PB, where does he say anything about infrastructure?
Just below the Fast Forward video link.
The second is, probably, more permanent: a shift in the culture. Cycling in the UK has changed massively in the past few years. Mostly for the better. Cycling as a mode of transport has really taken off in London, if not in all other places. It’s amazing. The infrastructure is improving beyond recognition. It’s incredible to see that cycling has become a normal, unquestioned part of so many people’s lives.
Hardly his main point though. He was talking about the spirit of adventure and silliness – he actually uses the word silly, which is a word I've only ever seen connected with cycling (at least in an approving way) on here, in Silly Bike Adventures – and lamenting their passing.
It was probably partly that word silly that suggested yacfiness, plus the fact that everything he is talking about is here. Some of it originates here, like riding through a tunnel in Mordor just because we can, or meeting in a field behind a pub to eat cake, drink beer and scythe toes, or riding to some Neolithic site with a sacrifice of smutty chocolate; and some of it is talked about here, like Dunwich Dynamo or absurdly demanding audaxes.
Those audaxes are at the intersection between three worlds though; the silly world (see above), the grumpy world of it were better in my day before these newfangled non-leather saddles, and the boy racer/mamil world. Each of which has, of course, always existed, in different proportions and under different names. Mamil? Roadie. etc.
Transcon is another excellent intersection of those three worlds (as far as I can judge from people's reports).
