your children 53 in 1000 budget when you know, any song 50 million? Yeah, how can you riders, you know, in the top six in a grant, I mean, I had to look back in the in the records cloud to find out, you know, has it been done before on a when Bill did it in 2011? We got a third of the been a couple other writers have been but in recent times, No, it hasn’t been done. It’s, it’s almost impossible to do. So then you got to say, What have you done it? And, and interviews and we’ll look at any of these interviews, the interviews that he gave, you know, they would make the cry foul, because he actually doesn’t talk about himself the first day. He says, you know, I’m in a family I’ve been given the freedom to do you know, I’m listening to value, and I just seem to get into so much more out of myself. And, you know, you Ryan, everybody making that effort to put that little individual component into it. So you make the one there, you know, without that, go right back then. So you gotta remember that always go backwards without that go right section. So you have a component within that attacks. And so what I was talking about is, let’s hear the stories from everybody’s just comparing is not up As a returning officer, Tim Martin, you know, but let’s say, I’m using Express at the moment together, we are strong. And I firmly believe that you know, whether it be teams, race organisers governing body, the media, we all have a role to play in cycling these days, you know, and if we can amplify that, and then take it into community or environment, or, or education or transport or whatever, then then we’re all winning, we are definitely all winning. So it’s very good of you to say, what does that success feel like? Perhaps add all the caveats that we’ve just talked about? Because the success is really? Look, we don’t own the sport. You know, we’re just sold internet. And if you remember, your custodian of something called it does change the viewpoint. And I know, with your, your writings and your rap that it doesn’t seem like, you know, what’s the path across intermittently over the years? It’s the reach out now. And for a lot of genuine people is heartfelt. And so that to set the test, you use the word is stellar. What we have to let go, Okay, here we are now, how do you start to get into stellar? I mean, you know, ultimately, I think the French have a really strange expression and magic that I mean, like, you know, would you prefer to be, you know, a Northern Star that burns bright forevermore? Or would you prefer to be a shooting star, which everybody stays personal, we want to be the former rather than the latter. So success looks like giving everybody their moment, in particular event horizon. So, you know, and that’s certainly the event horizon. And the, the monumental change for me is that young man now believes himself. And we, as a family just learned, given that belief. So what we’ve done first and foremost is say, let’s give you the right race broker, and let’s give you the ingredients, let’s, let’s put a relaxed situation, it lets you know, Coach, you know, Coach, or look at your coach and bring on best practice, you know, let’s do the best with the resource that we’ve got, you know, let’s not over promise and under deliver. So, you know, if we stay, we can do something, do it. And I think people like the fact that you’ve got honesty and integrity in what you can do. So if we’re going to erase overseas, you know, we got to come back from Belgium at 10 o’clock in an evening. You know, everyone says, Can you fly us back like other other things? No, no, you got to jump in the car. And I’m sorry, it’s a six hour trip back. Yeah, that’s the level that you know, we never promised. I mean, we can’t deliver because

Carlton Reid 17:52
that that is today isn’t your team is basically racing in Belgium, as we speak.

Ricci Pascoe 17:57
Oh, we’re riding. You’re lucky to drag me away actually. Hope? Yeah, we’re the GP, the dual arm or is, you know, again, yeah, we’re getting invites these races because I think people are saying, well, how are you doing this? You know, how are you doing it? You know, we’re touring Norway. Yeah. Wonderful. You know, we turn off we’re going to silver Swanee van, we got a white car, a black car, you know, the white back. So we look like the poor cargo performances are far from it. You know, so,

Carlton Reid 18:29
I mean, let’s go back to your your business hat as well, not just your your your team ownership and creation hat. Yes. does it benefit your business? Having a team it does actually wash its face? Does it does it? does it benefit you commercially

Ricci Pascoe 18:45
that the team does. But of course, it doesn’t benefit the business. If you’re spending 60 hours a week on on something else, you know, it’s very hard to, you know, generate independently overcoming life is if I spent the same energy in my business, I would be wealthy. But by doing a team that’s got something different, my life is very rich. My life is rich, because you can eat steak once a night, why two states, three states for steaks. So by actually giving opportunity by actually doing something that you know, you know, if you do something the right way, and like legacy is a really important thing as well. So, and it’s not like a seek because Oh, yeah, I’ve got lots of money. I want to feel better about leaving something because, you know, so initially, the business is not the most of it. But what we’ve done, we were doing something really unusual in and around some parent as well. So we’re going online presence as a the service course. So anybody who’s involved with the team, you know that they get a commercial return on the backend for a website for selling products or services. So that’s, you know, so we’re looking at For our own ecosystem, but then we’re also trying to help other teams or organisations as well through through what we do. You know, so, for example, with a very healthy relationship, so for example, with by race or work, we’re doing clothing for other organisations. So we’re feeding back the ecosystem or the economics of the people involved with that. Traditionally, you know, appropriation was either funded, because either somebody wanted to put some money in sold some advertising space, or the lesser level, it was oh, especially if if shops were involved, it was oh, if you buy more product, we’ll give you some free, therefore, you can run the team with that. But that’s the sales discount, right? So that that’s not particularly very healthy. If it’s done that way, but what we try and do is say, we’ll have a commercial relationship, we’ll try and get the ingredients together will try and bake a cake. And if you’ve built into taking care from it, then it’s growing in business terms. So every, every partner we got, we are growing their business in the UK, and because we’re now successful on the road, we’ve got eyes on, it’s great, we’ve got the content, and we can, you know, and we’ll we’ll work with products that we think, work for us. So, you know, we’re not taking secondary or tertiary bike manufacturers, and riding them, you know, a team at our level could get a fantastic deal with a, with a really great perhaps value for money brand, that isn’t really highly rated in terms of performance, but we won’t do that we will, you know, we will work with people that try and give us the best tools, therefore, we’re very happy in in recommending those tools. But it’s not conditioned on us purchasing or selling or whatever. So I know it’s a mixed answer. So initially, the business has not benefited. But of course, now, some parents become such a big thing we know, we’ve changed the name of the cafe to some parent cafe, you know, methodical bike chain, Rocky, but it’s, it’s more in, it’s moving more and more towards simpler and service course. Because, you know, one has got a regional footprint, and yet some parent is now going to national or international footprint. So the shift has gone from not paying, there’s a business model to becoming very successful as a business model. So hopefully, I’m answering your question. You know,

Carlton Reid 22:33
when you first started, you almost think but that’s detrimental to your business, because you’re taking so much time away from Correct, yeah, you know, brought up since 1980s. And you’re, you’re putting so much time and effort into this pot. But I guess you could also say grows cycling in general, in your part of the world. And that even though you might not be able to get an exact, you know, grip on whether that’s physically that money in the tail is coming from your team. But just if you’ve got more people cycling in general, that has got to raise, you know, all ships, isn’t it?

Ricci Pascoe 23:08
Well, you know, that’s a really great point. And sometimes you have really great relationship with the UK bike industry, it’s really strange, isn’t it where, you know, you may be an independent dealer, and this is Five in in the county. And if one dealer builds up a really strong cycling club, there’s a little bit of like, oh, that’s their cycling club. But actually, if more people are cycling friends or family cycle, you know, ultimately, you know, cycling game, you know, it’s not a brand fun bike. Such, you know, you’re right, I think the more people that the cycle that enjoy it, you know, I mean, what we need next is a, we need a political shift in this country. And that will only come about when you’ve got to back up 3 million people, you know, subscribe into one cycle entity, whether we can get British Cycling, cycling UK is just brand, you know, your site website, that’s it a bit different, different branches or sectors within it. But once you’ve got a million names, you’ve got political and economic power, you know, the organization’s become the National Trust doesn’t struggle getting some of its time campaigns or membership for grant applications truth, it’s got nearly 2 million members. It’s funny that, you know, so, you know, if anything, again, you know, we’re all in this together. It’s about I mean, I’d like to see a cohort of 20, 50 journalists together, you know, and saying, What is our tone of voice? What is our method? You know, we don’t see that, you know, whereas that, you know, something that we’re trying to maybe instigate another way and say, look, hey, guys, you know, I’m not expressing that we’re not capitalist. instal your own brand. If you’re moaning at your own industry, what we should be doing is don’t hang on a minute. We’re diverse challenges, but what a great, great thing we’ve got, you know, it’s a tool to start to people about, you know, you know, exercise and implementation. I know, I’m not saying, I’m an advocate, then everybody’s got a cycle. You know, no, it’s there if you want it, you know, the barriers to entry should be free, whether it’s in sport, hence us setting up our own site with comfort free delivery. Or we can cure our transport problems problem in this country very simply, with a tin of red paint.

Carlton Reid 25:26
Cycling’s famously, obviously, sustainable. Cycle racing, famously isn’t, you know, you think of the Tour de France, you think the Tour de France caravan, you know, and how many, you know, most of vehicles are actually going along the road, following the or in front of and following, you know, the men and the women on their on their bikes, racing. So what you’re trying to do with cars, you’re you’re if you go on to the same person, website, you’ve got a very in depth sustainability section. You know, it’s not just one section, there’s like, a six interlinked section. So you’re really going strong on the sustainability angle, and you said it was because of your son Lowen. Who’s now three. So So tell us about that sustainability angle. And you said why you said Lowen was the the impetus for that. But what exactly you’re doing because you launched it last year? Yeah. That like the kind of the the attempt to go Net Zero? Yeah.

Ricci Pascoe 26:27
Yeah. So listen, this is I’m very sort of strong on all of this. There’s there’s several components. And whilst I have was have limited knowledge, I’m trying to pull together more knowledge to give an example of best practice, I think we should be talking about Net Zero. How we see that these, we’ve got to do the first step. And with the last first step, I think, mostly talking about the circular economy. I think that’s the brought into as well. I think we should also be saying, yes, whilst the Tour de France, for example, with his vehicles, he’s driving his vehicles out, can it be? Not, there was the thought what you can do is say, Look, we can use an event to showcase what we’re talking about. And by the way, we’ll take the step on vehicles, let’s move from, you know, from diesel, to hybrid to to whatever, and that needs a step change in terms of infrastructure, as you well know. So it’s all about, you know, infrastructure, think vehicles sometimes can be used as a as a clickbait point, because, you know, the circular economy would say, well, actually, shall we repair a 20 year old Landrover defender, for example, it’s already been made, you know, there’s no more cost to the to the ecosystem, and less people on the road is a very strong argument that producing you know, a brand new electric lithium factoring car, then I think we included a little bit of digging yourself for all of us can learn a little bit about part of the the the inputs required, or the cost to us as a society, the sustainability kind of offers, I think those are sort of questions, that raises a few challenges. And our main points that moment for us. In all of this pesky cafe, life’s getting busy. You know, the main point in this is that we must ask the questions goal, whether we like the answers or not. So the first process was, for us a small steps in terms of look, we will look at every aspect of our organisation. So with the extra University, what a carbon footprint looks like recycling, you know, and it was quite horrifying, really about where our responsibilities lie. But, you know, we wanted to put our ourselves in the firing line. So you know, what are we doing? What are the mistakes we make? What belief does? So the first thing was research. So our first phase is research. And course we’re doing positive changes to McAfee even reusable cups and, you know, the black pill or rubbish or recycling and, you know, we’re trying to do lots of things, that educational programmes with our writers and our staff, around usage of the team and everything from collecting rubbish at races and bringing it home, and so on and so forth. So the first thing is we’re looking at, we’re looking hard at what we do, and bring it into initiative to the point and again, we paid for it took round a sustainability officer Orion for Brian Tracy followed us on a team. We’ve paid 2000 pounds for that budget. I’ve been ill afford for to look at every practice that we’re doing whilst on tour. Now,

Carlton Reid 29:44
when you haven’t gotten the report yet, that comes a while. Yeah,

Ricci Pascoe 29:49
but we don’t want it really didn’t we can’t, we don’t want it. You’re the first journalist to dig into this. And we don’t want the report because obviously, it’s gonna say hey, you’re using too many towels or you know what Lesson. But that’s the key, we need to know where we’re going wrong. So we’re the first team, that’s going to highlight some very difficult to answer questions. But unless we ask a question out, we’re gonna get floofy

Carlton Reid 30:14
daft question. I know, but do you then get ever going to get teams on steel bikes just because carbon? You know, carbon composites are an incredibly non sustainable form of, of manufacturing a bicycle. So how can you cut? How can you can you recycle carbon? What what are you doing in that kind of area? Yeah,

Ricci Pascoe 30:34
so we’re looking at about two big areas, or three big areas we’re looking at. So we’re doing a lot of the obvious stuff. So we’re bringing the tires back, you know, we’ll turn them into belts, or whatever. So we got a little we got a, we got an industry around, you know, cassettes that have been turned into clock faces. And you know, so we’re actually, you know, and yeah, you’re not gonna get rich on it. But we’re already reusing everything around that sort of space. And we are started looking at cars, then what we’re doing as a team, every item of clothing that we get this year, and it’s given back at the year end. And it’s December, can we wash it? Can it go further into our ecosystem, young riders will develop carbon, we’ve got a whole Project Grant Cardone, we’ve got all our carbon back. And yes, you can recycle carbon. Okay. So we want it all back. We want to know, what are best practices around it. So again, another question that we’re asking ourselves. And the reports we’re doing are very, very scientific. So again, you know, the unit cost us a question primarily Exeter University are leading on this front. And that’s why we’ve invited them around on the Tour of Britain, you know, and it was, it was painful because you know, we were collecting rubbish that we would normally put in a bin so that you can analyse, you know, what are we throwing away? You can imagine a mechanical 14 hour day and we’re sitting there, you got to collect the rubbish, while we’re titled space in the van. Yeah, we want it bagged up. She’s gonna go through your rabbit. And we’re like, you know, it’s it’s mind blowing what we’ve done in order to challenge ourselves to talk about these issues. All right. and

Carlton Reid 32:10
Britain have already got a having to Britain already got like a gel packet recycling programme, they kind of collect every gel wrapper and stuff.

Ricci Pascoe 32:20
Yeah, that’s absolutely bang on that we like it. I mean, to the point that we’ve gone into business, some parent have set up a business with a with a bottle manufacturer. So the three way partnership though, whereby it’s a bottle, it’s available on our website, got a plug for an advert whereby gels go inside the bottle. So currently, Brian is pleasing. So you put your gel inside the bottle, and then liquid around it. Now at the moment, it’s very much leisure use, because the UCI have certain criteria around bottle design. So we have to get injection moulded bottles made in a particular design way. We don’t get gels inside bottles, that means you don’t undo a wrapper, while racing, there’s no risk of you then swelling that little bit of the top of the gel pack down your throat, you know, it’s like you bite it. You know, and I have no, you know, erotics back in the throat. shouldn’t say that. But you know, it’s been done. Obviously, in a race situation, you know, you know, the rule is not thrown away, but if there’s a jam session on and you drop it, no, so you probably think right and we think we’ve got a solution with our squeezy bottle. Again, to drive games, we want to take this back to the UCI to adopt them as a phrase marketer Payton around bottle usage. So we suddenly care. One of the problems in the peloton, is we’re trying to build some commercial reality around this space. As well as just trying to provide solutions that are politically great. We want to come up with solutions that are an economic driver to them that provide further employment, you know, and conversations around economics and sustainability.

Carlton Reid 34:02
We’ll leave there for a second and go across to my colleague David in America.

David Bernstein 34:08
This podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people that Tern understand that while a large cargo bike can carry oodles of stuff, many of us prefer something a little more manageable. That’s why they’ve come up with the HSD e cargo bike for folks with big aspirations to go car free, delivered in a compact size, with its rear shock, 280 kilos and a combined hauling capacity of 180 kilos. The robust new HSD is stable and easy to manoeuvre, even when under load. And with its Bosch eBIKE SYSTEM tested and certified to meet the highest UL standards for electric and fire safety you will be able to share many worryfree adventures with a loved one, whether it’s your kiddo or nan. Visit www.ternbicycles. That’s te r n bicycles.com to learn more.

Carlton Reid 35:08
Thanks, David. And let’s get back to me asking Ricci a question about net zero. So when when do you think you might be able to get to net zero as a team?

Ricci Pascoe 35:20
You know, will we ever get to that, you know, it frightens me the questions we bring up, but and I think we need to be doing a lot of offsetting as well, then if, if we’re never gonna get there with the car. So you know, if it moves, you know, okay, we still got an electric car, you know, and the customers use that is x, y, or Zed, and over the life of the car, we’re never going to reduce that we need to be in a lot more as an organisation, then to start thinking, Okay, we need to offset that, you know, do we send our riders into schools and kids, you know, in that coaching process there donate riding the bike, and they got, they got to do more exercise a lot of burden on the end of the jack. So then it’s not, you don’t have to manufacture more machines, or drugged or whatever, keep that property together, I think we’ve got to look at the wider issues here, as well as the individuals, but let’s look at the wider impact that the bike can actually do. If you start saying, here’s an offset, I mean, you you will know this better than I do. I think if if someone takes a car, for example, which is a cycle event, you know, there’s X amount of expenditure, both financially and physically done. But if you ride to somewhere, you know, exponentially, there’s a benefit to the economy. There’s providers within reach or an easy transport system, there’s not too far away. So think, you know, switching between various forms of transport is important. But, you know, I mean, it’s been an expert in the university, and I will put this over the podcast over wherever you bought it, if we can just cut our speed, from say, 75 mile an hour, 60 mile an hour, we would reach our our carbon targets set by government. So I think if we suddenly go, Well, hang on a minute one fails, one measure suddenly achieves them, suddenly, he’s what we’re looking for. Done. I think that should be our focus, along with the drive the net zero. I don’t know what you feel about that. But I think it’s a combination for age. I mean, I’d like to think by a certain timescale, we’ll have got much of our major items, question tackled or actions,

Carlton Reid 37:31
what are your goals for the team away from net zero, your professional goals for the st. paren? Team, say the next five years?

Ricci Pascoe 37:41
So we’re back to the drawing board? Again, after the success this week is a stellar success, that Zeb sic plays on PC? Um, you know, absolutely amazing. You know, that all means if you work on a process or a writer development, we can achieve that. So, back to the drawing board, what’s next five years look like if I had a plan for a business that they want to be in the Tour de France for five years, we could probably put one in there. So my personal thought process, we try and stay on a conti licence. But we ride pro con, or what? Pro Series races. So like for Britain for a Norway? Well, we are racing against World War Two. So we have three or four races like that. And the cool point one pros are again, we’re racing against World Tour teams in in one day events A bit like the PP, that will only today, then we can expose our riders to the highest level racing without them racing seven times a year because I think if you do that you’re being disingenuous to your riders, you’re caught up in the world of pro cycling, which puts riders on a treadmill. Because after going to races, the organisers plan a bit of a start money and it’s part of the series, you know, I want to pick and choose if we can, that keeps our riders at the centre of our vision, gonna be hard to do, very hard to do, you know, for rider centric, but that’s the key component for me, the second peak, but the second one is about how we keep amplifying our message around our family values we already do never forget where you’ve come from, make sure that the most you know, temperate with really great physical and mental well being and, hopefully use what we’ve got as a window or a palette talk about if we’re not sustainable as a team or a planet you know, the both go hand in hand there won’t be any bike racing. So you know, and we love it when we we love it when bike racing is going well don’t we because when it’s going well and we can see all the effort people making and you know, it’s just so pleasing isn’t it? You know, you know romantically imagine, you know, we represent Team TV in France in five years is love and riding a bike A good question, no one’s going to join. So he’s very tall. Most people think he’s fine. Obviously, it’s his height for me. He’s running a balanced bike, you know, I’m very conscious not to be a pushy parent, you know, I’ve seen so much in cycling. You know, if I’ve run clubs, academys, pro teams, I’ve just seen it. It’s not healthy. Yeah, it’s not healthy, really, to be pushy.

Carlton Reid 40:28
But but, you know, a balance bike is just a natural thing for a kid to get on. And just, I mean, I’ve, I have coached kids on balance bikes in primary schools and stuff, it’s just they love it. It’s not You’re not being a pushy parent, it’s just like, kids naturally want to use their Yeah,

Ricci Pascoe 40:43
I suppose. I agree, I suppose the thing is, they all do this next to that next, and all of a sudden, look, I love it, what’s the first independent thing that we sell for you or a child does put you in might swim, but get on a bike is that, you know, that smile, is so bankable, isn’t it, that’s smile that comes about independence. You know, in fact, we’re, we’re partnering up with bikeability, in the next few months, and we want to show the great work that they do, we want to throw hate to what’s great about cycling and trying to take the whole storyline from, you know, being two, three years of age, through, you know, through their sort of bike printing school, you know, and bikeability adult, the adult training as well, I’m cycling, so we want to try and bring together, you know, that elite four element, you know, take it all back through, you know, through through performance cycling, through legislating, back back through to you know, that the, the ability to ride a bike, you know, and, you know, we want to bring that back that story to everybody else, we’re gonna lend our voice to, you know, they’ve got sort of like, we’ve grown up in schools to focus the week coming up at the end of September, and we’re going to showcase in that we want to start showcasing some really good things that are not necessarily centred around ourselves. But we believe the, you know, a really good thing.

Carlton Reid 42:08
You’re really covering the whole gamut of cycling there, aren’t you? You know, you’re not, you know, you’re I’m talking to you here, you know, came, started talking about a team, you know, a payment dinner team with a payment structure where your development team, a women’s team, a men’s, you know, usually continental team, but you’re also talking about kids in schools. So you’re, you’re doing the whole thing to, to basically create new new people on bikes.

Ricci Pascoe 42:34
Yeah. So we set up a CIC Community Interest Company, and if you pop on our website, I mean, it’s, it’s under community engagement. So, you know, we we got a we got a grant from the Heritage minister, we bought her a rundown property and in a town centre, and on bank building, you know, put some imagination around, you’ll be combination at top and maybe tapping it underneath and have access to some bikes, wanting to know that your bikes or whatever, so, you know, with the whole with the whole Rubik’s Cube, you know, any subject you would like to talk to me about, and you know, an awful lot about this industry, you know, we can talk to you about we’re looking at social prescribing, which we do we’re looking at doing that to the CSD. You know, we’re looking at working with, you know, government agencies to amplify and inspire and within, you know, and yet we’re great believers in in, in campaign it’s not complaining that things are showcasing what for the greater in and around.

Carlton Reid 43:32
Thanks, to Ricci Pascoe there and thanks to you for listening to Episode 339 of the Spokesmen podcast brought to you in association with Tern Bicycles. Show Notes and more can be found at the-spokesmen.com. The next episode will be out next month but meanwhile, get out there and ride …

January 27, 2024 / / Blog

27th January 2024

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 345: 24 hour racing with Josh Reid on Scotland’s Strathpuffer

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUESTS: Josh Reid, Alfie Marsh

TOPICS: Hiring a Range Rover from Turo to schlepp up to Strathpeffer in the Scottish Highlands for Giant Bicycles ambassador Josh Reid to ride the Strathpuffer 24 MTB race.

TRANSCRIPT

Carlton Reid 0:13
Welcome to Episode 345 of the Spokesmen cycling podcast. This show was engineered on Saturday 27th of January 2024.

David Bernstein 0:29
The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider. Whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That’s t e r n bicycles.com to learn more.

Carlton Reid 1:04
I’m Carlton Reid. And on today’s episode we follow my son Josh with 24 hours 24 hours of mountain bike racing on the hills above Strathpeffer in the freezing Scottish Highlands, I was support crew handing Josh his food, water and bubble-free Red Bulls from a rental Range Rover at the side of a fire road climb right on the Strathpuffer course. You’ll hear audio recorded during the day when Josh was chipper, and then through the 17 hours of darkness when he was well — spoiler alert — suffering. He managed 20 laps of what’s affectionately known as the Puffer. And that’s quite some achievement for him because …

Josh Reid 1:57
it’s very technical. …

Carlton Reid 1:59
… because he’s more of a roadie/gravel rider. And that snippet of information yelled at me as Josh came past on his first lap told me he’d likely lose a bunch of time on the technical descents. Let’s get rolling, beginning with some audio of me clipped from a video recorded on the long drive up to Scotland. We stopped in Glasgow to pick up filmmaker Alfie Marsh who helped Josh produce a stunning film of the event, the YouTube link for which is on the show notes at the hyphen spokesmen.com. I’m not gonna look at you, by the way, I’m going to be keeping my eyes completely focused on the road. So I do not normally drive an internal combustion engine car and certainly not one as mental as this Range Rover that I’ve got. But Josh needs to go to this event, we’re driving on the A9 up towards Inverness, and we’re gonna go to Strathpeffer — Josh can tell you exactly what the event we’re doing, but clue’s in the name, I guess. But to get out there to get all the kit, and to make sure we’re kind of comfortable. So we have hired this car. And it’s from a company called Turo. So I last time I hired a Turo in America in 2015 when I actually got a Tesla. But here, they’ve been in the last couple of years. It’s basically Airbnb of car hire. So basically rented it off somebody into his personal so it’s Gurinder’s personal Range Rover. And obviously looking after it’s not, you know, it’s a rental so don’t be gentle, no that you can look after the car. And we’re going to be stopping shortly. For coffee breaks, beautiful day here in the Scottish Highlands. And Josh exactly what are we going to so Strathpeffer, what’s the event that we’re actually physically going to be doing? You’re gonna be doing not me. So we’re

So we’re going to Strathpeffer, but the event is Strathpuffer, or people call it the Puffer. And it’s a 24 hour mountain bike event going round a 12 kilometre circuit. And as you can see, I’ve got laden with bikes in the back here. So I’ve got my gravel bike and full-suss mountain bike. And basically the aim is to just ride around a circuit for 24 hours and not to stop at all and see if I can get on the podium. We’re in just outside of Contin. Lots of big setups here. We’re in a small, relatively small setup, just the three of us. And we’re gonna be riding for 24 hours. And how are you feeling? Yeah, all right. Ready to get going?

It was a Le Mans start so all the riderss had to run to get to there

Josh Reid 5:16
just in the two hours in on the third lap, and just keep on pushing. Make use of the up hill was very slow on the downhills.

I’ve lost track of the number of laps I’ve done. I think I’m on lap five just under four hours completed. That means there’s 20 to go Yeah, it’s starting to feel like a grind going up this hill.

Carlton Reid 5:55
Coming back fast.

Alfie Marsh 5:56
I can see on the tracker. Josh is literally is just around the corner. There he is. Yes.

Josh Reid 6:08
Yes, my four and a half hours in probably about 20 to go.

Alfie Marsh 6:16
What’s been going on with you so far?

Josh Reid 6:18
I feel a bit sick right now. I was like stuffing a wrap with peanut butter and jam in. And then like all the way up to last climb. Got it down on me. But like, coming down I was just like

Alfie Marsh
How’s the riding? good.

Josh Reid
Oh, it’s just really good. Yeah, so much fun like the top it’s really tacky, which is quite difficult, considering I’m a roadie. And then the bottom is really like flowy it’s very nice. I guess I’m just Yeah, keep keep on plugging away. Yeah, I think last lap I was fifth place. Yeah, last I think I might have missed out a few places. I think last time I looked through a seven Okay, which is about half an hour ago.

Alfie Marsh
Yeah that’s pretty damn good though. Yeah, you’re happy with that?

Josh Reid
Yeah, just keep on going. Yeah, you never know when anyone else is gonna stop please raise your own race. You’re gonna pass people you don’t know where they are. You have a clue where

Carlton Reid 7:13
the music is by Sonder, they’re next to us, and will they play music all night long? dDon’t suppose so — their batteries will run out.

Sonder fella
we can always make you on Thank you. Yeah, just coffee or tea or because that’d be nice yeah, yeah.

Carlton Reid
Thank you. Yeah, I just want to transfer any food you want to wrap? No,

Josh Reid 7:57
can’t eat it You’re good. You’re good

Carlton Reid 8:05
to what you want and then next lap right you’re still back there

Josh Reid
thank you

Carlton Reid
you need more food and there’s just more and

Josh Reid 8:27
more and you just stopped doing my pocket here? I don’t hear this okay. Thank you very much.

Carlton Reid 8:39
Next lap wrap

Josh Reid 8:50
my head was going coming down this last year but see it’s nice to see familiar tactics for the next stage. They will more often then take our sunglasses off as it’s getting darker ready. Ready for 17 hours of darkness oh good and bad camera wrap.

Carlton Reid
Wrap is here.

Josh Reid I just need some water. Did you find the tablets?

Carlton Reid
No, I haven’t

Carlton Reid 9:28
what do they look like?

Josh Reid
Make it okay. All right. Cool. Thank you guys so much. Pasta.

Josh Reid 9:48
Pasta and yoghurt.

Carlton Reid 9:51
Okay.

Josh Reid 9:55
For more much more apricot?

Carlton Reid 9:57
Yeah.

Alfie Marsh 9:59
How’s it feeling in the

Josh Reid
It was amazing to start with my first taste it was really good to start with just like fresh air it felt like a new ride. But I started to drag on now keep on plugging away I think I’ve stopped for about 10 minutes so far. We’re about 10 hours two more to halfway to

Carlton Reid 10:30
our next one I’m doing now how’s it doing? Nothing we’re doing okay now that we’re found Josh’s salts and he’s had a look at that. So that is beautiful as pasta that we cooked yesterday or today. When did we cook that pasta last night and it’s now got lovely, lovely Strathpeffer mud on it. And he’s ingesting that. She’s getting extra proteins no doubt from that nice mud. Right so that’s his next one that’s got salt in and I may as well do his next one as well. After that. I don’t he might want to Red Bull while after that lightly. We’re going to leave Josh in the mud for a moment and cut to an ad break with my colleague David in the US.

Josh Reid 11:23
This podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern understand that while a large cargo bike can carry oodles of stuff, many of us prefer something a little more manageable. That’s why they’ve come up with the HSD e-cargobike for folks with big aspirations to go car free, delivered in a compact size, with its rear shock, 280 kilos, and a combined hauling capacity of 180 kilos. The robust new HSD is stable and easy to manoeuvre, even when under load. And with its Bosch eBIKE SYSTEM tested and certified to meet the highest UL standards for electric and fire safety you’ll be able to share many worryfree adventures with a loved one whether it’s your kiddo or Nan. Visit www.ternbicycles. That’s te r n turn bicycles.com to learn more

Carlton Reid 12:24
Thanks, David. And were back in the dark supporting Giant Bicycles ambassador Josh Reid on his first stab at the Strathpuffer 24 hour mountain bike race in Strathpeffer in the Highlands of Scotland. Right here.

Josh Reid 12:41
What I’ve learned I’ve got just chop that up. Yeah, no, he’s got that one. Yep. Thank you.

Carlton Reid 12:51
So you’re sick. And you’re not far away from the the four and five and six, you’re all close together rallied about like 30 minutes. At the moment. Top Five is a possibility.

Josh Reid 13:09
Can you get my Camelbak ready for the next lap? Yeah,

Carlton Reid 13:12
it’s there with the batteries the battery thing and what battery

Josh Reid 13:17
does an Exposure battery thing in the yellow bag? But no worries are not okay. Okay, I

Carlton Reid 13:22
got it the … okay

Carlton Reid 13:26
what do you want? Okay.

Josh Reid 13:30
It’s getting harder and harder to get do the techie section. Just like tiredness yes of course change and much with the place to get where bits are. I’ll finish that Red Bull next lap somewhere. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Appreciate it.

Alfie Marsh
You got this you got this.

Josh Reid
Want to sub in for me?

Alfie Marsh
I’d love to I’d love to have a good one, man.

Carlton Reid 13:56
Up you know for a while.

Alfie Marsh 13:58
What are time are we on now, Josh?

Josh Reid
that past 11 o’clock. 11.30 maybe?

Alfie Marsh
Do you know what lap you’re on?

Josh Reid
lost count on ap four

Alfie Marsh
Do you know what place you are?

Josh Reid
No. Do you know?

Alfie Marsh
I actually don’t right now. How are you feeling now?

Josh Reid
Good. It’s good to be past halfway not hopefully I’ll get easier and easier. This is gonna be the hardest bit I think. next little bit

Carlton Reid 14:32
to three o’clock. Tough one.

Josh Reid 14:36
The laps are taking me like an hour and a half now. Yeah. Whereas it would take me under an hour before.

Alfie Marsh
Yeah. You guys Yeah.

Carlton Reid 14:48
Right, do you want some pasta?

Josh Reid
Can do.

Carlton Reid
There’s some sandwiches We’re getting

Josh Reid 15:03
it’s almost 6am Probably another two hours before light. pretty cooked, just started to snow

How are you want to stop this keep on plugging away this take it easy and just keep those legs spinning two more hours and then I can stop

Josh Reid 15:39
I’ve want some of this return yet I

Carlton Reid 15:45
can’t toast it for you…top 10 Josh keep it up how you doing the lights? I’m

Josh Reid 16:03
fine six

Carlton Reid 16:04
I mean six hours

Josh Reid 16:06
yeah but I don’t I only use it on low for what about yeah I lost about one on profit

Carlton Reid 16:13
I haven’t really helmet like

Josh Reid
It’s OK I’m going slow.

Carlton Reid
How about one of you?

Josh Reid 16:24
I can’t get it on. Can you get it on? I’m just gonna go

Carlton Reid 16:34
That flapjack was really nice. So just chomp on that it’s really soft

Josh Reid 16:41
Should be light by the next time I come around ish. What? Six there’ll be eight o’clock ish yeah all right

Carlton Reid 16:58
there’s one more can of Red Bull Yep,

Josh Reid 17:02
I’m gonna have I drank three so far

Carlton Reid 17:28
do want to establish take around with you Josh. What about more flapjack? That’s quite nice. It’s nice flapjack.

Josh Reid 17:39
Okay

Carlton Reid 17:43
Babybel here next time. Next time what else next time. You haven’t had an apple?

Josh Reid 17:59
I know one apple a horrible hurry. Okay.

Carlton Reid 18:03
Any pasta right she got some more sandwiches? Yeah, yeah. To eat more apricot. Well, pasta I mean you first sandwiches How are you doing your water? Full full. Full. Okay. That’s cool. You don’t drink much water

okay. Daily, they say.

Josh Reid 18:42
Now in the second half of the last lap 10 minutes to 10 which would be 24 hours. We have till 11 To finish the loop. So really excited to be done.

Carlton Reid 18:57
Been a long night. It was a long 24 hours never mine a long night, Josh. And he came in at just before 10 o’clock. And he was 10th, well done Josh.

Josh Reid 19:30
What’s going on? That was so much fun. The smell of it. Yeah. Just like knowing now it’s done. Well, like I was in pain on my last lap. My hands I couldn’t like because all the bumps just came to me properly. I’ve been awake for 25 hours.

Carlton Reid 19:53
When Josh was little when he’s about 5, 6, 7 I used to do 24-hour mountain bike events. So really pleased to see Josh is carrying on the family tradition — there has been quite a big gap since the time I was riding 24 hour solos, but they are good events to do. I’ve never done the Strathpeffer. That was actually after my time when I was riding, but maybeI’ll do it next. Yeah, maybe, maybe. It was certainly fun to be there supporting Josh. So well done to him for the 10th place. So many thanks to Alfie Marsh who was doing some of the recording there. And of course, all of the filming, which I grabbed some of the audio from from his footage. And thanks also to Turo for helping out with the the rental Range Rover and of course, to the sponsor of this podcast every single show which is Tern Bicycles. The next show will be out next month, but meanwhile, get out there and ride …

December 28, 2023 / / Blog

28th December 2023

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 344: First Ever Computer Modelling of How Cyclists (And Motorists) Hit Potholes 

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUEST: Kara Laing

TOPICS: Automotive engineering analyst Kara Laing, an everyday cyclist, explains her new work on the modelling of hitting potholes.

MACHINE TRANSCRIPT

Carlton Reid 0:13
Welcome to Episode 344 of the spokesmen cycling podcast. This show was engineered on Thursday, the 28th of December 2023.

David Bernstein 0:29
The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider. Whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That’s t e r n bicycles.com to learn more.

Carlton Reid 1:02
In this last episode of 2023, I talk with automotive engineering analyst Cara Lang, who explains her new work on the modelling of hitting potholes. She describes how she recently spent 600 pounds for a pothole dinged car wheel, but goes on to explain that hitting the same pothole on her bike could have cost her her life. I’m Carlton Reid. And this episode could be literally and certainly figuratively, the most impactful in the show’s 17 year history. All right, you you direct message me with the fascinating piece of research, which we will talk about, and hopefully at length, and you will very quickly discover how little science I know. Tell me first of all, because you’re an engineer, [yes, I am]. Your background. So give me your trajectory in life. Before we even get on to cycling. Just tell me how you got into engineering. And then segue into what you’re doing now.

Kara Laing 2:13
I went the long way round into engineering. I’m a mathematician by education. And when I finished I finished a PhD. And I decided I wanted to do something to make the world a little bit safer. So I decided that I was I wanted to work on car safety. Didn’t know how I was going to do this. It turns out that just at that time, about 20 something years ago, finite element modelling was becoming the next big thing in car safety. So what car companies were starting to do and is now established practice is that they would take their car design, and they would build a computer model of it. And then instead of running car crashes on actual cars, they would run it on in the computer model. The way we build the model is you take your your different parts of the vehicles and instead of being one large, complicated shape, we turn them into lots of little little pieces that we called finite elements. And it’s quite simple to work out the physics for what’s happening when you when you squash something you know how much it’s going to resist, and how much it’s going to push the next element in the chain. But you just have to do it about 2 billion times two model a car crash. I went into that. And I’ve been working on that now for 23 years coming up for 24 years. I started off working in full vehicle crash modelling. And then I started working on a company for a company my current employer Vectayn where we do a lot of what happens to people inside vehicles. So that’s my job. And I’m a technical specialist there. Really enjoy it. love talking about it can talk about it for hours. But it means that I look at the world in a way of okay, how can I look at that as a model? How can I understand what’s going on why it feels like that? Or why it looks like that or why something is reacting like

Carlton Reid 4:27
It’s a tough one to throw this on you because not not your fault. But automotive crash test things in general. Clearly focus as you were saying before about the people inside the car that’s quite natural. You want to you want to protect your customer, the person who’s physically buying that you want to protect them you’re not really that fussed about the people outside because they’re not buying your car. So do you also work on protecting people that are not inside the car? Well,

Kara Laing 4:57
this is interesting that about 2010 Euro Ncap, European new car assessment programme, started looking at what happens to pedestrians outside the vehicle. And that was the first time that that requirement had come into place. There’s now also a legal requirement for cars in Europe for an A, to some extent in the States for what happens if you interact heavily with somebody outside the vehicle, shall we say? It’s actually the sort of modelling that I really enjoyed doing. For the reasons that it’s it’s more socially supportive. I’m trying to think of the right words there. It is good for people outside the vehicle is not just a marketing thing of how safe Can you keep your family, but how well can you carry out this responsibility to the people around your vehicle,

Carlton Reid 5:52
and how well they’ve had to meet the standards. So how well do you think companies are doing?

Kara Laing 5:58
They are doing better. But fundamentally, if you will, the regulations have now changed that, or sorry, the euro in cap assessment has now changed. So that it now model vulnerable road users. So it looks at cyclists as well. It’s I think it’s it’s been significant, it’s now standard to consider that standard. Consider that in how vehicles are designed. And you can actually see that so that they are more vulnerable road user friendly. Yeah, so it’s improved, it’s still not as safe as the occupant.

Carlton Reid 6:38
Because there’s theTesla cybertruck. You know, that’s clearly never gonna pass any European regulations. It’s just it’s a death machine on wheels for people outside the vehicle. I’m sure it’s incredibly safe for people inside. But outside, that’s just a death machine. And we don’t want to see those kinds of things coming across to me, we’ve got another SUVs, so

Kara Laing 7:02
don’t get me started on SUVs. I have to be a little careful what I say, yeah, I, I was passed by a Humvee the other day, I was cycling down a single track lane, on my way home from work, and I pulled into a parking space and this thing went past me and I don’t even know if they knew I was there. It was enormous. If it had helped me, I don’t think they’d have noticed. And yet, the cyber truck, I don’t know whether there will be any publicly accessible results from testing. I’d be very interested to see how it performs. It’s a truck. So it’s quite possible it won’t even need to pass through any Europe any federal requirements. I don’t know how it’s going to be sold here.

Carlton Reid 7:54
I’ve not I think it’s really easy answer that one for a very long time. And if it changes by EOB, yes, the illustration on the Vectayn website is of a kind of like an estate car with probably quite big, wide, you know, nice crumple zones. And if you you know, you get hit by that you get thrown up, I’m assuming and then shove to one side kind of thing, whereas an SUV hits you and you just get your splattered with an SUV hitting you like getting

Kara Laing 8:21
better. But I wouldn’t want to be a six year old kid standing in front of one.

Carlton Reid 8:25
No. So you mentioned cycling from work there. So what kind of cycling apart from cycling to and from work? Is it something that you’ve always done? Why do you get into it late? We’re kind of you’re

Kara Laing 8:37
My cycling trajectory. When I was a student, I couldn’t afford the bus pass. So I bought a bike. And it turns out, I actually really enjoyed it even though that bike was so terrible that somebody burgled our shed and stepped over my bike to take all the others. Cycling is part of my happy space. It’s how I get to and from work as much as I can. It’s cheaper than the gym. I cycled for leisure whenever I get the chance. It’s something I do with I’ve got a cycling buddy. I tried to cycle with my family. But of course, it’s never enough cycling. And cycling to and from work is just my way of fitting a little bit in and getting a little bit fitter and reducing my carbon footprint. It’s a win win win win scenario for me.

Carlton Reid 9:28
So since that previous bike that the thief stepped over, you’ve invested in something nicer.

Kara Laing 9:35
Yes, yes. Yeah, I it turns out I now have a winter bike and a summer bike. Mainly so that in the winter, a lot of my route. I take country lanes because it’s quieter and it feels safer. But they’re unlit and you can’t see the potholes,

Carlton Reid 9:55
which is a great segue into yours So, you contacted me? Yes. I was writing, basically about the transport minister. You’re ignoring cyclists in this announcement about London’s roads and a bit of cash that’s going to be pumped into into road resurfacing in London and you just eat basically just and in fact, the press reserves to plan for transport press release, pretty much 99.9% of it was motorists motorists known as like, oh yen and it kind of like maybe potholes affect cyclists as well. It was just like a throwaway line right then. But then your research your research shows that is completely the opposite. Absolute. So describe. I mean, yeah, I could describe this but let you describe your graph to me, which shows this in absolute me I don’t be a scientist to realise Oh, that particular curve means that hurt compared to that particular Bob little line, which is the motorists line. Yeah, might might scratch a hubcap, they ain’t gonna die. So describe your graph. Okay,

Kara Laing 11:03
well, what I did is I went around mid I carried a tape measure around for a couple of weeks measuring everything I could I have built a computer model of five different types of wheel I’ve my first question was wider potholes hurt more when I’m riding my road bike than when I’m riding my mountain bike type bike. It’s got fatter tires, there’s a lot more air in there the rubbers thicker and so on. And then I thought but what’s it like for other road users as well? So I’ve I had a conversation with a friend where I said can I please measure the wheels on your chair, I measured my my bike I found an online model I found a paper describing the modelling of a car tire. And we’ve there’s there are a couple of open source car models out there. And I also modelled a an E scooter by finding one of those we’ve got higher scooters in the city I live in So there’s me standing there with my tape measure measuring it okay the diameter is this how have how squiddy does that feel trying to find out a little bit about the E scooter tire. And what I originally did is I dropped them all with an appropriate weight on them which is the equivalent of riding off a 50 mil curb off into a 50 mil deep pothole. I’ll go back to 50 mil in a moment. And I looked at the amount of debris that the person or the top of the shock tower for the car would experience from dropping into that pothole. And basically a car experiences about a third of the amount of acceleration that a road bike does so it explains why when I when I drop into a pothole it hurts I’ve since run the what happens when you ride out of the pothole. And it’s even more stock that cars are designed to drive over curbs and bikes, scooters and wheelchairs really aren’t that the amount of force that somebody riding a bike has to be able to control with their hands is we’re talking about 300 somebody’s giving you 300 kilogrammes to hold suddenly and yeah and that explains why it’s quite difficult to ride into an outdoor pothole

Carlton Reid 13:48
you mentioned shock tower before Yeah. That’s on the car that I mean I’m assuming that says the suspension system is that your definition of a shock tower

Kara Laing 13:56
Yeah, the top of the suspension system I think I sent you some images I’ve taken as little as I can of the car model because my my work of happy to let me do this but I need to kind of sneak it through when we’re not running big crash models of something else.

Carlton Reid 14:16
I do recommend people I’m gonna I’m gonna post this high res version of the graph that you did posted on Twitter when you sent me this this high res version I will post that on on the show website so people can go and scare themselves silly basically by looking at this and and probably it will go semi viral in that when anybody comes and says oh look my you know my car was you know hubcap was dented by this this pothole, just show this graph. Yeah, but look what it happens, you know, with cyclists die, they don’t and they go into your, your, your, your modelling here. So the shock tower, we we’ve kind of got that definition. So the MTB, the mountain bike, one that again that was that’s a suspended product. You’re talking About a suspended mountain bike bike with front suspension or what

Kara Laing 15:04
I just took that That one’s nice and simple. I just took it from the middle of the wheel. I didn’t I didn’t have any model for a mountain bike suspension. So I took so there would be a little bit of extra give in the system. Yeah, so mountain bike is is an optimist is sorry, is a pessimistic curve, and suspend it shows how suspension would help. But this brings me back to to one of my initial questions when I cycling along and I thought I wonder about that. The next lunchtime i I logged on to my institutions library and started looking for information about what people had already done looking at the amount of the amount of force that is experienced through a cycle, hitting an obstacle or dropping into a pothole. And there was nothing. Nobody has done this work as far as I can find. I haven’t spent hours and hours going through the literature search but there really isn’t anything out there. And that’s quite shocking. It’s I’m also going to bring it back if I may Colton to the 50 mil. I chose 50 mil most councils in the country assess their potholes by they’ve they’ve moved over to a risk based assessment of potholes. And they it has to be 40 mil deep and however big it needs to be the county I live in. They don’t count unless they’re 50 mil deep

Carlton Reid 16:41
as the No there’s no government regulators. It has to be this deep. This is a each council does each different. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Kara Laing 16:47
So in? Well, I’m in Essex, and in Essex unless it is big enough for a car wheel to fall into. And unless it is at least 50 mil deep. It doesn’t count as a risk. So I actually I sent the initial graphs that I sent to you initially sent to my counsel, I’ve never heard anything back.

Carlton Reid 17:11
Yeah, cuz there’s all this like, Well, yeah, of course that’s gonna hurt a cyclist. What’s the way you tell us something we didn’t know. I mean, that’s that’s part of, you know, the kind of the cynical thing here is like, well, of course. Yeah. But, but that isn’t how the Ministry of Transport press release. showed it at all. It really was. This is hurting motorists. Yeah, it was like in Cyprus, just we’re just not in the equation here. But at this point, Kira was called away. So that’s a great spot to cut away to my colleague, David for a quick ad break.

David Bernstein 17:45
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Carlton Reid 18:45
Thanks, David. And we are back with Kara Laing and her work on the computer modelling of dropping into potholes. So your work all right with with with this, this is a very graphic thing that you could show the powers that be and that’s something that’s like quite physical compared to you know, here is this cyclist who died from this which you would think would actually be more powerful in many respects, but often isn’t. Whereas this is something that anybody can look at and go oh, yeah, we need to fix those potholes. Because look at that, but what cyclists when they when they when they sadly die from hitting potholes. It generally isn’t the pothole that’s killed them it’s generally I’d have to again do a literature research on this and find out exactly but it tends to be hit pothole you know, wobble and then fall into moving motor traffic that’s falling behind that aren’t breaking quickly and and they get squished unfortunately from that what’s happening base that 300 gramme await you suddenly got that makes you wobbles you’re not you’re not gonna die from the there’s no other vehicles around you’re probably okay it’s the other vehicles are Round that’s gonna kill you.

Kara Laing 20:01
Yeah, I cycling off a pothole like that I don’t think I’ve got the strength or the reactions to control it, I don’t have the skill to control it. It would be that is the kind of thing that would take somebody off their bike. We also have potholes around here that because they are wedge shaped, you can find yourself with a wheel completely trapped and no way of getting out of it. So yeah, that are a real risk for cyclists in a way. In a car. It’s uncomfortable. I mean, I recently had to pay 600 quid for a new wheel after a pothole on a country lane. But I’d far rather be paying 600 pound and having bits of me put back together or be paying or having my family paid for my funeral.

Carlton Reid 20:51
Yes, yes, that again, that is the reality behind your your graph, Bear. So tell me that the practical applications of your graph, what could activists do with your graph? What could you do with that graph?

Kara Laing 21:05
I had do some more on this on my to do list. Since this was work that I did during furlough, I sort of had to do more with this. One of the questions that somebody asked on your Twitter thread is what is the difference between a 50 mil curve and a 40 mil curve? And my plan is to run that and find out that to quantify what the increase in I’m not going to say perception what the increases of experience, because I think that minimising that acceleration pulse that is felt through the arms through the bike through the wheelchair, that’s got to be a good thing. It needs to be reduced. So that I mean, if we say if councils are saying that a car that a pothole needs to be repaired, when a car experiences that kind of Jolt, then we need to reduce the standard so that when a cyclist or a wheelchair user or a scooter user experiences that kind of Jolt, how do we need to change the requirements so that the risk level is the same for all road users? So

Carlton Reid 22:17
how do you do say effective dropping into a 10 Min millimetre pothole 20 3040 5060 isn’t going up. And then you did plot that out? As look, if it’s this level, this is what’s going to happen. So you really ought to be doing potholed at, say 30 millimetres? Is that what you can do with your, your research, you can actually plot all these things out and think, look, if it hits this depth, you got to do something about it? I think

Kara Laing 22:42
so. But what I am aware is that, for example, my estimate of the E scooter wheel is wrong. I know it’s wrong. When you look at the animations, it’s a bit squishy. It just doesn’t look right. So I would welcome any input from anybody who’s ever stuck an accelerometer on their bike and gone through a pothole, to find out what actually happens in the real world. This is, from my point of view, an initial model. And it’s as good as I can make with the data I’ve got. But I don’t have all the data I would like.

Carlton Reid 23:17
See, there’s two answers to that. That was the two things can pop pop in my mind. The last show, in fact, with Mr. And Mrs. McAleese, who have now moved to Australia, their tech, which is the you know, the See.Sense lights, well, that has an accelerometer, and that does track events, you know, pothole events. And then, you know, plot on maps when it’s linked to a link to the iPhone when when you can opt in, basically to, to, so the data is shared, anonymized but shared. So potentially See.Sense would have some of that data. So I’ll put you in touch with with them because I’m, I’m sure I’m sure they would love it right. Please do. Like it’s sort of a joke here, but also real right up the street. This, this kind of modelling will be to them, put it that way. But also just iPhones and and Google Pixel phone and smartphones, gentlemen, they do have accelerometers. So presumably you could get an app could be created to measure this either. In the CCENT terms, it’s like it’s just happening all the time. You just fit the light and you just you forget it, or you could genuinely go over. You know, a stunt stunt doubles could go over potholes and see if your graph is the real world. Yes,

Kara Laing 24:45
absolutely. We, we we just compare information. I mean, I’ve got a model of, of different sizes of wheels. I can make more models. I’d love to see it I’d also be really interested to see to understand from Wheelchair users point of view, how it affects them? Because I’ve modelled what happens at the wheel? But how does that affect the wheelchair user?

Carlton Reid 25:10
So this the model that you’ve got here, have you hit the lip of the pothole, then you go down into the pothole as a wheelchair user scooter user cycle user, you’re probably going to hardly notice it in a car. We’ve all kind of we’ve kind of established that. But then what you said before was, it’s actually coming out. That is potentially and that’s the work you’re still doing or you need to do more work on. It’s the coming out. That is potentially the worst bit. Yeah,

Kara Laing 25:37
it appears to be where I’m getting much more sharp pulses. They’re called pulses, the curves, I’m getting much sharper pulses. And the the issue is, it appears to be that the rubber does everything it can but if the pothole is too deep, then the rim of the metal hits the rim of the wheel and then hits the structure. And on a car tire because you have got 100 200 mil of space before you risk bottoming out that’s why it’s not anywhere near as much an issue on a car as it is on a road bike wheels are really thin, it makes

Carlton Reid 26:18
sort of sense that it is going to hurt hitting the second lip. Because the first lip is you’re dropping it down you can imagine your your tire and perhaps any suspension you’ve got will maybe cope with that. But if you’re then travelling when some of these potholes are pretty big, and you might travel perhaps half a metre or metre before you hit the lip but it is that second bit where you’ve got to be very careful of what’s happening coming out. So just that appreciation alone can be like a lifesaver.

Kara Laing 26:52
Yes, absolutely. And also what if you don’t hit the edge the the exiting edge straight? What if you hit it one key How can you I haven’t modelled that but I can it’s something that we can the models can become as complicated as we want them. How much strength do you need in your arms to be able to control that Yank of the wheel

Carlton Reid 27:16
here in Northumberland I’m gonna have you said this bad message in Northumberland we have cavernas almost literally caverns you down and hardly be seen by anybody Yeah, they’re pretty deep so Northumberland is notoriously bad for potholes and I’m maybe Essex is is the same but councils need to be shamed I know there’s Cyclists’ Touring Club as of bold you know we asked cycling cycling UK of today they were pretty big on potholes previously and I’ve been looking just recently when I’m when we’re doing this as an all women’s their pothole stuff and they haven’t done anything for a while but haven’t really resurrected their campaign they had an app you know fill that pothole, they had all this sort of like campaigning materials built around potholes, and the prevention of and the filling in of and they seem to have died away again. Hopefully this research can actually help them with statistics and with with graphs, literally with graphs, actually resurrect that campaign. So councils, Northumberland, Essex, wherever you live, can be shamed into filling these things in

Kara Laing 28:31
that will be wonderful. And I’m happy to talk to anybody. I mean, fundamentally, my issue is I dislike potholes as a cyclist. And I’d like them to all go away please. Anything I can do to encourage appropriate repair of potholes with round the corner from me. They’ve recently filled a load of potholes in that our wheel size, but then they’ve chosen not to fill in the ones that are cycled tire size around the corner. Anything that encourages a wider acceptance of who road uses quite might be.

Carlton Reid 29:11
And that’s good for putting the wheelchair in as well. Is that like a standard wheelchair with solid tires? Is that what kind of wheelchair was that? Or is that like a road cycling type wheelchair?

Kara Laing 29:26
This was can I find any wheelchair tires online to get any dimensions out of them? It’s an airfield we’ll talk airfield tire I’d quite like to do a rubber one but I’ve not been in not being in this position to take somebody’s wheelchair well apart and have a look at what it’s made off. Because

Carlton Reid 29:46
that thing literally saves us in that the air do pneumatics in a tire literally saves us it doesn’t just make more comfortable we can hopefully hit a pothole and survive as long as we don’t hit that wobble and then get hit from behind. Yes Speaking

Kara Laing 30:00
at speaking as an engineer, this has actually been really interesting looking at how the tire works, looking at how it stretches and how it boulders and how it recovers to carry on doing its normal job of just going round.

Carlton Reid 30:13
So you’re using … Vectayn is allowing you to use their finite element modelling computers to do this. But is this your Is this a spare time thing? So this is like a lunch break or something? And they’re not expecting you to guess, come up with anything practical for their business? Or, oh, might you be able to?

Kara Laing 30:33
I think, I think there is plenty of scope here. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to become a customer of my own company. So if anyone is out there and wants, once the modelling done, the groundwork is already there, it would be really affordable. And I’d love to do it for you. At present, it isn’t. We don’t have a client for this. If anyone if anybody is interested in this, if any councils are interested in this in a more well defined assessment of what risk based pothole repairs should look like. I’m, I’m definitely you’re definitely the analyst you need to talk to. We’re

Carlton Reid 31:16
on that note correct. And it has been fascinating. And as you said before, you could talk for hours about your day job. Or we could talk for hours about deformation of tires going into into potholes. But we can’t speak for hours and hours and hours. So we got to stop at some point. So this is a perfect juncture, I guess to say, who you are and how people can contact you. Okay,

Kara Laing 31:38
well, the best. The most detail on this is on my LinkedIn profile. My name is pretty there’s not many of us. It’s pretty obvious who I am. If you look for me,

Carlton Reid 31:49
and the Laing is L A I N G Yes.

Unknown Speaker 31:54
And it’s Kara with a K.

Carlton Reid 31:57
It’s been fascinating talk to you. I’m going to go away and I’m going to try and link you up with interested parties here. Season please. Cycling UK, they should be doing something on this because it’s absolutely essential work. You’re doing that and it’s working I didn’t even know hadn’t been done. So that’s, that’s pretty scary.

Kara Laing 32:18
Exactly. Exactly. That’s what shocked me most about this. Fundamentally, really selfishly, I’d like to get this published somehow in some format in a journal would be great, but in a magazine would be great. And then I can put it in front of my council and say, Look, you’re 50 mil assessment for curb decks. For for pothole that is inadequate, you need to reduce it, or you need to think about where you apply that and make it genuinely risk based and not just motor normativity risk based.

Carlton Reid 32:53
Thanks to Kara Laing there and thanks to you for listening to episode 344 of the Spokesmen podcast, brought to you in association with Tern Bicycles. Show notes and more can be found at the-spokesmen.com. The next episode will be out next year — dad joke there — but meanwhile get out there and ride.

November 21, 2023 / / Blog

21st November 2023

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 343: Mr & Mrs McAleese moving to Oz 

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUESTS: Philip and Irene McAleese of See-sense

TOPICS: Philip and Irene McAleese of See-sense, the Northern Irish bike lights and data company, are upping sticks and moving down under. We also talk V2X beacons, Cycling Industries Europe, Kevin Mayne, Jon Parkin, Velo-city and Geordie accents.

MACHINE TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Carlton Reid: Welcome to episode 343 of the Spokesman Cycling Podcast. This show was recorded on Tuesday, 21st of November, 2023.

[00:00:29] David Bernstein: The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider. Whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That’s t e r n bicycles.com to learn more.

[00:01:04] Carlton: the last episode, I said this show would be an interview with Komoot of Germany, but then an Australian angle intervened. Philip and Irene McAleese of See.sense, the Northern Irish Bike Lights and Data/data? Company, are upping sticks and moving down under. I’m Carlton Reid and regular listeners will know that Philip and Irene have been on the show multiple times, so it’s only fitting that I invited them for a wee chat before they depart at the beginning of December.

[00:01:40] Carlton: So what convinced you to exchange the reign of Northern Ireland For the sunshine of Brisbane.

[00:01:48] Irene McAleese: Oh, well. Really a mixture of things. Obviously, you know, I’m Australian. I’ve been away now for 20 years. Next, in April of next year, I’m coming up to 20 years. [00:02:00] Um, and I think it was actually when I was back home, um, last year, my, my dad wasn’t well and I went back, um, for that.

[00:02:08] Irene McAleese: Um, but it just sort of, I don’t know, something just sort of, um, In my mind just thought I wanted to be back, I wanted to be closer to my family, but also we were really impressed with What’s happening in Australia? It seems to be sort of post COVID. There’s a lot of energy around Active travel, there’s a lot going in in terms of investment They seem to have more funding pots available for this kind of stuff And yeah, we like the, you know, we liked what What’s happening in the energy of the, the, um, in Australia at the moment and the, um, you know, the economic potential as well.

[00:02:46] Irene McAleese: So yes, weather is certainly a, a factor, but, um, we do see opportunity to expand CSense in the Australian market.

[00:02:55] Carlton: Yeah. I’d like to get into that in a, in a, in a bit, because that’s clearly going to be [00:03:00] a phenomenal, uh, task ahead of you. And you can tell me about exactly the structures you’ve put in place, but first of all, uh, A bit more personal, really, in that, you’ve clearly, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve visited Irene every couple of years.

[00:03:15] Carlton: Is that, is that right? Like, to go and see your family and, and, you know, pandemic withstanding, you’ve kind of, you’ve been there regularly. So I’m assuming your kids, it’s not going to be like totally alien for them. They’ve also seen Australia. And, and, and what is, is in their future.

[00:03:33] Irene McAleese: Yes. However, I am trying to kind of get across that, you know, every time we’ve been back for holidays, it’s…

[00:03:39] Irene McAleese: It’s the beach, it’s barbecues, it’s social events, it’s family. They have this very rose tinted view of what life in Australia would be like. So I’m trying to get across that there’s actually going to be a lot of grunge stuff as well. Like, you will have to go to school.

[00:03:55] Carlton: You

[00:03:55] Irene McAleese: will still need to do homework.[00:04:00]

[00:04:00] Irene McAleese: So, you know, um, yes, I, I think that, I think that they are excited, but yeah, I mean, as with anywhere you live, you make the best of where you are. And I’ve actually really enjoyed everywhere I’ve lived. I’ve lived in Northern Ireland for 11 years. I’ve lived in Singapore. I’ve lived in London. Um, I really, you know, I, I always think that you can make the best of wherever you are.

[00:04:24] Irene McAleese: And it’s very much about your attitude and also just being around good people. So how old are your kids? Our kids, well we have, our youngest is actually turning 12 this week, and our eldest is 14. So part of the reason of, I guess, wanting to go now is to get them into the school, for the, get them a little bit embedded into the school before they get too senior, um, and start to get into the later years, so.

[00:04:52] Irene McAleese: I guess in an ideal world, we might have liked another a year or two to sort of, um, um, [00:05:00] prepare for the move, but really once the decision was made, we ripped the bandaid off quickly, um, and decided to do it.

[00:05:08] Carlton: And Philip, talk, talk to me about this. So, I mean, you know, Irene’s obviously spent 20 years away from Australia.

[00:05:16] Carlton: Is this like a quid pro quo thing? You know, you’ve spent 20 years away. All right, let’s go and spend 20 years in Australia. How have you, how have you negotiated this as, as part of your, your marriage kind of contract?

[00:05:29] Philip McAleese: Yeah, so we were living in Singapore and obviously we had to make the decision between Northern Ireland and Australia when we decided we wanted a bit more family support.

[00:05:36] Philip McAleese: Um, my family are all quite local to where we are here. Um, whereas Irene’s family were dispersed around Australia, uh, which is a really, really, uh, unfathomably big place for Europeans. And, um, so it made sense to come here first. We always said that we would retire in Australia. Um, we’re, we’re just going a little bit sooner than we expected.

[00:05:57] Philip McAleese: Um, just to fit in really with. It’s the equivalent [00:06:00] of GCSEs A levels and not disturbing schooling too much. Um, and, and plus I’m really excited about it. I mean, there’s a lot of opportunity for us down there. Um, and you know, some of our bigger, biggest projects are happening right there at the moment. And so it’ll be really good to go down, um, and to be there, to be able to accelerate and leverage.

[00:06:20] Philip McAleese: Um, all of that goodwill we have already. So

[00:06:22] Carlton: is that project the one that you’re doing with, uh, Victoria’s TAC, Transport Accident Commission, the Light Insight Trial? Is it that one? Yes, it’s

[00:06:30] Philip McAleese: actually an extension of that trial. So that trial wrapped up, um, last year. Um, but we were delighted that they chose to extend the project working directly with TAC.

[00:06:39] Philip McAleese: Um, and now we’re working with, uh, the first LGA, local government authority, um, called Surf Coast. Um, who are just a little bit, um, south of Melbourne. Um, they’ve got some infrastructure going in and they’re very interested in understanding the before and after and seeing what impact of change they can have.

[00:06:58] Philip McAleese: Um, they’re really [00:07:00] interested in community engagement and lots of the great things that our data can really help to, um, facilitate and help them do. Um, and that should lead on to projects with other, um, LGAs as well. There are a number of them interested and I’m talking to the TAC at the moment, um, and it would be fantastic to see, um, what we can do to help them

[00:07:18] Carlton: as well.

[00:07:18] Carlton: Because Australia, from, from this side of the, the kind of the antipodes, it’s always seemed a bit backward in, in cycling in that, you know, certainly Europe, continental Europe, and even the UK for a few years. Seem to be far in advance of Australia and Australia seemed to be going backwards on active travel But what you’re saying or what what what I was saying a few seconds ago was maybe that’s changing.

[00:07:43] Carlton: Yeah,

[00:07:44] Irene McAleese: we’re seeing I definitely think that there is There does exist in Australia this Us and them, you know attitude of cycling. I mean it does exist Um, I’m not sure if that’s something that’s going [00:08:00] to be introduced here as well to an extent. But, um, that’s what I was saying though, Carlton. I think that I sense that the attitudes are changing.

[00:08:07] Irene McAleese: There’s definitely a lot more investment in infrastructure that has gone in. Melbourne and Sydney, but also in Brisbane in my hometown, I was really impressed to see even in some, even in, uh, you know, there’s urban investment in urban areas, but also rail trails, they call them, which are like the Greenway investment for tourism and things like this.

[00:08:33] Irene McAleese: Um, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s really, um, it’s. It has really taken off in the last few years. I think particularly since COVID, there’s been, there’s been a big uptake. They, um, they still have a long way to go. Um, but I’m seeing that there’s a lot more appetite. Um, and I’ve been speaking with other Australians at the, it was a large contingent of Aussies at the VeloCity in Leipzig this [00:09:00] year, there was a really active, um, um, advocacy groups there, um, the Amy Gillett Foundation and, and WeRide and the Bicycle Network, they’re all doing fantastic work, um, there’s, there seems to be.

[00:09:14] Irene McAleese: You know, the likes of the people that we have been engaging with at the Transport Accident Commission and the iMove project. I mean, we work with people on projects around the world and some of the people we’re working with there we really think have great minds and a real appetite for innovation. Um, so.

[00:09:33] Irene McAleese: Yeah, we’re really happy to, to explore that and see what we can do, um, to help push.

[00:09:40] Carlton: And how much of the, this may be this expansion of interest in active travel, how much of it is perhaps due to climate change? Because again, from the perspective from this side of the Antipodes is certainly the, the previous crop of Australian politicians have been all dinosaurs.

[00:09:57] Carlton: They were all just totally denied the fact that [00:10:00] man made climate change. Uh, is happening at all? Are the current crop

[00:10:04] Irene McAleese: better? Yeah, they’re, I mean… Well, I think that the current Prime Minister has acknowledged that climate change is a thing, so that’s, that’s definitely a start. I think that, yeah, there’s definitely an awareness in Australia now more so than in previous years about the need to make change and to do it, do it rapidly.

[00:10:24] Irene McAleese: Um, so I think that definitely could be, could be a factor. Um, I think there was a report actually that came out, um, just this week about, about the cycling industry and its contribution to the economy. So it was, it was really interesting that one of the questions that they asked people as to why they’re riding their bike, um, the reason why.

[00:10:49] Irene McAleese: My highest reason was for their own fitness and well being, but one of the second highest reasons I think was about concern for the environment. So it must be playing [00:11:00] on people’s minds.

[00:11:01] Carlton: And then logistically, your business, I mean, let’s just, you’re not closing your business down. You are operating it as a satellite.

[00:11:11] Carlton: So you’re going to be opening a sales office in Brisbane. And expanding in Australia, because what currently do you have in Australia? Is there anything at all in Australia or do you just sell your products and your services there? And that’s it, and you do that from the Northern Ireland? Yeah, um, we

[00:11:26] Philip McAleese: do exactly what you say.

[00:11:27] Philip McAleese: So we’re setting up a sales office there. Um, all of our projects are, uh, have been run and executed really from, from here. Um, we did visit, um, the Transport Action Commission in Melbourne. Um, and we spent the day with them on our last personal visit to Australia. Um, and we found that to be incredibly useful and really, really rewarding.

[00:11:48] Philip McAleese: Um, and so we realized that it was a good opportunity to do a lot more of

[00:11:52] Carlton: that. Previously I’ve asked this, this, this question, and maybe it changes every few months anyway. Because you started as a light [00:12:00] company, and yes, it was a clever light, but it was a light company. And then each time we talk, it’s the data, data thing, uh, with Irene and with you, the different ways of pronouncing it.

[00:12:09] Carlton: Um, you seem to be becoming much more of a, a, a, data company. Has that accelerated even just in the last, you know, six months since we last talked? Um,

[00:12:18] Philip McAleese: I think we, we’ve not really changed our focus. I think probably what has changed is that, um, you know, with projects like, uh, in Denver and in Australia, um, and in Essex, we’re seeing real infrastructure changes be put in.

[00:12:33] cPhilip McAleese: So I think we finally got to the point where, um, you know, appetite and willingness and I guess understanding of data, um, has advanced to the point where it is now being actively used, which we’re super excited

[00:12:46] Carlton: about. When you are in Australia in your new sales office, you are selling lights or data?

[00:12:51] Philip McAleese: Oh, very much data.

[00:12:52] Philip McAleese: Yeah. So, I mean, the lights are fantastic. They’re really good at a personal level. We think for helping to make you more visible, [00:13:00] um, as you ride around, which should hopefully lead to a better riding experience. Um, but ultimately the bigger benefit we can have is around understanding, um, the, the greater pool of cycling.

[00:13:11] Philip McAleese: So, you know, where is the infrastructure working well and where can we help the cities to understand where it can be improved? Um, and we’re starting to look at other things, you know, there’s a lot of initiatives going on with things like green waves. Where, um, you know, they put beacons or transponders on the bikes and allow them to have green traffic lights all the way through their destination.

[00:13:31] Philip McAleese: Um, we like that idea in principle, but of course you can’t have a beacon on every bike. And so it doesn’t really provide, um, you know, a fair experience to everyone. Whereas when we look at our data, we only need a sample of cyclists in order to be able to model, to understand. Where the bunching of cyclists occurs, where the biggest delays and the highest probabilities are of being stopped at a set of traffic lights.

[00:13:55] Philip McAleese: And then through that modeling, we have the city to understand, you know, what, [00:14:00] what changes need to be made to traffic phasing to allow for these bunches or groups of cyclists that have naturally formed in the environment to get collectively a green wave all the way through. without having to have any additional sensors on the bikes themselves.

[00:14:14] Carlton: All right, Philip’s brought up beacons there. I, I wasn’t going to bring it up, even though you know that I probably was going to. Um, so, so, so beacons was mentioned at a certain safety conference you were at in, was in the Hague just recently. And it was, it was, it was Gazella. So it was like somebody from Gazella basically saying cyclists of the future are going to have force fields.

[00:14:36] Carlton: Um, you know, this, this, this. This, this, you know, beaconization program, uh, was it, was it swallowed whole by the audience or was it quite, was there groans when even Gazelle, alike, seemed to have, uh, swallowed the Kool Aid? Well,

[00:14:52] Irene McAleese: I, I would say that it was, you know, this is an academic audience who, um, you know, this is the international [00:15:00] Cycling safety conference.

[00:15:01] Irene McAleese: Um, the audience, um, primarily academics who are focused on research and they like the idea of testing out ideas. I think one of the things that, you know, one of the key things that the audience really noticed straight away was that the coalition for safety, I think it’s called the organization which has been set up, didn’t have any.

[00:15:25] Irene McAleese: Um, voices on that coalition from the academic world. Um, so that was, I think, the number one point of view. Now, to be fair, Gazelle did say, well, we would like to invite those voices on now, but it had originally come from being an industry driven thing. So I think that was the first point of, you know, why are you developing this in isolation without taking on the, the ideas, the insights and, you know, Perspectives the academic, um, world could potentially offer, [00:16:00] um, in helping to shape or steer the solution.

[00:16:03] Irene McAleese: Um, and there were other also other questions that that came up about. Um, why, you know, um, would this give a cyclist a sort of sense of false sense of security that they felt that they were riding in a bubble? I think that was actually the picture on the first slide. There was a picture of a cyclist enclosed by this, by this bubble of safety.

[00:16:31] Irene McAleese: Um, that, um, you know, and I think there was immediately some reaction to that. Um. And your ears must have been burning, Carlton, because yours truly did put up my hand and say, Have you read Carlton’s fantastic piece in the Forbes about this? You know, I think that there’s, you know, there are some valid points here around equity.

[00:16:52] Irene McAleese: Um, but yeah, there were actually a couple of people in the audience as well that, that, you know, didn’t seem opposed to it. Seemed, [00:17:00] you know, open to it, but wanting to test and validate that actually this could. Does this work? And I guess that’s coming from the researcher point of view, you know, appetite to validate or test things without sort of completely ruling it out.

[00:17:15] Irene McAleese: And I think that, um, to be fair to Gazelle, they acknowledge that there’s definitely a lot more work to do to be able to validate. If this does actually bring benefit, and it was kind of presented as very much a work in progress. I

[00:17:31] Carlton: mean, I welcome technology. I’m talking to people here who are right, the cutting edge of bicycle technology in data and in digital diagnostics, so I’m not against this.

[00:17:45] Carlton: But I’ve got a bikes that sometimes have the Garmin radar. And you very quickly get used to that and, and you almost stop looking behind and you just rely on, on [00:18:00] your, your dashboard to tell you how many cars are coming, which is great when you’re on that bike. But then if you’ve got like a few bikes, which, which I have, I’m lucky enough to have quite a few bikes, you switch to a different bike and you’re still in that kind of, I’m going to rely on the technology mode.

[00:18:17] Carlton: And then all of a sudden it’s like, yeah, but you’re not on that technological bike anymore. You’re on a naked bike all of a sudden. So you’ve got to go back to the old ways. So it’s, it’s almost like the, the, you know, self driving cars. If you have, you know, 10 years of sitting in a car and you’re not having to touch anything, all of a sudden you have to use, you know, your driving skills.

[00:18:39] Carlton: It’s just a little atrophied. And it’s the same with, with, with, with technology. If we start relying on technology. on bicycles too much, like the, the Garmin Varia radar, all of a sudden you’ve lost all of those actually pretty good skills. And that’s not even, as you mentioned, equity there. You’ve got a whole bunch of, you [00:19:00] know, 99.

[00:19:01] Carlton: 9 percent of the population ain’t going to have this technology. It’s for the rich people will have this technology. And why should we sacrifice, why should the rich people be protected and, and everybody else not be protected? So there are huge, the academics, if you’re, you know, talking about academics, I would quite like there to be some historians, not just tech academics, but historians there, social historians, you know, people, academics who are specialists in, in, in genuine.

[00:19:31] Carlton: equity to bring all of these perspectives because that’s that is up from what I can see is totally being ignored.

[00:19:37] Irene McAleese: And yeah, they’re currently not on the coalition for safety. Panel at all so that that perspective has not been brought in which is a real miss That’s definitely something that the audience caught out The other thing that they also said is how would this work in the Netherlands with you?

[00:19:53] Irene McAleese: Detecting bikes and there’s thousands of bikes Um, anyway, Philip, you were going to [00:20:00] say something. Yeah, I

[00:20:01] Philip McAleese: think it’s interesting as well, because if you look at sort of the agenda, who’s driving it, um, obviously there’s both, you know, car and bicycle companies, um, promoting this as an idea. Um, but really when you look at it, um, at the technologies that they’re using and trialing and evaluating.

[00:20:17] Philip McAleese: Um, it’s largely based around car based systems of V2X. And so a lot of those are by companies like Qualcomm, um, who will be not just in one manufacturer, but will be in multiple cars. And the argument is that, you know, because it’s in multiple cars, um, it can be upgraded over the air in the future to allow the cars to detect.

[00:20:37] Philip McAleese: other things that have V2X on them. Um, but it’s fundamentally, um, I think they’re trying to retrofit a technology which is too expensive for bikes. Um, and as you say, we’ll end up only in the most expensive bikes because it’s, uh, it’s an expensive chipset. It requires a lot of energy, which in turn needs a big battery.

[00:20:54] Philip McAleese: Um, and so it’ll tend towards high end e bikes and that sort of thing. And, [00:21:00] you know, there are cheaper technologies out there, but it would require more More money being invested into the car, which again, changes the economic value. So the thing that I think is quite good, and I’m actually reasonably excited about is, um, the likes of Euro end cap and the Australian equivalent end cap.

[00:21:18] Philip McAleese: And since 2010. Sorry, 2020. Um, they’ve had tests around autonomous braking and detection of cyclists. Um, most recently in 2023, both of them have announced that, um, dooring or prevention of dooring is part of their scoring system as well. Um, and that’s kind of interesting because although these tests are, you know, independent of the car manufacturer, um, they do kind of.

[00:21:45] Philip McAleese: Uh, reactor, or I guess we’re set up as a result of things that are present in the cars. So, for example, the dooring, um, one of the first cars that was available to do that was the idea for back in 2016. So, you know, getting on for 7 year old technology. [00:22:00] And indeed, I believe that uses very similar technology to the Garmin Varia.

[00:22:04] Philip McAleese: Um, of a radar based system looking behind to look for bicycles. So it is possible to do this stuff without needing, um, you know, really expensive V2X technologies that is being, um, proposed. Um, I guess on the flip side to, to be fully, um, I guess cognizant of all the different factors, um, you could argue that.

[00:22:25] Philip McAleese: Um, how well do these systems work in the real world, the, you know, they certainly work well in testing and a lot of cars do pass, um, the standards for the test. Um, but we know from emissions regulations in the past that it is possible to set up a car to do a very specific thing and the real world, it might not behave exactly the same way.

[00:22:45] Philip McAleese: So given that the car manufacturer is saying it’s really hard to detect a bike, but the cars are passing these Euro NCAP standards. Um, I think we probably need something more, more like we have an air traffic control. So my, my first job was an ATC. [00:23:00] And if there’s a crash with an aircraft, it gets independently investigated, um, a report is published and everybody learns from that.

[00:23:07] Philip McAleese: Um, of course, that doesn’t happen with cars. And, you know, if a car has a collision. Uh, I should say if a car, if there’s a collision, not necessarily the car’s fault, unless it’s self driving, of course. Um, but where does that information go, you know, at best back to the manufacturer to improve their own system.

[00:23:23] Philip McAleese: So, um, you know, how do we get some of that knowledge and spread it around the car industry so that everybody can learn from it as

[00:23:29] Carlton: well? We’ll talk about data here. And if you’ve got a company that. Is now more data than it is just pure, just, uh, physical product lights. Um, even though your chips are being used, presumably that means it’s been easier for you to make this decision to move you and your family, uh, and set up a sales office in Australia.

[00:23:53] Carlton: Because you’re not really doing physical distribution of products if you’re doing data. We,

[00:23:59] Philip McAleese: [00:24:00] we do still have a reliance on the technology. So, um, a lot of what we do and our secret sauce is around the processing we do on the devices, um, which is unique to us and give us so much data, much deeper, richer insights than would otherwise be available.

[00:24:14] Philip McAleese: Um, The, the fortunate thing, I guess, with our technology is it is relatively small. Um, you know, we can take a box of 100 or 200 lights and send them to wherever we need to, anywhere in the world. Um, we’re very fortunate as well that because it tends to be viewed as safety technology, it tends to be free from, um, duty and import taxes, which, um, slow things down and complicate the processes.

[00:24:36] Philip McAleese: So actually we’ve, well, we do have a reliance on some logistics. Um, it’s perhaps not as challenging as some other companies. It allows us to, to work around it relatively

[00:24:45] Carlton: easily. So after, I’m going to cut to a commercial break now with my colleague, David, but after the break, I’d very much like to, uh, talk about logistically, how you’re going to do it.

[00:24:54] Carlton: And then I’d like to bring Irene again and, and, and, and talk about, um, her role [00:25:00] in the industry and, and how maybe she’s going to replicate that in Australia. But first of all, let’s go across to David in America.

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[00:26:09] Carlton: So, thanks David, uh, in America there, but we’re not talking about America. We’re talking about Australia with Irene and, uh, Philip McAleese.

[00:26:19] Carlton: So, tell me exactly how you’ve embedded yourself, very successfully, In the industry across here in, in, in Europe, um, specifically cycling industries, Europe. So tell me about the role. on, on, on the board. Maybe start by telling us what Cycling Industries Europe is.

[00:26:37] Irene McAleese: So, Cycling Industries Europe is, is the industry group which is being set up to, um, advocate for industry, but also really recognising that, um, you know, there’s a lot of work actually done to sort of advocate for investment in cycling infrastructure because most of the cycling [00:27:00] brands recognize that more investment in that helps to get more people on bikes, which ultimately helps all of the brands.

[00:27:08] Irene McAleese: So it’s not just bike brands actually over the years. It’s, it’s, it’s sort of broadened out. So the whole remit of the cycling industry is company like ours, which are offering. You know, um, accessories and data and services. There’s also other companies looking at maintenance, a whole range of different kind of support industries as well.

[00:27:28] Irene McAleese: Let’s do it around the main bike sales. Um, it’s actually an offshoot of the European. Cycling Federation, ECF. So years ago, it was part of that and then it sort of split out from that, but actually provides a lot of funding and support back to the ECF. Um, I did, uh, we were actually proud to be a member of the ECF or the, um, the CIE back when it was still part of the ECF actually.[00:28:00]

[00:28:00] Irene McAleese: And, um, one of the reasons I joined at the time was because I came across Kevin Mayne. Actually, it was through one of the articles that you had written, Carlton, where I’d seen that. Um, and when I met Kevin, I, I met Kevin at the first, It’s the first VeloCity I attended in Taipei and I was blown away because he, he was such an inspiring guy and he really understood when I said to him, you know, this is back in 2016, I think it was that we were looking at cycling data.

[00:28:32] Irene McAleese: We wanted to, um, look at shaping cities with data. I mean, I think in a lot of. Areas of the cycling world and we might have seemed a little bit alien, um, and a little maybe ahead of our time in some ways, but Kevin, he really saw, he actually had that vision as well. He really saw that the data was going to become more and more important and digitalization of the cycling industry would be more and more important.

[00:28:59] Irene McAleese: Um, the [00:29:00] main thing that he saw, and I think he’s completely right, was that. You know, cities are using data anyway. They use data from cars. They use data from other modes. And cycling had really been the kind of Cinderella in the ball. There was little data coming from cycling. And therefore, if cities don’t have much data, how do they design their cities to accommodate it?

[00:29:21] Irene McAleese: So he really saw that.

[00:29:22] Carlton: You treasure what you measure, basically.

[00:29:24] Irene McAleese: Yes, yes, exactly. So, um, uh, Yeah, I, I really found it great to, to work with CIE at that point because they, they helped us, um, you know, um, shape some of our vision as well as we went along with very, um, collaborative kind of company. I’ve learned a lot from talking with them and, um, they also set up within their organization, uh, a cycling, um, Connected Cycling and ITS Network Group, so other like minded companies can come together and we can work on things for the industry such [00:30:00] as standards and and things like that which which help to you know, it’s a little bit of grunge work really behind the scenes to to try to Facilitate things and make sure that we can put in place things that are actually going to help grow the market for everyone Then I was invited to Participate in the board.

[00:30:21] Irene McAleese: They put out a call actually because the CIE’s board had been all male. Um, and they put out a call saying that they wanted to invite more women onto the board. And, um, I decided to throw my hat in the ring for that and I was very pleased to be. Selected I did a two year stint on the board. I think it was just over two years once Brexit came along I did sort of kind of step back a little bit because a part of the reason of CIE is really about advocating for funding at the EU level Um, so, and they’ve been tremendously successful at that [00:31:00] actually in things like the Green Deal and getting the European Cycling Declaration signed off recently.

[00:31:06] Irene McAleese: Um, of course, unfortunately here in Northern Ireland as part of the UK, that funding pot doesn’t trickle down to us anymore. Um, so I, I couldn’t justify, you know, so much of my time going to CIE and, and actually the flight or the trip to Brussels is actually quite, uh, quite a long journey here from Northern Ireland.

[00:31:27] Irene McAleese: So it would take quite a lot of time, but I, I am still quite involved in the, the cycling expert groups online and participating more in the working. Hands on stuff. So I learned a lot actually by being the only woman on the board. They’re really big companies there track Excel At the time they had Sort of Uber with their bikes, share fleets, and different companies like this on the board.

[00:31:54] Irene McAleese: So we, I guess we’re a little bit different. A, we’re a small company. B, [00:32:00] we were a company working at the edge of innovation on data and technology, and C, being a woman. So I definitely brought in a perspective, a different perspective across all three of those areas. But yeah, fantastic experience. Um, There

[00:32:17] Carlton: is a, there is also a slight link with Kevin in that he’s from New Zealand originally.

[00:32:22] Carlton: Yes. So during that, some of that get up and go, you’re talking about some of that awareness of other issues potentially came from the fact that he wasn’t born and bred. Uh, in Europe, he had maybe a different skill set, a different perspective, because he did come from, from New Zealand.

[00:32:42] Irene McAleese: I thought he was actually English and his wife is from New Zealand.

[00:32:45] Irene McAleese: I could be wrong. Really? Oh. I will, I

[00:32:49] Carlton: will. Carry on talking. I’ll Google that, because I’m, I’m, I’m pretty sure he’s New Zealand, but carry on. Let’s, let’s, let’s talk about different things while I, while I, while I Google that in the meantime. [00:33:00] Okay. I could be wrong. You could be right. I mean, I could be like.

[00:33:03] Carlton: I could be giving him an international perspective there where there is… Yeah, I know, I

[00:33:07] Irene McAleese: know he met, I know he met his wife in, when he went on a trip to Australia, I think, and for work, because he used to work for a, uh, was it a drinks company, some sort of drinks company or something. Um, yeah, you might have to slice this bit out, Kevin Carlton, but yeah, I think, I think he’s English.

[00:33:32] Irene McAleese: I think I’ve spoken to him and he was English, but… Um, but yeah, he does have a lot of get up and go and actually, um, you know, I’ve always thought that, um, he, you know, it’s kind of funny to have Kevin who I thought was from the UK heading up, you know, he was obviously cycling UK’s, um, CEO at one point, um, and then he’s there.

[00:33:55] Irene McAleese: Um, heavily involved in the whole European cycling context, um, who would be [00:34:00] more traditionally known for cycling. So it’s good to have fresh voices around, around the table.

[00:34:05] Carlton: Well, he lives in Brussels now, of course. And, uh, I mean, Brussels, we were talking about Brexit and, and the fact that you had to like, maybe come out a little bit and, and I, I, I’m kind of.

[00:34:16] Carlton: I’ve done the same thing, even though I try to be as much as a good European as possible. But when I get the press releases from the European Cyclist Federation, you know, about the Green New Deal and about, you know, all of these things, it’s like, it’s wonderful. But what does it really? Mean to yeah, well to us

[00:34:35] Irene McAleese: in the UK the day that the European Cycling declaration was announced the same day was announced in the UK.

[00:34:46] Irene McAleese: The plan for driving was announced

[00:34:51] Irene McAleese: So, you know the disparity between those two Situations is so stark and it’s at this point. I actually joined, you know, I’ve joined now the [00:35:00] bicycle Association Here in the uk. Um, and I’ve also joined the board. Um, they’ve as a, as a board advisor for diversity, um, for the bicycle association here. So I’ve really been trying to sort of, um, impact that way, um, more locally here over the last year, which I’ve really enjoyed.

[00:35:20] Irene McAleese: And then actually the bicycle Association are doing some really great work now. Um, looking at. I think they’ve really evolved and are really much more, uh, you know, they’re getting really into advocacy, you know, lobbying the government for funds and investment to fill some of the gaps that have been left, I think, from, um, the, the exit from the EU.

[00:35:43] Irene McAleese: So, um, and you know, So I’m, I’m excited to see where they go with that.

[00:35:50] Carlton: Technically, if, if you are to believe the Brexit crowd, we’re actually going to be having closer ties with Australia and we’re certainly gonna be having the [00:36:00] beef and stuff, um, from the antipodes. So do you envisage actually potentially some benefits to Brexit?

[00:36:07] Carlton: Could we, could we have found some benefits that you might actually find that operating a business in Australia and having it in, you know, the other part of it in being in now?

[00:36:18] Irene McAleese: Yeah, there is a free trade agreement in place, but I think as Philip said, we were already exempt, um, for, um, the, the tariff for importing of the bike lights.

[00:36:30] Irene McAleese: Um, but one, I mean, one thing will be useful is ensuring, um, parity on the, um, data privacy work. So at the moment. You know, historically we’ve been part of GDPR and you want, which is at the European level. And we, we don’t want the UK to diverge too much from that because it’s really seen as the gold standard, um, worldwide around data privacy.

[00:36:58] Irene McAleese: And we’ve worked really hard to [00:37:00] ensure we’re compliant with that. Um, but I think as well, if we, if we have Australia and the UK, Um, broadly aligned with those in that perspective, I think that will be really useful. Um, and we have good dialogue around that. Um, but yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s obviously a, um, a historical link between the two, the two countries and, um, yeah, there is the free trade agreement.

[00:37:29] Irene McAleese: I guess we need to get to Australia and explore a little more about what that would actually mean for us. Um, at this point,

[00:37:39] Carlton: but I’ve just been searching for, for Kevin. I can’t see anything from his background, but I’m pretty sure he’s, uh, he’s from New Zealand. And even though I can’t find that, I’m, I’m pretty sure, but looking at the board of directors for cycling in Europe, there’s now three women on, on the board.

[00:37:53] Carlton: So you, you, you basically. You pioneered that. There are now three women. So April [00:38:00] Marsh, Anna Bookman and Isabel Eberlein. So that’s you. You’ve opened the door. You broke through that glass ceiling.

[00:38:07] Irene McAleese: Yes. Yeah. And it’s really fantastic to see. In fact, I think that they had this year a competitive, very competitive, um, selection because there were even some more women that wanted to.

[00:38:20] Irene McAleese: that were in the final list. Oh, I think they had, you know, just overall the board was very competitive in terms of getting in this year. So it’s really great to see those women were selected on their merit and brought in on that basis. And it’s no

[00:38:34] Carlton: longer the organization, when it started, it was almost just Kevin and himself.

[00:38:38] Carlton: It is now quite a few people beneath it. So it’s a growing organization, Cycling Industries Europe. Yeah, I think they’re

[00:38:44] Irene McAleese: doing really well. Um, um, you know, there are all these, I think that one of the keys has been the working groups. Um, because something that Kevin said is This really gives a lot of, um, credence [00:39:00] to the EU when they talk about how they actively engage all of the different industry players, um, members, um, through You Through these working groups and how you know different suggestions and things that brought forward it has it does carry more weight So I think that it’s been a clever strategy on the part of the CIE to to have you know Such great engagement with the members and then also To have a really good team like Laura who’s in the team She’s fantastic in being able to you know her understanding of how the whole EU kind of lobbying Machinations work is phenomenal and that’s really needed because you look at You know, she was telling me, like, you think about the car industry and other industries.

[00:39:53] Irene McAleese: They have just whole teams of people that are a hundred percent devoted to lobbying, [00:40:00] you know, the EU get through their agenda. Um, and they are really awake to that. Um, and they, you know, they see the opportunity for really talking up things like, you know, the impact on the economy. That’s been the key.

[00:40:16] Irene McAleese: We’re providing jobs. We’re providing, you know, we it’s a green growth industry and really getting that that message across is, I think, being, you know, one of their strengths, um, and getting cycling seen as another form of transport, not just a lesson for, you know, really bringing it up to the table.

[00:40:37] Irene McAleese: That’s what part of that. EU cycling declaration is about, um, but yeah, combination of good understanding of lobbying and better than conversely really working well with the industry members and, and bringing forward to the table ideas that have been shaped by the community. Um, so I think that’s how they’re doing it.

[00:40:59] Irene McAleese: So [00:41:00] I think, yeah, Kevin is a really great leader in that respect for pulling it together, but he does have a good team behind him. How are you going to

[00:41:07] Carlton: be organizing The team that’s going to be operating your business in, in Northern Ireland and, and how you’re going to be doing it remotely perhaps, or, or, or not, maybe it’s all going to be completely self running.

[00:41:22] Carlton: So, so logistically, how are you going to have a, how you run a business from Australia? Yeah, that’s a great

[00:41:28] Philip McAleese: question. I mean, um, I, I worked in Singapore for a period and so I was very used to the, um, the routine of being, um, you know, comparatively quiet and able to get some strategic work done in the morning.

[00:41:40] Philip McAleese: Um, and then London’s, um, start of day happening and coming online and creating a busy afternoon. So it’s kind of an extension of that where, um, I guess COVID was a good trial for our processes to begin with. We all had laptops. Um, all of our work is done in the cloud with very secure [00:42:00] storage. Um, and so we were able to disperse our various homes and continue to work in a relatively straightforward and easy way.

[00:42:06] Philip McAleese: So we’ve only really come back to a hybrid working model where people are in the office, typically one day per week, um, and it varies depending on the individual. Um, and so we’re already operating in a, in an environment where we’re not seeing everybody face to face every day. So I think. Whether or not we’re in a, uh, our home, we’re in a coffee shop in Brisbane, um, or indeed at home, a coffee shop in Newton Arms or in our office at Newton Arms will make comparatively little difference to the overall operation of the business.

[00:42:35] Philip McAleese: Um, obviously the time zones are a bit of a challenge. We will definitely be doing, uh, meetings early in the morning, late at night, um, more than we perhaps would like to, but that, that’s the, I guess, the cost of doing it. Um, we’ve got a very strong team here, so we’re very confident that, um, they’ll continue to operate very effectively.

[00:42:51] Philip McAleese: Um, without having us to, to be in the same time zone as them.

[00:42:56] Irene McAleese: And Carlton, we have really, you know, my previous life now, which [00:43:00] is now quite a while ago, um, that was really, my, my background was actually human resource management, change management, um, change management, um, advisor. Um, And so what some of the, some of the things that I learned from that experience, we’ve tried to bring into CSense.

[00:43:17] Irene McAleese: So we do, we run, we run CSense in a, in a way where we’re very values led. Um, so we do invest in really as much as we can with our people trying to help them. Starting from the top is, you know, our mission and our vision, what we’re trying to achieve and helping people see what they do on a day to day.

[00:43:38] Irene McAleese: basis really aligns with that. So that comes through from how we recruit people to how we do our performance management development. We have like quarterly team events, which we’ll continue to do where we get everyone together face to face and we have like bottom up and get, you know. Bottom up engagement in developing our OKRs, [00:44:00] Objectives and Key Results for the next quarter.

[00:44:02] Irene McAleese: So we’ve got some really nice kind of processes in place that help people feel engaged and part of the process and that they’ve got, you know, good mechanisms for communication and that kind of stuff as well. So. It’s not just, you know, you’ve got your laptop and you’re on your own. You know, we really do put a lot of work into managing all of the glue that brings people together.

[00:44:27] Irene McAleese: It’s going to be a challenge, absolutely. I’m sure we’ll have some teething issues as we land in Australia, working it out. But I genuinely think it’s not insurmountable. We’ve got a couple of team members at the moment. One, one based in Wales, actually, our new BizDev manager, Craig Brew, and we have Becky, um, Marsden in, in Birmingham.

[00:44:50] Irene McAleese: Um, the rest of the team here in Northern Ireland are actually a bit dispersed over Northern Ireland. Some in, in, in Derry, one’s in, in Enniskillen, [00:45:00] a couple of them down in Enniskillen actually. So we’re kind of a bit dispersed anyway, and it’s, it’s working. Sorry, it’s just getting a bit more extreme in the disbursement.

[00:45:12] Carlton: Yeah. Yeah. So you’re not just 20 miles apart, you’re going to be quite a few thousand miles apart. But yeah, that’s right. I mean, you can run a business. Uh, from wherever you are in the world, I guess the way we have now seem to have landed after COVID in, in, in everybody now knows how to use teams or most people knows how to use teams and all the different sharing platforms.

[00:45:38] Carlton: So you’ve kind of, we kind of. When I used to these things, you can now run a business. Nobody will think it completely odd. Remember 10 years ago, that would have been completely alien. Now it’s like, of course you can run a business from Australia. You’re just on Skype all the time. Or there’s Skype equivalents now.

[00:45:55] Carlton: I

[00:45:56] Irene McAleese: do worry though, because you know I’ve been, well, the last, the last fortnight [00:46:00] I’ve kind of done this really Condensed. Almost it feels like my swan song. I’ve been to all these conferences trying to see people face to face taking selfies with them and stuff because there is something really wonderful about that face to face experience.

[00:46:17] Irene McAleese: Um, and seeing, you know, I, you know, I think that that is really important and I worry a bit about that. Obviously not going to be able to do that as much. Having said that, there’s some key events. I would likely see, I would try to make things like the VeloCity, for example, where lots of like minded people come together.

[00:46:39] Irene McAleese: I think next year’s in Bruges. Ghent. Yeah, Ghent. So, yes, Ghent. So, um, it’s sort of, that, that would be definitely penciled in and, um, we, we have Phil’s, um, family’s still here in Northern Ireland, so we expect to be back for that, um, as well Christmas time. So we, we, you know, we will try to, [00:47:00] um, make the most of any trip that we have back and, and connect with people face to face where we can, um, because it’s really important.

[00:47:08] Irene McAleese: Actually, I haven’t seen you face to face for a while, Carlton, so maybe the next VeloCity.

[00:47:14] Carlton: Yes, yes, because VeloCity does travel the world. So, you know, it has been in, in, in Australia before. And as you mentioned before, you know, it’s been in Taipei. There was a, there was a, there was a version across there.

[00:47:27] Carlton: So you just got to wait for it to come to Australia again.

[00:47:30] Irene McAleese: Yeah, I heard that they were, I heard they were trying to, or they were thinking about getting one in Australia soon, but I don’t know if that’s going to come off.

[00:47:39] Carlton: Well, it’s been fascinating to talk to you. Thank you very much for, for, for taking the time, Philip and Irene.

[00:47:44] Carlton: I wish you all the best. How long have you got left in the UK? And are you finished? Are you like, are you wrapped up with things?

[00:47:52] Irene McAleese: Oh my god, no. We are literally working right up until the day we go, Carlton. Fourth of [00:48:00] December is the day we get on the plane. I’m actually going to London this afternoon, I’ve got a really exciting workshop we’re doing in London tomorrow, where we’re getting all of our, not all, but many of our key clients together, plus some very interesting thought leaders, Professor John Parkin being one of them, uh, we’re going to be brainstorming together how we can use AI and machine learning on CSense data to Um, Um, develop out in the next phase of our dashboard, which is a super exciting project.

[00:48:36] Irene McAleese: Um, so that’s happening, that’s happening tomorrow in London. Um, and then, um, there’s, there’s lots of stuff really going on right up until we go. Um. So yeah, never, never a dull moment.

[00:48:50] Carlton: No. Uh, well, I wish you all the best, both of you, and I can pretty much guarantee I will be still talking to you. And we don’t have to meet in the [00:49:00] flesh for us to, for us to talk because we, you know, I think it was at the, the, the London move conference when we talked to you last, but that was only.

[00:49:09] Carlton: That was only February, wasn’t it? So that wasn’t that long ago. Oh, that was just Philip, actually. I think that was just Philip, wasn’t it, Irene? You weren’t there at that one. I saw Philip. Right, so, so, so best of British. Best of luck across in Australia. And I will be talking to you when you’re in Australia.

[00:49:27] Carlton: We’ll just be on a different time zone, that’s all. Thanks to Mr. and Mrs. McAleese there and thanks to you for listening to episode 343 of the spokesman podcast brought to you in association as always with Turn Bicycles Shownotes and more can be found at the hyphen spokesman dot com the next episode Should be the fourth dedicated to cycle navigation out As I talk to Cammo, that show will be out next month, [00:50:00] but meanwhile, get out there

[00:50:04] Irene McAleese: and ride.

[00:50:45] Irene McAleese: Yeah, and I wonder, Carlton, if my accent is going to change. Philip says it changes as soon as I hit the, hit the tarmac and then I go full Aussie. So you will be able to tell me if I get better at using [00:51:00] data, data. Well, you’ve been

[00:51:01] Carlton: here, you’ve been here 20 years, but you haven’t lost, I mean, I’m sure people in Australia think you’ve, you’re, you’re completely Northern Irish with your accent, but we, we, I, I can certainly tell that you’re Australian, uh, with your accents.

[00:51:13] Carlton: You haven’t lost that, but yeah, I’m sure you’ll be even broader, um, once you’ve lived there for a bit. Yeah,

[00:51:19] Irene McAleese: you have scarred me though because I was presenting last week in, um, I was presenting last week in the Manchester conference and I actually heard myself say data and data in the same sentence as I was presenting, and I actually laughed and said, Oh my god, I’ve just done what Carlton Reed told me to do.

[00:51:44] Irene McAleese: Oh, yeah, so, um, So funny.

[00:51:47] Carlton: Thank you. What would be interesting is how, what Philip says. Will he change? Oh my goodness. Will you have an Australian accent, Philip?

[00:51:56] Philip McAleese: It’s a good question. I mean, I did spend ten years working in London. [00:52:00] Um, I did learn to speak a bit more clearly and a bit more slowly than the average Northern Irish person, perhaps.

[00:52:04] Philip McAleese: But, um, yeah, it’ll be interesting to

[00:52:07] Carlton: see. And your kids, what do they speak? What language do they speak? So, our…

[00:52:13] Philip McAleese: I hope they’re NI. Yeah. Yeah. They’re very good at doing accents, though, so it’ll be interesting to see, um, how quickly they morph and how that changes.

[00:52:23] Carlton: Twelve and fourteen. I should imagine pretty quick.

[00:52:27] Carlton: Yep. Pretty quick. Oh, my kids, my kids are bilingual. So, certainly, uh, one of my daughters is, uh, very broad jawed y. When she’s with her friends, but if she’s in a professional, uh, setting, can quickly switch to, to, uh, uh, the received pronunciation, shall we

[00:52:48] Irene McAleese: say. Did I see online, she, she, um, got into medicine or she graduated in medicine?

[00:52:55] Irene McAleese: That’s

[00:52:55] Carlton: my other daughter. Oh, okay. Twin daughters. You’ve got twins? And, uh, yes. [00:53:00] And, and they, uh, chalk and cheese. The doctor daughter has always spoke with an English accent only whereas my footballer daughter Uh, my fitness freak daughter, because she had footballing friends, she would then, and just when she goes to the Newcastle matches, she will speak incredibly broad Geordie with them, and then English with other people.

[00:53:30] Carlton: So yeah, your kids are going to get the best of both worlds, you’re going to be speaking probably Uh, one, one accent with one set of people at home and then very quickly a completely Aussie twang. That, that probably happens. But you know,

[00:53:46] Irene McAleese: I told you, Carlton, that my grandparents are Geordies, which were Geordies.

[00:53:50] Irene McAleese: Oh.

[00:53:51] Carlton: Yes. I think I remember.

[00:53:53] Irene McAleese: Yes. Yes. Yes. So, they they emigrated to Australia in the fifties. Um so, I grew up with the [00:54:00] Geordie accent. Um and they my my grandmother, she still had, she lived in Australia since in 1951, I think they arrived and she passed away. She she still had a twang, a little bit of the Geordie accent there.

[00:54:17] Irene McAleese: So, But it’s always, I don’t know, because it’s the accent of my grandparents, it’s etched in my brain and it’s a comforting and nice quality to it, to me.

November 19, 2023 / / Blog











November 3, 2023 / / Blog

3rd November 2023

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 342: Yorkshire Coast Gravel with Markus Stitz

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUEST: Markus Stitz

TOPICS: Two epic wet days riding in Yorkshire with gravel guru Markus Stitz

LINKS: Route YC. Bike & Boot hotel. LNER. Josh Reid’s YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAx7H__gPPQ&t=4s

MACHINE TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Welcome to episode 342 of the Spokesmen Cycling Podcast. This show was engineered on Friday 3rd of November, 2023.

The Spokesmen Cycling Roundtable Podcast is brought to you by Tern Bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e bikes for every type of rider, whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school, or even carrying another adult.

Visit www. ternbicycles. com [00:01:00] That’s T E R N bicycles. com to learn more. You may know Markus Stitz as Scotland’s very own German gravel guru, but I caught up with him in Yorkshire for two days of epic and rather wet riding. He’s been researching gravel and road rides for Route YC, a new brand for getting out and about on the Yorkshire coast.

I’m Carlton Reid, and I recorded audio with Markus as we rode on the cinder path between Scarborough and Whitby. This former railway line is one of the suggested rides that’ll go live on RouteYC. co. uk early next year. Also along for the ride was my endurance riding son. Josh, he’s not on the audio, that’s going to follow in a second, but he was filming beside us.

[00:02:00] So watch out for this video on his YouTube channel soon. In fact, there were three videographers on the trip, so we stopped lots. My video, short and sweet, is already on the hyphen spokesman dot com. Markus, I cannot see any whisky distilleries. I cannot see any young men in kilts. I cannot, we’re not, some puddles, but there are no lochks.

Um, what kind of part of Scotland have you brought me to here, Markus?

Um, Yorkshire.

This is a bit of a detour, literally, for you, isn’t it? Like, I mean, how come you’re in Yorkshire, Markus?

Yeah, it’s a, it’s a new, new territory for me. Um, I, I was approached by Tom Campbell, who [00:03:00] designed the North Coast 500 initially, and he was working on a project down here, and he was basically creating a number of routes down here for gravel bikes, road bikes, and touring bikes, and…

Due to the fact that I’ve done quite a bit of work of the same kind in Scotland and when I wrote Great British Travel Writer, I actually travelled a fair bit out of Scotland as well. Yeah, true. Um, yeah, it was, it was interesting to be commissioned. I think it’s, it’s been, it’s been interesting from a point of view that this has pretty much been a blank canvas for me, whereas in Scotland, most of the projects.

I had some sort of connection to the areas by either having lived there or travelled and, um, and this was, was slightly different about, but really enjoyable and it’s a beautiful part of the world. It’s [00:04:00] nice and what I loved about it is, it is very central. Yeah. It’s so much more accessible for. I better just describe what we’re going through because we are now going through quagmires, quite deep mud and it’s black mud.

Uh, and you could say it’s like cinders, because this is a cinder track. I’m just going to zip my top up here. Thank you. Thank you. So we’re going through black mud. Uh, we’re going underneath railway bridges. So clearly an old railway. Yes. Where have we come from and where are we going along this, the cinder track, Marcus?

So we’ve come from Scarborough. We joined the cinder track a little bit further on, so it starts in the town. But we went a little bit along the coast first and then joined it. And we’re heading to Whidbey on this. So, I [00:05:00] think it’s about 24 miles in total, this stretch. And, I mean, you were telling us before that it was going to be quite washed out.

Yeah. Is this as worse as it’s going to get worse than this? Um, this is possibly as, as soggy as it will get. It is. I’ve ridden this in, uh, in summer, and in summer it’s, it’s really enjoyable. Yeah, summer, it’s obviously, it’s dry. Now, they were talking about, uh, putting asphalt on the cinder track all the way, because then that would make a, you know, a Whitby to Scarborough.

But clearly they haven’t done that. I think there was a lot of protest to stop them doing that. So we did some stretches on asphalt, on tarmac, through town, but now we’re on the dirt. I mean, it’s quite okay here, but there are stretches where if you were on an everyday cycle, you wouldn’t want to go through that, and then even back further back there, [00:06:00] it was a lake.

That was, uh, something else. So this is, this is, I mean, the cinder track is like, it’s at the backbone of all your routes. Is it something that you think you’d use quite a lot to get from the variety of routes you’ve chosen? Yeah, it’s part of three routes. Um, I wouldn’t say it’s a back… Well, it’s kind of…

It’s possibly the longest continuous cycle track section along the coast. Um, but… The routes itself… It’s the road bikes that only take tarmac. If you go ahead there, Markus, I’ll catch you up. We can both carry on talking, don’t worry. Yeah, and… Thank you. Hello. Hey, uh, hi guys. Yeah, so there’s routes. Gravel bikes.

Road bikes and touring bikes. Alright, so we’re not just gravel bikes. I thought it was like, it’s only gravel. So this is, this is the whole commute then, that’s good. Yeah, so it’s, yeah. And there’s [00:07:00] also, so… The heart of the project is, uh… Went about 420 kilometres. I’ve forgotten how much that is in miles. I think 260 miles.

Um, so that’s a longer adventure route. But then there’s also a route which is shorter and suitable for riding on a weekend. Yeah. Uh, then a cycle touring route because further down south is Hull. What’s the route called? What’s the, what’s the, what are these routes? Route Yorkshire Coast. Yorkshire Coast, okay.

Um, but it does venture all of those roads, uh, routes. I think I have a nice mix of coastal riding, but also you go a little bit further inland because you’ve got the Yorkshire moors. Yep. And the vaults as well. And then, I particularly like the southern section actually, um, around Holderness. Because it’s, it’s quite flat, um, but quite interesting riding.

Like it’s not, it’s not flat riding where you get easily bored. [00:08:00] It’s um, yeah, really nice. Small villages and, um, sand dunes and, yeah, it’s just a really, I think that’s what I, what I do like about this region. It’s, there’s a huge variety of landscapes in a very, very small area if you travel through it. And how long have you been working on it, Mark?

I mean, you’ve done this, like, a lot of it in the winter. So it’s going to be a huge surprise to you in the summer, or have you been working on it so long that you’ve done the whole, you’ve done every season? So, I had initial discussions in April, and then I got commissioned in early June. Yeah. Early June.

And then ever since then, pretty much on and off, with a few other projects in between as well. Um, but, yeah, pretty much since the beginning of June. I’ve been doing this. And then we, we, we joined you last night. So I’m with, uh, we’re with Josh. So I’ve got [00:09:00] two intrepid world explorers here uh, helping me.

And actually very much helped me because I had a brake block, or a brake pad problem. And uh, the two world expeditionists just sorted me out. I didn’t have to do a thing, it was great. Uh, so I’m with Josh, my son, and with Marcus here, obviously. Riding along the cinder track, between Scarborough and Whitby.

And then we’re going to be going inland a bit. But when we met you last night, because we stayed, I mean I stayed there before with a dog. And it’s a fabulous hotel for dogs, for the same reasons it’s a fabulous hotel for cyclists actually. And that’s the Bike and Boot in Scarborough. And that was a brilliant hotel.

So just describe what it, if you’re a cyclist and you’re coming to Scarborough, What are you going to get from the bike and boot? I think, as a cyclist, it’s possibly the most important thing is you can lock your bike away securely, and you can wash it. [00:10:00] There’s a fantastic bike wash there, isn’t there?

Which is particularly good if you’ve just cycled along the coast and got your bike coated in salt water. Yeah. Um, so the bike facilities are pretty top notch. They are really nice. I, I just, I also think it’s really friendly staff and, and, and the rooms are lovely as well. I think it’s got a, it’s got a nice, I like quirky places.

I like places that have character. I mean, I’m equally happy to stay in my tent for the night. Yeah. Doesn’t have to be indoors all the time. But if I stay indoors, it’s just nice to have somewhere where you kind of feel like I’m welcomed here. Um, I’ve got a nice comfy place. I’ve got a coffee machine in the rooms as well, which I think is particularly helpful.

That, that always helps, definitely. I’m a bit of a night owl and early riser, so. Um, and actually, the thing we, we missed, because we came in late, they, they’ve got free cake at 4 o’clock as well. This is why it’s perfect for cyclists. Free cake, 4 o’clock. There you go. So far, I’ve mostly missed [00:11:00] that, because I was mainly out riding my bike at that time.

So you stayed there not just last night, you stayed there previously? Yeah, I stayed there quite a few times now, yeah. Yeah, it’s a cool hotel. Uh, now you’re, you’re not at the hotel, but you are with certain people. So tell me who you were filming with yesterday, that people will, will know from your videos.

Yeah, so Mark, Mark Beaumont, good friend of mine, and Jenny Graham. Um, we’ve… We’ve actually done quite a few projects together. We’ve done a film last year in Argyll in Scotland. And we bunched up again this year to do this. Yeah, it’s quite fun. I think it’s interesting because we are very similar in the way that we’ve, the three of us have ridden around the world.

Mark and Jenny hold world records, I don’t. Um, but I’m okay with that. I’ll cycle at a single speed so that possibly counts [00:12:00] as well. That’s a world record in itself. Come on. Going round on a single speed. Yeah. Um, so yeah, it’s been really nice just to kind of ride around. And the nice thing is, like, I guess we are, all the three of us, function really well independently.

But it’s also quite nice having the three of us together. And… It’s just, it’s the old crew really, isn’t it? It’s like, absolutely, it’s your classic. So you’ve, even though, and that’s the classic Scottish crew. Yeah. So even though people would think, oh well, you know, you’re going to be doing a route in Scotland.

You’ve actually come to Yorkshire. You’ve transplanted to, uh, uh, uh, to Yorkshire. Yeah. So describe those routes again then. What, what have, what have you got? What kind of, what’s the most challenging? And what’s the easiest? And then maybe we’ll get to the middle bit. Yeah, so the most challenging is, uh, I guess I would call it a four to five day [00:13:00] route.

Um, the adventure route. Um, we, we, possibly we give it a more distinctive name, but that’s what the working title is at the moment. Um. Which is a good point. So, would, this is not actually open yet as such? When is it launching? When is the actual… to the Yorkshire. Yeah. Roots will be launching in early 2024, so at the end, back end of January next year.

Um, just hopefully in time for people making plans to plan their holiday next year on a bike. Right, so I interrupted you there Markus, sorry, just to get, you know, exactly when this is opening. So you’re starting on the challenging, so four, five day challenging route. Yeah. Is that linking every single route up, or is that like a big circle?

What is that? It’s kind of, in a way, it is a circular route that’s, which kind of encloses all the other routes which are in there. Um, but it’s a route, a route by itself and that one is, I guess it’s designed for people who either want to get into bikepacking [00:14:00] and don’t mind having a longer route, but something which is a bit less challenging to start off with so you can ease in over the first two days.

And then once you hit the North York moors, things get a bit more remote and a bit steeper. So it starts in Scarborough, heads down the coast, beautiful coastline. Basically what we’re doing now? Is that the first part of it? That will be the last part actually, so we’re going in reverse at the moment.

Right. The last section will be coming down from Bridge Beach, Scarborough, on the cinder track. Um, but yeah, you start off on the coast, go all the way down to Spurn Point, which is a super interesting place. Um, it’s a sand pit sticking out into the Humber and then back through the inland actually. So once you’ve done the coast pit, um, you go a little bit further inland, um, and then into the

moors. So through the walls first and then into the moors and then [00:15:00] north of the River Esk to Whitby and then back down to Scarborough. Yeah. And sand pit. Yeah, there’s quite a bit of climbing in that as well. But, it’s, I guess I design routes this, I think that’s, and this is, this is, this is, I guess the result of, of having done this a number of times now.

I guess I look at surface, I look at gradients, I look at how this works together so, you know, you don’t really want to batter people continuously with one steep hill after another one. Um, a nice mix of it is welcome. Um, but it’s also looking at facilities for cyclists along the way. So, um, is there, is there accommodation?

Are there places for people to get some food? I think it’s super important to kind of look at public transport as well. So actually before I did any of the routes here, [00:16:00] I had a look at how people can get here by train. And then kind of… Because it’s really good to understand what the main routes are and how people can get here and then kind of looking at starting points.

So the reason why Scarborough, for example, is the starting point. It’s just the most accessible place if you take the train. Yes, so back in the bike and boot in the, I don’t know about your room, Marcus, but say in my room there was a poster there 1930s poster for LNER, in fact. Yeah. When, you know, they were doing holiday trips to, to Scarborough.

So it is accessible by train, very accessible. We certainly got here by, by train. So we took the LNER from Newcastle, got to York. I mean, it was challenging weather yesterday. So, you know, a lot of Scotland has been inaccessible to train just recently. And parts of Yorkshire were [00:17:00] inaccessible to train yesterday.

But we did get here, about an hour. An hour late once we got the, the train from York to, to Scarborough. Got to the bike and boot and just about made it before, uh, the chef went home for the night. So we had a couple of burgers while we got in. Now, this is a beautiful route, so we’re, we’re expecting tons of rain the next day.

But right now, we’re, we’re kind of wet underfoot, but… We’re dry, we’re dry. So we’ve got squirrels going between our wheels almost. We’ve got this amazing churned up black mud. Which is where the cinder name comes from. Um, but it is beautiful. Now what we’ve got coming up so we’re gonna, in a minute we’re gonna have we’re gonna have views in about Half an hour probably to, to Robin Hood’s Bay.

What, what, what route, what can you [00:18:00] see from the cinder track? So this, this first section is, yeah, quite enclosed in the woodland. It’s beautiful. And then once we come to Ravenscar, Um, which has a lot of interesting history behind it, because it used to be, well, supposed to be a big town, but it never went, took off.

Um, so from Ravenscar onward, you’ll get some amazing views right over the bay. over to Robin Hoods Bay. And then from Robin Hoods Bay, we would have a climb up again and then views towards Whitby and the Abbey. Ooh! Ooh! Yeah, Mark has had a bit of a slip there. I’m doing my cyclocross exercise here. Yeah. Um, I mean the track is definitely quite cut up, isn’t it?

Yeah, and then yeah, I just think Whitby is such a beautiful setting, the town. And there’s also For anyone who is super brave, possibly we shouldn’t, shouldn’t encourage people to do that. But there’s a, there’s a road called [00:19:00] Church Lane, which is a extremely steep cobbled road. Um, so there’s a… Coming down from the…

Coming down from the Abbey. The Abbey in Wembley, yeah. Past the graveyard that inspired Dracula. Yeah. Bram, Bram Stoker. Bram Stoker. Yeah. Um, yeah. We tried to ride that yesterday. I think we were all brave enough for the first bit and then did, um, kind of good production over braveness, braveness and push the bike for the last bit.

Yeah. I, I have heard that someone actually circled up there on the flat bike, so it must be doable, but I think you need five inch tires for good, for a good traction. But yeah, it’s a, this is just a really nice mix of. route and some villages and some, some really nice coastal scenery, uh, big cliffs [00:20:00] coming up soon.

Yeah. So I’ve cycled here tonnes. I’ve cycled on the cinder track tonnes and it’s a, it’s a, it’s a great route. Certainly it links into lots of the walled routes that I’m guessing you’re using quite a lot. Yeah. But right now. Yeah. Yeah. We’re going to cut to a break and we’re going to go across to my colleague David as I struggle through these big, big gaps.

Take it away, David.

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And we’re back with Marcus and with Josh somewhere behind. I’m on the cindy track still. And Marcus, before the break, you were telling us, uh, about the, the long route, the challenging route. Yeah. So, first of all, tell us what we’re doing today.

Where are we ending up? So, we’re getting to Whitby. We thought we were getting to Whitby for breakfast, but we’re not. We’re going to get breakfast, or have breakfast at a hotel, but we’re going to get to Whitby. Where are we going from Whitby? Um, there’s, I guess, kind of depends on what time of the day we get there, but roughly, we [00:22:00] head west from there.

So, we either go… Above the Asquarelle to the north, or to the Asquarelle, uh, towards Crosmont. And then to Gauffland, and I’ll be staying in Gauffland. Which is a, it’s like a proper Yorkshire Moors village, with sheep grazing the streets. Yes. I remember the first time I came there, I was just like, this is um…

This is very interesting. And it’s got, I think I, I, I get a, Um, I, I like steam railways. Yeah, I was going to say there’s a railway through there, isn’t there? Yeah. So you can actually take a railway. Can you take your bikes on that railway? Yes, I think you can. Um, they have bike spaces. Um, I haven’t, I haven’t managed to get it yet.

Just done several times of filming steam trains along the way.

I’ll [00:23:00] hold your bike.

This way. There you go. And we’re going through a nice station here. Yeah, I think that used to be a old platform. Yeah. Nice brick and a concrete topping. You can tell this was a railway and a beautiful little cottage here. That was the railway station. Yeah, it would be nice to take the train here. I think it must be an absolutely amazing journey.

Yeah. So there’s somebody just living there. That’s not B& B, it’s not a restaurant, not a cafe. That’s just somebody living there in the station. That’s cool. Yeah. Right, so we’re ending up in Gowtham. And then, if we’ve got some daylight, I’ve asked you if we can crack on and maybe go to Wealdale. Is Wealdale on one of your routes?

We’re not going off route there? It is, um… Yeah, the actual Roman road itself isn’t on it, but the road basically next [00:24:00] to it is on it, yeah. Yeah, so Weald, so that, that, well, it’s still part of your route if we go through Wealdale. Have a, a look at the, the arch… Yeah. Just to, to, to explain, I came to Gowthland and to Wealdale, in fact, Wealdale Lodge, when it was still a youth hostel, and this is 25 years ago, when I was a college student, so I did my geography coursework.

in this part of the world, so I know it well. And I know how gorgeous it is. Uh, no motorcycles on this path, says that sign. Josh is coming through, so we’ll leave the gate open. So we’re gonna go and hopefully go and see the Roman road. And then we are staying in Gotland. Yes. And then, so that’s where we’re going.

So how about, uh, How about telling us about maybe the simplest routes, the, the easiest routes you can do. Are these family friendly routes? Yes. Um, there’s, so there’s one, I, [00:25:00] just out of the top of my head, the shortest route is a, is a crabber route around Friley. So it starts in Friley and then kind of meanders through the Lettish farmland um, on the back of Friley, and then you come back to Friley.

That’s about it. I think less than 10 miles in total. Um, Um, so that’s certainly. Then there’s another one up in Whitby which is a bit more hilly, but takes you on the cinder track for a short section, and then through the Asprelli and back. I guess the cinder track if it’s, if it’s in summer. section, so I particularly recommend going from Whidbey to Robin Hoods Bay and back.

That would be a nice family friendly route because it’s flat ish. Um, and there’s some nice places to get some food in Robin Hoods Bay on Whidbey. Yeah. Um, [00:26:00] and, and the other, I think the other really interesting, which is not like a route in itself, but, um, If, one thing which feels like an adventure but you don’t really go far is to head out to Spurn Point in the south.

Um, it’s a bit pushing your bike over, over the beach for a wee while, but once you get on that tarmac road which is still there, down to the lighthouse, it’s just such a really nice place with loads of birds. So, if you’re into having a bit of wildlife on your cycling trip. That’s the place to go. Thanks to Marcus Stitz there, and thanks to you for listening to episode 342 of the Spokesman podcast, brought to you in association with Turn Bicycles.

Show notes and more can be found at the spokesman. com. The next episode will be the fourth dedicated to cycle navigation apps, as I [00:27:00] talk to Komoot. That show will be out later in the month. But meanwhile, get out there and ride.[00:28:00]