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I ride around central London with a 4 year old. A 9 year old should be much more sensible but these are the things that have helped us:

1. Route selection - we only ride routes that are very well tested / de-bugged, ideally on cycle paths and very low traffic roads. We resort to pavements or putting him on tow to link things up safely. Route Plan Roll is great.
   
2. Listening - not listening to instructions (even a small lapse) means we go home without stopping for cake.
   
3. Engagement - he is in charge of telling me when to stop at junctions, when cars are coming, etc. That helps me tell when he is paying attention and keeps him focussed - similar in princple to shisa kanko.
   

It depends on the trailer. They have different attachments.

I wouldn't use a burley hitch with horizontal drop outs.

The street space consultation ends in a few days - https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/general/streetspace/

Ideally this would be a sticky in the main forum. The feedback really matters and this affects us all.

Sorry I didn't see you - gave it until five past but was getting cold. Maybe next week!

Hills was fun but cold enough to make me worry about ice.

Will be out tonight. Planning to be at HHV gates at 7 (or by the stands if the gates are open).

Still forecast to be dry in the evening tomorrow, so, planning to do this if anyone wants to give it a go.

Usual rules - social place between hills & waiting at the top, no one left behind.

Weather is looking good for Tuesday.

Pub won't be open, so, might be beers in in the park afterwards. Bring warm clothes!

Good idea.

I think I can be there next week, 6:45 at HHV.

Hugh Carthy 2nd in the Vuelta,,the good news just keeps coming

Seems to be doing it without much help from his team, either, or is that just how it looks on TV?

Looks like a good set up for this kind of thing.

What is getting my goat is:

• people arguing that traffic has increased on their road despite traffic counts showing a reduction (e.g. on streets outside the LTN, which were formerly a rat run, which are no longer a rat run because a filter somewhere stopping the route as a whole being suggested by Google Maps)

• people who live in nearby areas filtered decades ago, arguing against new filtering projects while passionatly defending their own traffic filters

• people complaining that cutting off a 4000 vehicle a day rat run is unacceptable because 20 vehicles a day are now using their street

• people

Pack list:

Things I forgot! Coffee, washing up sponge
Bought on site: eggs, sausages, milk, beer, firewood, marshmallows

Breakfast: sausages, eggs, wheatabix
Dinner night 1: (chorizo onion and garlic pre-chopped), pasta, (pesto, pepper and salt) - fry chorizo mix, cook pasta, mix in pesto.
Dinner night 2: udon, eggs, sweetcorn -boil water add everything
Desert both nights: hot chocolate

GSI pinnacle 1p and 2p cook kits
Kovea spider stove and Amazon windshield
Gas canister
Wooden spoon, leatherman knife
3 titanium sporks

Lanshan 1p and 2p tents plus carbon poles
Naturehike sleeping bags
3 small tarps and some extra lines and pegs
Decathlon silk bag liners
Exped lite sleeping mats

Petzl head torches + lamp kits
Anker cache batteries

Uno
Pack of cards
Kids activity book
Phone with BBC school radio downloads
Kids headphones
Book

1 change of clothes p/p
Wash kit

My wife wants to go camping again, so, I'd give it 10/10. We were helped out by the weather; no rain and not too cold.

I've got the boy on tow with a follow me. The tow bar weighs 4kg which is a bit of a challenge on the hills (when added to 17kg of camping gear, 8kg of child's bike, and 25kg of child), but, it works nicely with a rack and panniers. It is also easy to detach the tow bike for independent adventures or to get it onto smaller trains.

We had a short ride to Victoria, then a 1h train to Plumpton station.

The BlackBerry wood campsite is 2 miles from the station via quiet roads and gravel tracks. You get a clearing to yourself to pitch your tents and there were plenty of other kids there to share and enjoy the just-the-right-amount-of-danger playground. (Zipwire, massive swing, tree trunk bridges over a stream...)

The campsite shop is open until 7pm and sells firewood and beer (plus other non-perishables) cutting down on what you need to pack.

All in all it was a superb introduction to cycle touring, and a great step towards bigger adventures.

The GWR bike cupboard location is shown on your bike reservation ticket.

(The cupboards are are awful, but, giving you an individual reservation for an individual bike space isn't a bad idea.)

Have just finished rinsing the dust off my lanshan (flames creed) 1 and 2 person tents after a two day shakedown trip to East Sussex.

Both survived the attentions of an inattentive 4 year old, although I had packed a spare carbon tent pole in case of disaster.

No issues pitching them, although the tent floor is so thin you do have to put some effort into clearing away stones.

I'll probably invest in a proper tent footprint but otherwise 10/10 because my wife said she's happy to go on another trip.

Still a bit surprised you can get camping gear, cook kit, and food for 3 people into two 20L panniers and a handlebar dry bag! A big departure from my DofE days.

We are off on Sunday for 2 nights of cycle camping.

Definitely apprehensive about logistics and what happens if something breaks.

I've not noticed any chaos at Vauxhall. In fact it's much more pleasant than usual, with greatly reduced congestion.

Fox hill and most of the other Crystal Palace climbs have been closed to through traffic which is great.

I tried out the new improvements to CS7 last night.

Nearly didn't make it to Tooting due to a pair of horrific close passes near Oval.

The improved sections are a lot better but they only seem to have done the easy bits. Still huge stretches full of parked cars.

Hope they've got more to come!

Think it's bad now, wait until Vauxhall Bridge is shut for four months.

Hope they fix the stupid barriers that are half blocking the cycle lane.

Do you mean the new bus stop bypasses?

At the junction of Fentiman and Meadow roads they've given the smaller road priority, which works quite well.

Could do that at every junction along the A3 in inner London, if you could stand the endless whining about "traffic flow".

I won't give you a full analysis of this, but overall, like most of the 'low traffic neighbourhoods', which as mentioned before, is a very silly name, these are not well-conceived. The officers mostly designing the schemes have very little experience of modal filtering and fail to understand some key principles of how these schemes should be done.

The officers are also being put under pressure to deliver schemes quickly, at low capital cost. So I think we can afford a bit of generosity.

But the Oval LTN exhibits some of the problems you highlight - filters in the middle of the triangle would have been better than ones along the A3, except that filtering along the A3 has improved safety on CS7 by eliminating traffic turning accross the cycle lane. If they want to keep the A3 exits open, and keep the CS7 safety benefit, they'll need to make the re-opened junctions traffic light controlled - and they don't have any money for that.

except for footway level entry tables

I put up with these every day as a pedestrian (Archway end of Holloway Road) and they're the absolute worst for ambiguous priority. Let's build a thing that encourages pedestrians to cross without stopping to look, but which drivers still have absolute legal priority over! Awful things.

The highway code is being changed so pedestrians waiting to cross will have priority over turning vehicles. (Peds already have priority if they've started to cross - the change gives them priority while waiting to cross.)

So the new junction treatment reflects the new rules. Pedestrians should be able to wander across at will.

Would be even better if they painted a zebra crossing at every junction, but you'd have years of uncertainty before the massive painting project was completed - what does it mean if a junction has no zebra crossing, yet?

My experience is that car drivers crossing pavement level junctions (like the one at Magee St to the A3) behave more politely than they do at other junctions.

Well, there are lots of back streets ready to be linked together. But the links can be quite difficult.

For example, in Camberwell, demolishing the wall at the end of Southwell Road to allow cycles to enter the Hospital campus would create a lot of route options.

But, who would you need to work with to do this? Probably 5-6 stakeholders, plus the local NIMBYs. Much easier just to fix Denmark Hill road which is wide enough for proper cycle lanes.