Upon reaching Mac Donalds, we didnt really take a break except buying some drinks at the 7-11 and a quick smoke break… Yeah, we have some heavy smokers on this cycling group, so if you are non smoker, you’ve been warned here… lol…

We continued the journey towards Fort Road, passing Mountbatten and cut through Stadium Drive so we can ride on Nicoll Highway and cycle to our first pit break point at Keppel Bay. Nice night scenery there.

How beautiful? Well, words alone cannot describe this piece of night scenery at Keppel. A picture is always worth a thousand words right? Here’s an image I grabbed from the Flickr.

This is a nice picture doing justice with nice colors coming from the auto-changing bridge lights, I’ve got better links to share with everyone. From these links, you can see a 360 degrees view of Keppel Bay as though you are there!

Wait no further people, click on the images now… IE users may get the yellow notification under the address bar informing you to install the “DevalVR 3D Browser plugin” Ignore that and wait for the page to load fully. It may take a while to load depending on your broadband speed…

360 Degrees View of Marina Keppel Bay 1

360 Degrees View of Marina Keppel Bay 2

360 Degrees View of Marina Keppel Bay 3

360 Degrees View of Marina Keppel Bay 4

Source of the 360 Degrees View of Marina Keppel Bay: http://moonshine.homedns.org:2655/pano/
View more 360 Degrees View images of other locations from there if you like them. :D

4 of us spent estimated good 30 mins of rest at Keppel Bay before continuing the route to West Coast Highway and riding towards West Coast Park Mac Donalds as our next pit break destination. This time we rode all the way to the designated point with no intervals.

After refreshing/relieving ourselves at West Coast Mac, the continuing journey will be tougher. (Estimated 28 to 30km) Next destination was Kranji Reservoir.

Cycling along West Coast highway can be dangerous sometimes because there are often big trucks or trailers driving towards Jurong Island & Tuas area.

Areas we passed by are: Jalan Buroh, Jalan Boon Lay and the nice riding long road -- Lim Chu Kang road. Where is Lim Chu Kang road located? (click to view)

Along LCK, the moment we passed the chicken farms… yeah, the chicken shit smell was uber power…. =.=”’ thats the only thing I dislike about LCK, else its a really fantastic place to ride on but you must be cautious at all times, open up your ears to listen for roaring engine revs from speeding cars racing on this road. Beware…

Alright…. Its Video Time! :D

Jayme must be !$%#%%$^* at me now, why must post that malu picture of her online… Oh no, I’m not trying to get you embarrassed ok… I meant well to educate everyone, please drink more h2o during the before riding at night…

We reached the Kranji Reservoir park soon and visited the public toilet there for quick relief then we rode to the next pit break point at the 24/7 mini-mart along the Kranji industrial estate at Kranji Road. We took a long break there as Jayme’s muscles were still pulling. We should be riding the ever challenging Mandai Road for newbies on road especially when they’d never experienced much up-hills in Singapore plain terrains but due to Jayme’s pulling muscles, we switched our route to accommodate to the situation. The route we took was:

1. Exit Kranji
2. Woodlands Road
3. Upper Bukit Timah
4. Dunearn Road (took a break at bus stop, lots of dawn roadies to watch)
5. Newton Circus

We reached city and decided to take breakfast at Crawford hawker center. After breakfast, when we were started riding in less than 10 meters, the weather turned foul and begun to rain heavily. The lucky four took shelter at the housing estate area just around the corner. hehe… another long break soothing the nasty pulled muscles on Jayme. :p

It took quite a while for the rain to simmer and we took a turn at Jalan Sultan, riding through Java Road before the good old Concourse, back to the usual Nicoll highway, Fort Road then back to East Coast Park. Total clocked distance ridden by Vickie and me was approximately 90km by the time we reached Fort Road. We took the underpass after Mac so we can start the journey back home and call it a “night” but the irritating rain came back forcing us to take another break under the HDB void deck at Marine Parade housing estates.

After the rain stopped, Perly rode towards Bedok South for his home in Pasir Ris, Jayme, Vickie and I rode on Still Road, sent Jayme back along Jalan Eunos and head to our start point Hougang. Nothing particular happened along the way except that owning shag face on Vickie… we didnt sleep a wink since 9pm when we started riding…

Congratulations to Vickie for being able to complete a Century Ride -- 100km! Well done man, its not an easy task for a girl who had never done this before, perhaps your old bike did really “trained” you well…

Perly clocked 120km, Jayme should clocked an estimated 90-100km as well.

Watch out for the ride next week, see ya soon! The END.

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Cycling Route Distance
Should be comfortably between 30-40km to and from East Coast to Changi Village and back
Or more since we have season riders for the first ride… maybe can do a simple round island…. biggrin.gif

Attendance

Description of the ride..

It was a nice and cooling weather, started off from Hougang for me, supposed to meet Vicky (xIaoviiCk) but was informed by her earlier that she’ll be meeting her friend Johnathan so I set off alone to meet Jayme (iamtired) at Jln Eunos before heading off to East Coast to meet perly.

Less than 1KM from my place, my rear tube went bonkers, luckily the nearest LBS Kian Seng Heng is not closed yet at 9.15pm so I pushed my bike to them for immediate fast replacement so I did not have to utilize my own spare tube. After changing my tube, I tried my best to speed to meeting location at Jln Eunos averaging at 35-45km/hr… Less than 15 Mins I reached and continued the journey to East Coast after a short introduction of myself to Jayme.

We took a breezy ride straight down from Still Road and perly was waiting for us at Mac Donalds patiently so the three of us had a good time chatting with Jayme while waiting for the rest to arrive.

At about 11.30pm, Vicky and Johnathan called me and as usual, we briefly introduced to each other before heading down to our pre-planned location – Changi Village. Johnathan was having a bad rear tire as well but it didn’t seemed to be punctured situation so my portable hand pump came into usefulness. :D

After refilling air for his rear tire, the five of us started our 17-18km route from East Coast towards Changi Village riding at a comfy speed of 15-20km/hr. Along the way, we were having some nice intermediate chit chatting and took a short pit break at just outside Safra East Coast Resort, top up our water bottles and replenished ourselves with H2O. It wa 7.7Km from Mac to the resort water point and we estimated approximate 10km ride to reach Changi Village.

We continued the route with the same previous casual slow ride, non pressurized and easy riding condition as we were riding on PCN paths most of time. It didn’t take us too long to reach the Changi Village hawker center and guess what? Haha… there were some very beautiful and sexy “Ah Guas” (Transvestites) “doing business” at the public carpark area. We rode past them before taking our long pit break at the coffeeshop which was jam packed with soccer fans.. Match on this happening was: Manchester United vs Tottenham Hotspur. It was just the beginning of half-time when Man U was behind Tottenham at a shocking score of 0-2. Not long after we were having our round of drinks, Man U got their first goal with a penalty scored by C. Ronaldo at 57 Minutes. The 2 coffeeshops’ soccer fans cheered like thunder and we joined in the cheering fun and shouted the first “GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL” with them… ROFL!

Astonishingly, when we happily chatting about how lucky we were to ride on night with such an exciting match going-on, W. Rooney pumped in the 2nd goal in just less than 10 minutes after the first goal… Again, the goal cheering was super fun! Haha… That was NOT ALL… just a minute away from the 2nd goal, the super hero C. Ronaldo scored the 3nd goal of the night!!! Can you imagine how hyper the massive crowd was having when all these flying goals started to roll in one by one by the offensive Man-U players! It was totally AWESOME!!! Well, it appeared that Mr. fast acting W. Rooney didn’t want C. Ronlado to steal away all the limelight, he contributed his 2nd goal at 71 minutes!!!(3rd goal 68 minutes)

It must a terrible night for the Tottenham players as they were leading 0-2 at first half but at 71 minutes the score was at their huge disadvantage of 4-2. We were comtemplating that 4-2 should be final score and that would really be finalized. Lol… Soccer ball is round, we didn’t see D. Berbatov was the final goal scorer as he made the 5th goal for the night that truly finalized the score at 5-2. What a glorious victory by Man-U, good job!!!

Shortly after very exciting soccer match, most of the crowd from the coffeeshop started leaving and I took sometime out to take a look Vicky’s bike which was making constant unpleasant noises when cycling. I came to realized it was her lengthened chain was causing all the noises and advised her to replaced it to shut the noise up… Vick & Johnathan took a trial ride on Jayme’s Wheeler… In fact, I tried the Wheeler too! It came to our surprise that the Wheeler was in extremely good condition except the rear brakes but other than that, it is definitely one of those good bikes that should not take you long to fall in love with it…. Lol! Ok, I’m exaggerating… hehe…

We had rested enough and calling it a “night” since Vicky & Johnathan’s bikes weren’t too appropriate to travel further so we rode down towards Pasir Ris via the “Loyang TPG” temple and headed towards Downtown East where we parted with perly. We gradually traveled towards Elias, IKEA/GIANT, cut across the Chartered route, Old Tampines Rd and all the way till we say goodbye with Jayme (towards Jln Eunos via Defu Lane, Ubi, Jln Eunos) and Johnathan towards Kovan. Jayme and I turned in separate ways at Hougang Ave 7 and was given the honor to send back her… (less than 800 meters from my place)

Yeah, that we called it a night, I’m pretty looking forward for the next ride on May Day 2009 Friday night. :)

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Transport planners in the Netherlands know how to safely fit bicycle use into tight spaces. The country is one the most densely settled in the world, with compact cities and many older areas with narrow streets. They also have much higher car ownership than Singapore. It would be hard to argue that the Netherlands’ cities have more space for bicycle facilities than we do in Singapore.

If you want to know the Dutch “secret” for a great bicycling environment then an excellent start would be the visually stunning, Cycling in the Netherlands (pdf), put out by the Dutch equivalent of the LTA.

One of its key points is that “bicycle policy works“!

… a consistent approach by Dutch policy makers to the bicycle has had a demonstrable effect. Municipalities which have had a focused bicycle policy for some time have a higher bicycle share than other cities. Traffic safety has also benefited from the bicycle policy. (p.19)

There is safety in numbers for bicycle users as this figure from page 13 shows. The more bicycle use there is in a city, the safer it is per km.

Page 64 of Cycling in the Netherlands also kindly lists further English-language resources on Dutch bicycle policy:

CROW, Sign up for the bike: Design manual for a bicycle-friendly infrastructure, 1996. This manual can still be supplied. See www.crow.nl. An English translation of the revised Ontwerpwijze Fietsverkeer (Cycle Traffic Design Method) may appear in 2007.

The SWOV organisation for traffic safety research also has an extensive website in English, containing considerable information about bicycle use and bicycle safety: www.swov.nl

The research unit of the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, AVV, has a
large number of reports on traffic in the Netherlands in the English section of its website, including ‘passenger transport’ and various publications relevant to bicycle policy: www.rws-avv.nl

The Fietsberaad, or bicycle consultancy, recently issued an English-language publication outlining bicycle policy in a number of cycling cities: Continous and integral: The cycling policies of Groningen and other European cycling cities (Fietsberaad-publication no. 7, April 2006). This publication contains a number of accounts on the traffic policy of several cities characterised by a relatively high degree of bicycle use, extending over a prolonged period. Each account gives a specific picture of the ‘course of development’ of bicycle use in a municipality and the relationship between bicycle use and local policy. It covers five cities in the Netherlands known as ‘cycling cities’: Groningen, Amsterdam, Enschede, Zwolle and Veenendaal. This is augmented by a selection of five cities from other neighbouring countries also featuring a reasonable level of bicycle use: Münster and Freiburg in Germany, Copenhagen and Odense in Denmark and Ghent in Belgium. The publication can be downloaded from www.fietsberaad.nl, via ‘rapporten’.

To these sources I would add the Interface for Cycling Expertise (I-ce), which is devoted to sharing Dutch bicycle planning expertise worldwide.

[Update: I wrote a follow-up to this post over at the Reinventing Urban Transport blog.]

Thanks to Cor-Henk for the link to the Cycling in the Netherlands document.

Credits: http://cyclinginsingapore.blogspot.com

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