If you squint just right, a plastic pink flamingo named Flance bears an eerie resemblance to a certain local cyclist who won his record sixth Tour de France on Sunday.
He said: There's a certain cadre of cyclists that attack anything that isn't new, hard infrastructure being built.
It can also be questioned if the trend will continue to exist above a certain amount of cyclists, when drivers and bicyclists learn to coexist, or whether the effect is due to a focus on traffic management rather than the sheer number of cyclists.
He argues that cycling campaigners have successfully shifted London's street management policies away from measures that simultaneously assist all "sustainable modes" and foster truly living streets towards favouring a certain sort of London cyclist at the expense of everyone else.
"It has become the uniform of a certain sector of 'new' cyclists," he contends, "and by that I refer to the stereotypical cliché of 'all the gear, no idea'.
Details of each ride are uploaded onto iPhones: who was fastest climbing a certain hill, how many miles had one cyclist clocked relative to another, whose heart raced fastest on this Tuesday.
In other words, London cyclists were seen as being a certain sort of person: "Somebody who's quite environmentally friendly, probably quite independent, maybe a bit of a leftie, vegetarian," observed a woman called Michelle.
As an addicted cyclist, I must come clean about a certain ambivalence concerning David V. Herlihy's first book.
The International Cycling Union, which tests for elevated levels of red blood cells, will not let cyclists start if their concentration is over a certain level.
But cycling a certain distance generally takes longer than it would take in a car, so over the same trip there is greater exposure to an accident for a cyclist.
