As a kid the bike shop in my town excited me, I would walk past often, peering through the windows, glimpsing shiny bikes and related paraphernalia. Venturing inside, however, was a different matter. I wanted to, to inspect the machines and initiate myself into the ways of the proprietor and patrons but I couldn’t. The bike shop was a forbidding place where grown men discussed the intricacies of serious cycling in a language I didn’t possess. Serious cycling was what I aspired to and having convinced my parents to buy me a Trek rather than a Halfords bike I’d hoped I might be halfway there, but I was still way off. Leaping into the unknown, entering the bike shop with its array of gadgets, alien lingo and Lycra clad leg shavers was too daunting an undertaking for this self-conscious teeny-bopper: both literally and metaphorically I didn’t have the bollocks. (more…)

Like other notable publications, we’ve been working hard at Article towers to present you with a guide to the world’s coolest cities in 2009. This is ‘cool’ in its best sense: wealthy young people and their needlessly complicated trends.

Given this, we can reduce coolness to its hard, bare facts. If cycling, and fixed gear bikes in particular, are the international arbiter of the trendy citizen, we can equate coolness with flatness.

Cycling is cool. Hills are bad for cycling. Therefore, hills inhibit coolness. Here, with negligent methodology, we present the world’s coolest cities with our original flatness to coolness ratio.

Graph A. Relative topographical inclines of various world cities.

Graph B. Gradients plotted with level of highest possible cycling conditions (y-axis). Hatched area below line indicates the relative ease of cycling between cities.

Graph C. Data from Graph B. Big hands indicate ‘yes!’ or ‘no!’

Conclusions.

Amsterdam takes the top spot, with Berlin a close second. St Petersburg looks promising, but is strongly warned against given the state of its roads. At the bottom, Sheffield notably performs better than Barcelona, which needs to sort itself out if it’s to perform better next year.

But of course, this is really a matter of geographical consequence. These cities have no hope unless there’s massive earthquakes or tectonic plate movement. Or, god forbid, a sport like street luge becomes cool.