CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 14years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
I'd want to see cycling normalised as a transport option for everybody. Not sure how PoPing with a radium-powered steampunk cargo bike would help that cause!
OK, I recognise that pseudo-Edwardian garb not that normal either but I suppose the point we were trying to make was that if we had segregated infrastructure, we could dress any way we wanted - long skirts, goggles and all!
@argo We trying to figure out if you had the smallest baby in the world hidden in your trailer!
I filled in the survey yesterday, but I forgot to mention the flags so I thought I'd do so here, prompted by Rosie's comment. I will be leaving the flag attached to my pannier rack until such time that it falls apart, falls off (but hopefully I will notice in this case since the flag stem doesn't look particularly biodegradable) or gets nicked...
Oh, I didn't mention the flags either - but I came home with a couple, one now in a plantpot in the window, and one stuck into a pot in the garden. Considering re-attaching one to bike now...
Saw the weezers at laid back when we were buying our picnic wine at scotmid (my pal Graeme has straps that allow you to transport a bottle from the crossbar). Chocs away.
Also in the queue there was a baby seat made out of wicker. Looked more like a log holder for putting on the first step of a stairwell than a modes basket. Baby looked happy.
I too completed the survey. Flags were a good thing and putting the children at the front.
Thanks @sallyhinch and @kaputnik. That looks rather cool. There's even tracks going up Arthur's Seat after the PoP. I will add my own track later.
I've completed the survey but forgot to complement the sound system which made it easy to hear the speeches despite some folk in the crowd clearly preferring the sound of their own voice and talking through them all. I was surprised that a couple of the politicians didn't seem to know where to hold the microphone to get maximum amplification though and so required more concentration to make out what they were saying.
Spotted gembo (I assume) chanting for Elgin from the back, although didn't know it was you. I was the wicker carrying rider you mentioned who almost dropped his son while waiting for the lights on the cobbles.
"Saw the weezers at laid back when we were buying our picnic wine at scotmid (my pal Graeme has straps that allow you to transport a bottle from the crossbar). Chocs away."
Aye, saw you and the-man-with-the-vin on Saturday on MMW. I'm still leaving space on my top tube for one of these.
Well done to the organisers of PoP, and to the Polis and Toon Cooncil for bearing with us, and giving support for individuals to join and have a mass protest!
I thoroughly enjoyed 'benting around under the radar!
Will fill in the survey this evening, but for group cogitation:
Being in the unusual situation this year of being on foot but with branded t-shirt, I had a few people come up and ask what PoP was (and were supportive when I'd explained it). I wonder if a few people walking either side of the protest with big "ask me about PoP" signs would make the most of the publicity.
Could also hand out flags to kids in the crowd, etc.
Must say that Roibeard was excellent at this and certainly in my plans next year marshals will all have a pocket of flyers for just such a situation.
I handed out quite a few at the start, and I think we'll be getting more flags next year!
Also natural for people to ask the police what the event is about. I overheard a policeman at the top of MMW explaining what was going on to a couple of women on bikes.
some years we've also given marshals extra copies of the flyers to give to pedestrians. I didn't suggest it this year because we were totally out of flyers - except that a bunch came across from glasgow late friday that we could actually have used.
Just a thought that flags were good but a shorter itinerary and more space for a summarised manifesto would have been good. A lady stopped and asked us what it was all about and we were briefly tongue-tied. A crib sheet would have been handy! In the end she was exactly the kind of person who should have known about it: Green Party supporter who used to cycle when she lived in Cambridge but was too afraid in Edinburgh!
I didn't see any flyers as such - I guess because they were all used...
I realised too late that people who I thought would be keener on the idea were put off by not knowing how inclusive it's meant to be. Friends with small children or with wheelchairs or who otherwise don't cycle, but who would all obviously benefit from the whole thing. I should have been talking more of "active travel" and "livable streets" and so on. :-(
I still had a few, hence being spotted above handing them out.
I did have one chap actually attempt the "road tax" argument, and seemed deflated after the concepts of general taxation and emissions based duty were explained to him...
;-)
Robert
I thought the atmosphere afterwards was lovely with people hanging around and trying out each other's bikes. I wonder if a bit more could be made of this as a way of drawing in people who might not be sure if the event is for them (like dougal's comment above)? A sort of 'meet the cyclists/people who cycle/families/shoppers who bike' etc. There is such a great range of bikes put to different, everyday uses on display, it's a shame not to make something more of it. (Obviously not wanting to encroach on FoC's family biking event...)
I agree with Dougal's point about reducing the itinerary and adding a summary of the manifesto on the flags, but I am also torn by the idea of just having the logo, or something similarly eye-catching, on both sides of the flag for maximum visual impact. A compromise may be to have a single manifesto bullet point on the reverse of each flag in large text with a batch of flags for each point, but no doubt that would then have a major impact on the affordability of having the flags produced at all.
Excellent day. Well done all round. Apologies for doing no more this year than turn up.
Seeing as there are still people out there who don't know about it would it be worth doing some end-of-summer/start-of-autumn (when the place will hopefully be swarming with cyclists and people more inclined to give it a go without getting their faces hailblasted) non-imminent-event publicity, with postering/flyering to try and get people aware of the website/on the mailing list/reading the FB group/@following so that there's then an open channel to inform them of the event itself, when the date is known?
"when the date is known"
Then all things will be possible.
getting people on the mailing list (or following on FB/twitter) is a huge challenge for us. any suggestions appreciated.
Just seconding what Darkerside said. I was walking behind the large banner (which was ace btw) pushing a buggy with a flag waving small thing inside. I stopped and chatted with loads of people who were wondering what was going on. Everyone was really supportive but it took me a few attempts to come up with a good '30 second elevator pitch'. If I'd thought about it beforehand some flyers would have been great to hand out.
@SRD Are there any generous donors/sponsors we could approach for a Twitter/Fb competition e.g. "Retweet & follow/Like & share PoP to win [insert desirable thing here]"?
There's a mailing list? Have to admit I had completely missed that. I would be seriously tempted to move it front and center of the website, certainly once current news dies down. I don't know if you have stats but it would be interesting to look at how many people go beyond the front page.
In Terms of Twitter, one of the best ways to get followers is to follow people, if nothing else it's a prod for people to follow back. Encouraging people to interact and re-tweet is also useful.
Facebook wise, then PoP events seemed to work really well (in that I was invited to several through different sources). I notice that there is a Group but not a Page, I wonder if PoP needs a page, as far as I know stuff that happens in a group will not be seen outside of a group.
So I seem to be friends with one person on the Facebook Group (hello Denise), but if they post/like/comment on anything in the group then that won't get pushed onto their timeline, and there is no chance of seeing it. Whereas with a page there is at least a chance this will be seen by there friends who will hopefully also like, share etc.
As far as I know Facebook groups are much more about an existing group communicating internally which people are invited for or would search for. Facebook pages are designed to be more viral, and frictionless (I think)
POP was superb, thanks to all the organisers.
Just one comment, when everyone gets to parliament they spread out over the grass, and the photos which some of the papers used don't look all that impressive. By contrast, when we're all bunched up on the royal mile you can really see how many people there are.
Would it be possible next year to get someone in a building quite high up with a view down on to the royal mile looking down on to the point where the police bunch us all up? This has the potential to be a really impressive shot where you can actually see four thousand bikes.
I'll be doing a review of the website now that things have calmed down and I have a chance to do some analytics reviewing but you're right Chris - most people don't move beyond the landing page.
With regards to FB there is an issue that without mass engagement on every post you've got very limited reach these days (about 9% of people following will have the chance to see a post if they happen to look while it was on their timeline) We have no money to paid promote although this is something I'll be looking into next year.
I think we do need to revisit how we're using Social media and certainly be looking to get more content out there. Watch this space!
@UtrechtCyclist - I agree. I e-mailed LAMedia (edinburgh based) last year as they do some cool filming with quadcopters and could have got loads of good shots, but didn't even get a reply. I still think it's worth considering….
There was a hexacopter drone bimbling around the road down from the hill (looking momentarily like a much bigger thing flying over the castle until it resolved itself) but I couldn't see the operator to ask if they'd been anywhere near holyrood. I'd popped into the museum to refuel/drain the child on the way to pop and had peeked over the edge of the roof to see if there's much visibility of the route, but there wasn't. SRD's office stair might have a good view of the start. The Camera Obscura might be a bit too set back to see the High Street. Storytelling Centre or John Knox House or Museums of Edinburgh or Childhood might have a public-accessible window-view.
We did debate the page/group thing. The page is better for pushing out information, but in the end I'm glad we went for a group because, at least in between POPs, it is a place where people can genuinely debate things, and all posts are equal. So it feels more like something you've joined and less like something where people are just promoting stuff at you. As we are a grass roots organisation, the less top-down we are the better. It helps us stay in touch with our base, to use the horrible phrase. There's more to POP than just being an efficient marketing campaign, important though that aspect is. The more people feel that they are in some way part of POP rather than that POP is something that other people do, the more likely they are to actually come, and drag along other people, and make a real effort to spread the word
In my opinion, the single most effective thing we can do is to paper the whole of the Central Belt with flyers in the three weeks running up to POP, and preferably have an actual conversation with every cyclist in that region as we do so. And that simply takes loads of people who are willing to give up their time...
I like the idea of having a PoP elevator pitch. I was also asked by a few people what was going on and struggled to give a concise version.
Leafleting etc: is there some way of being able to distribute mass volumes of fliers where we could pick them up in advance? My local friendly LBS had some, but I wasnt sure if they were just there to hand out to customers, so I didn't want to take a handful. Printing at home is obviously the preferred option, but not everyone has access to a printer.
More than willing to help with the mass-flyering next year though.
@stickman you certainly could have taken a stack from your LBS -- of course some had more than others. In previous years, we had a Friday PY meetup at which people were encouraged to take away lots of flyers, but the Easter holidays kind of got in the way this year.
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