Cardiff By Bike isn’t all about us, it’s for everyone. If you’d like to get involved in this site; in improving the provision for cycling in Cardiff or just want to be more involved in Cardiff’s cycling community, read on.
Cardiff Cycle City
After much fanfare back in January, you might be wondering what is next for Cardiff Cycle City. Truth be told, it’s still going strong and we’ve been meeting every last Thursday of each month at the Nos Da Hostel & Bar, 53-59 Despenser St, Cardiff (6:30pm) for many moons now. We’ve settled into a pretty solid group with ambitions and plans for the future. We’ll soon get cracking on adding content to the website, but the social media channels (Twitter, Facebook) are as active as ever.
However, if you would like to join us and you feel as though you have something to contribute, please come along and say hello.
Contribute an article
If you have something you would like to say, in English or in Welsh, feel free to submit a draft, using our submission form and we’ll look into it. If you would like to become a regular contributor, please get in touch via Twitter or Facebook.
Events
We try to keep the events calendar as up to date as possible, but it is likely that we might miss things from time to time. If you have a schedule of events for your cycling club or organisation, please feel free to get in touch on Twitter or the Facebook page and we’ll endeavour to get it up on the calendar.
Strava Club
We also have a club on Strava. Join us and contribute to our stats; find other cyclists in the area and get involved in discussions.
Hashtags
If you are on Instagram, we’ve started a #cardiffbybike hashtag that you are welcome to use while you are out on a ride. If we start getting some interesting contributions, we’ll try to incorporate them on here. You can also use the same hashtag on Twitter if you wish.
Other ways…
Lobby your councillor…
Perhaps you don’t want to get in touch, but you still want to help make things better for yourself and your two-wheeled brethren. Well, nothing happens in Cardiff without a critical mass of councillors onboard. So, this is where you can help.
Take a look at our campaigning articles to get a feel of where we are now and what needs to be done. You could then find out the name of your local councillor and write to them, even tweet them and let them know that you want them to support, for example, more investment in cycling; more 20mph zones; a safe route for your child to cycle to school; more racks outside your local shops; better maintenance of routes like the Taff Trail; a safe route from east to west; a network of cycle superhighways like they’re getting in London or something else we haven’t thought of.
At the end of the day, politicians and councillors need to be kept honest and they need to be constantly reminded that there’s always an election around the corner. You can help to do this by keeping on their backs about issues that matter to you.
Report those potholes!
Potholes are a menace, especially when out on your bike. They’re hard to see in the dark and some of them we’ve seen this winter have been big enough to send you flying over your handlebars. We need to report them.
FixMyStreet is a good way to do this. You simply find the location on their map and put in a description. This will then generate an email with the location details & description and fire it off to the council.
For when you are out and about, there are iOS and Android apps that’ll use your GPS data to record the location.
Add bike parking locations to OpenStreetMap!
We have an article on this that explains things a little more thoroughly, but we see OpenStreetMap as an excellent way to create an online repository of bike parking locations, in the hope that they will find their way into other services that use OSM data such as Garmin Connect.
It’s a bit nerdy and a little fiddly, but if you are up to the challenge we’d love the help.
Referral Links
Some of the tools and services we use provide referral links that offer benefits to you and us. This could be a free month’s subscription, a small discount or perhaps just a small donation to our coffers.
Cardiff By Bike 