A Weekend Without a Car

Marianne Prowse · 8 July 2026

Train to the city, hire at the station, and see what a place feels like at fifteen miles an hour.

Why It Works

Cities are the wrong scale for walking and the wrong scale for driving. Walking gets you a neighbourhood in a weekend. Driving gets you a car park and a one-way system.

A bike gets you the whole centre and the two or three districts either side of it, which is the actual shape of most British cities.

Planning Loosely

Pick two fixed points a few miles apart and leave everything between them undecided. That is the entire itinerary and it is enough.

The value of riding rather than walking is that a detour costs almost nothing, so you will take them.

Getting There

Booking a bike onto a train is a whole administrative genre. Hiring at the far end removes it entirely, which is most of the argument for doing it this way.

Check the scheme exists and covers the bit of the city you are staying in before you commit. Coverage maps are frequently more optimistic than reality.

What Goes Wrong

The usual failure is arriving on a Sunday and finding the scheme has half the bikes out because nobody redistributed after Saturday night. Have a second plan that involves buses.

The other one is the operating zone being smaller than the city. If where you are staying is outside it, you can ride there but you cannot end the hire there, which is an expensive thing to learn at eleven at night.