Now it’s the Tour de Roof

There are some extraordinary sights in Darlinghurst on a fairly regular basis but this bears sharing.

The girl who rents the roof-top studio apartment of our building is an avid cyclist with several bikes hanging on the wall of her room-with-a-stove-and-bathroom that she calls home next to the laundry. While hanging out my washing I found her on the flat roof with a bike on rollers, alongside her similarly mounted boyfriend, pedalling at a leisurely clip while watching a televised bike race. Both were in racing kit, black and white, with the de rigeur smattering of tags and logos that lycra seems prone too.

It was a clear blue sky day – more excellent for drying than riding nowhere, I suggested.

“No, no,” they cheerily replied to my chiding, “It’s a team thing.” They were interactively pedal pushing for a virtual 100kms!

That same strange day the national broadsheet’s glossy magazine ran an article headed “Reinventing the wheel’. My attention was drawn by an illustrated green bicycle wheel reminiscent of a time when this humble column had a heading.

It was a blurb lauding our City of Sydney’s $76 million expenditure on 200 km of comprehensive cycleways, 55km of which will be separated cycleways. The puff piece concluded – “ to prove the maxim of build it and they will come, bike shops are springing up everywhere”.

So we have Clover to thank for Tokyo Bike, which opened last Saturday in Marys Place near St. Margaret’s where construction of the Separated Bi-Directional Cycleway [aka ‘the unmentionable’] continues its grisly devastation of Bourke Street. A range of elegantly engineered and modishly coloured vehicles seemed suitable for hipsters wanting to be seen out and about on two wheels.

Entre nous, I suspect our Lord Mayor cannot take all the credit for cycling being fashionable. Just because she reinvented the wheel in an easy-to-fold polygonal mode does not mean the old round thing was not without its merits in the times B[efore]C[lover].

by Peter Whitehead