Interesting report in Technology Review. The city of Lyon has had a public-bike scheme (called Velo’v) since 2005, and the system logs electronically when each bike is checked out and returned. Currently there are 4,000 bikes and 350 docking stations. Now some researchers at the Ecole Normale Superiere have analysed the data.

They looked at 11.6 million bicycle trips in Lyon between May 2005 and December 2007. The result is the first robust characterisation of urban bikers’ behaviour, they say.

Some of what they found is unsurprising. Over an average trip, cyclists travel 2.49 km in 14.7 minutes so their average speed is about 10 km/h. That compares well with the average car speed in inner cities across Europe.

During the rush hour, however, the average speed rises to almost 15 km/h, a speed which outstrips the average car speed. And that’s not including the time it takes to find a place to park which is much easier for a Velo’v bike than a car.

Other results reveal the habits of the urban cyclist for the first time. For example, there is a clear peak in average speed at 7.45 am and 8.45 am on working days, when presumably there is rush to get to work. The average speed drops to a more leisurely 10 km/h at weekends.

Curiously, the Wednesday morning speeds are systematically higher than on other days, even though there is no change in other factors such as the number of cars. This, say Jensen and co, is probably because women tend to stay at home and look after their children on a Wednesday in France. So the higher proportion of men pushes up the average speed.

The data also shows that bike journeys between two points are shorter in distance than the corresponding journey by car. There are no bike lanes in Lyon so this suggests that cyclists use other techniques to make short cuts, say Jensen and co. Their shocking conclusion is that cyclists often ride on the pavement, along bus lanes and the wrong way up one way streets.

That kind of information will be useful for urban planners. For the first time they have real data to show where to build cycle lanes and how well they will be used…

I wonder what a corresponding analysis of the Boris-bike scheme in London would show.

For some reason, the link to the arXiv.org paper isn’t working at the moment (2 December, 08:56).

Sure, it’s wonderful to be able to pack all those books you need for your research onto a Kindle. But what do you do when you need to cite page references for footnotes? Sarah Lacy is right. You can’t, because the Kindle doesn’t do page numbers.

“Why did it do that?”

Most common comment from cockpit recordings of test pilots on the original Airbus jumbo airliner.

Clearing out some books the other day, this AOL flyer from the early 1990s fell out of one volume. Reminder of a vanished age? Or a harbinger of a new one?

“You are only as old and boring as the people you surround yourself with.”

John Brockman

That’s one of the reasons why it’s nice to work in a university.

One of the Irish newspapers last week (I forget which but the reporter was Pat Leahy) had a revealing little vignette from the Donegal South West by-election — which was won by the Sinn Fein candidate, and in which the Fianna Fail vote collapsed. Leahy reported a conversation he had with a constituent in which he asked her how she intended to vote. She replied that she and all her family would be voting for Fianna Fail, the architects of the current economic catastrophe. “Why?” asked Leahy. “Because Mary Coughlan [Deputy Prime Minister and one of the other TDs [MPs] for the constituency] got my mother into hospital”.

This (and my own story about my father’s death) tells you all you need to know about Irish politics. Parish-pump politicians are not the kind of people you need to run a modern state.

Classic boom-‘n-bust story by the excellent Lisa O’Carroll in the Guardian.

It was the story of Ireland’s boom and bust in a nutshell: a newly built apartment block near the windswept coast of far-flung Donegal, once valued at €9.5m, was selling for €500,000 (£425,000).

But now, it seems, it’s not even worth that. Navenny Place, a 47-apartment complex, was withdrawn from auction this week after just one token bid of €5,000 – and that was after the auctioneer reduced the starting price to €300,000, or €6,383 per flat.

The apartments are situated on the edge of Ballybofey, a pretty town in the heart of Donegal, and are described by the estate agent as “architecturally superior”, akin “to the type of property found in London’s Docklands”.

Hmmm… Only a couple of things wrong with the story. Firstly, Ballybofey is quite a long way from the coast. And only an estate agent would describe Ballybofey as “pretty”. I’ve always thought it was a pretty drab little place whose main claim to fame was that it housed Donegal’s biggest department store.