Woonerfs are also planned for the city of Toronto[4], where they have been approved for the West Don Lands community, and are being discussed for Queen’s Quay along the waterfront.

In the United Kingdom, areas approximately equivalent to woonerven are known as home zones but do not enjoy similar protection in law. Community involvement is necessary to improve urban liveability and the urban environment via residential street design. This includes shared spaces, traffic calming, speed limit compliance and traffic restraint. This should lead to safer streets, including pedestrian safety and bicycle safety.

Injury can be avoided by keeping speeds down and/or learning to use the rear brake. However, higher speeds, counterintuitively, are often necessary to master the wheelie as more balancing skills are necessary with decreasing speed, which are usually not present without sufficient practice. For this reason, beginners attempting wheelies on bicycles should tune up their rear brakes and aim for an 12-18 km/h (8-12 mph) wheelie for maximum safety. Although a wheelie or manual can be easily achieved without the use of the back brake it is always recommended that the lever is covered. Never have the entire fist closed around the bars because if the balance point starts to become to far back there will not be enough time to grab the brake and at that point the rider may fall off backwards. A grip is needed on the bars so only one or at the most two fingers are required to use the back brake lever. The seat height will determine the outcome of going over the back, the higher the seat the harder it is to land on the feet.

Beginners should use a low seat height until comfortable with the balance point and back brake. It is harder to maintain speed with a low seat height so wheelies may be short but once comfortable raising the seat height will make the front wheel more eager to come up and make maintaining speed a lot easier. It will also make the balance point easier to fine tune as there is more weight above the back wheel to move back and forth.

Turning the bars in the direction the rider wants to go is the initial stage and only requires minimal movement, couple this with slightly shifting upper body weight (mainly head and shoulders) again in the direction of the turn and the bike should start to lean over and turn. This is not an easy maneuver because the bike now is very biased as to which side it wants to fall over on to. Concentration is needed to keeping the wheel off the ground and countering the sideways balance. Turning the bars outwards and shifting body weight to the outside will help keep the bike on a smooth path around the turn.

To lower the “balance point”, put the saddle higher up, which will mean that the “maximum height” of the wheelie is brought down, and it will also be more comfortable to go for long distances on the back wheel. There is a skill to being able to stop on the back wheel, and then keep going more slowly, this can be done by striking a balance between the back brake and the pedalling.

A wheelie can be maintained indefinitely most easily by finding a 50/50 balance between amount of back brake and speed of pedalling. It is possible to hold the back brake on constantly with very small adjustments in pressure relating to how hard the rider is pedalling. This gives a more stable feeling as the balance point is more consistent. To complete the move, lean forward and gently squeeze the back brake if needs be to allow the front wheel to slowly drop back to the ground. Ensure it is straight on contact, or control of the bike may be lost.

Once the wheelie has been conquered the manual wheelie can be attempted. This is the same as a wheelie but without pedalling. The bike is balanced by the rider’s weight and sometimes use of the rear brake.

It is also a convention, if the hub has a maker’s label on its barrel, for the label to face (and be readable through) the valve hole. The rim labels should be readable from the right-hand side (drive side) of the bicycle. The hub labels should face in the same direction front and rear (generally so they are readable from the seat), this means that even an undished, symmetrical front wheel has to be laced to the rim the “proper” way round, if perfection is the aim.

Wheels can be built by machine instead of by hand. However, machine-built wheels are rarely as satisfactory as handbuilt wheels, partly because it is uneconomic to allow the machine to spend long enough on each wheel for a perfect result but also because most machines leave spokes with some residual twist. Machine-built wheels can be identified by their lacing pattern (if it is not radial), as the spokes are laced the same on each side, rather than mirrored as on hand-built wheels. More modern “factory built” wheels such as Mavic’s Ksyrium series are of quite different construction from that of a conventional wheel, trading a deeper and stronger rim for fewer spokes. They are popular, and quite light (in the more expensive models) but not as durable, readily repairable or maintainable as a conventional wheel.

Stainless steel is the most common material for spokes, although most mass-produced budget wheels use galvanized steel spokes. Other materials such as titanium, aluminum are often used to reduce weight. Some wheels are designed around carbon fiber spokes, which are often completely integrated with the hub and rim and bladed in shape. Non-steel spokes are normally reserved for racing bikes and other specialist applications where weight, aerodynamics and performance are valued over durability and cost. DT Swiss and Sapim (Belgium) are two of the most popular spoke brands used in hand built wheels.

Rims were traditionally made of steel but currently aluminum is by far most common and best choice due to its light weight, high durability and stiffness. Wood is also used. Composite materials such as carbon fiber are sometimes used, typically for racing competitions such as time trial, triathlon and track cycling, although carbon fiber is becoming more common for recreational uses such as road cycling or mountain biking due to it’s looks. Mavic (France), DT Swiss, Velocity, and Sun are popular makers of high quality bicycle rims.

The canonical text on building conventional bicycle wheels is “The Bicycle Wheel” by Jobst Brandt, published by Avocet.

The most common spoking pattern is “three-cross” where each spoke crosses three others on the same flange of the hub before meeting the rim. The last cross is normally “interlaced” by wrapping the spoke around the one from the other side of the flange. Radial-spoked wheels, where the spokes do not cross each other, saves roughly the weight of two spokes (because the spokes are shorter) compared to a three-cross wheel but run the risk of tearing hub flanges apart, unless the hub is specifically designed for this pattern. Two-cross is sometimes used for hubs with large-diameter flanges (such as generator/dynamo hubs or large flange hubs), as it gives a more perpendicular spoke/rim angle, and four-cross is standard for spoke counts of 40 and above.

“He went and joined the BLRC and started road-racing. I always remember, you’d ease up a bit and mop your brow and look round and there would be Walter, just behind, with his one arm. What a man![15]

Greaves founded the Airedale Olympic cycling club and in 1949 organised a race from Bradford to Morecambe and back. The Bradford Telegraph and Argus reported:

“He painted a white arrow from Keighley Road into Swadford Street to take competitors out on the A59 via Broughton Road but that lasted for some months, bringing complaints from drivers who thought it signalled a new road system.”[16]

Greaves had a cycle shop in Bradford. It burned down and he moved to Craven Forge, then known as Winifred’s Café. The Telegraph and Argus reported:

“He struggled to make a living in the café and took a job at Water House Pressings but later changed the café to a forge making and selling garden ornaments. He also took to writing and singing songs in clubs and pubs in the area.”[16]

Tim Teale said:

Walter bought a place at the side of the Leeds-Liverpool canal halfway between Keighley and Skipton. This he made into a forge. He asked the club to call on our way back from Upper Wharfdale one Sunday and he would put us some tea on. This we did, and on going in there were some sandwiches on the table and a large jelly. But when we looked closely at the jelly we saw in the centre a very large monkey turd, so I’m sorry to say we declined the invitation and rode back to Skipton.[17]

Greaves kept the monkey as a pet in the flat above the café, where he lived with his wife. He seems to have had an interest in exotic animals: the minutes of Yorkshire section of the British League of Racing Cyclists show that members had to talk him out of his plan to have a dancing bear for the annual dinner.[18]

Greaves contracted Parkinson’s disease in 1979, and died in 1987, aged 80.

Peter Duncan, an official of the Vegetarian Cycling and Athletic Club to which both belonged, said:

I stopped my car in the lay-by near the café about three years ago waiting for a friend to catch me up. As I waited, a frail, ragged scarecrow emerged from one of the huts and tottered laboriously up the steps to the house. With a chock I noticed that the left sleeve of the ragged overcoat was empty and I realised that this walking skeleton was all that was left of the robust, fanatical Walter that I had known in the 40s or 50s.[7]

Greaves had been a single-minded, determined man described as reluctant to give way in arguments. The friendship between him and Duncan ended at a club meeting in 1951 when the two disagreed at an annual meeting and Duncan reported that Greaves said:“ “I’ll punch your head in and do it publicly.”[7] ”

His record was set to fall even as he reached Bradford town hall. Next day another amateur rider, Bernard Bennett, set off to ride 45,801 miles. The record fell twice more the same year, the second time to René Menzies - who matched the record at Alexandra Palace with Greaves beside him[13][14]

Cycling reported:

Bernard Bennett was reported to say that he was attempting the record just for fun. He set the new record figure of 45,801 miles and also setting a new world record of 100,000 miles in 642 days. As all this competition was going on in the United Kingdom, a year’s race had commenced between two widely separated contestants, Ossie Nicholson from Down Under who had already tasted success, and a newcomer, René Menzies, a 48-year-old Frenchman of Scottish descent. René rode in the UK and on the Continent, searching for the hotter weather… Many miles away, Nicholson had found better weather and financial support; at the end of his year he had collected an amazing 62,567 miles thus time tasting more than glory as he had also pedalled his way clear of beating the 100,000 miles record, this time in 532 days.[1]

Tommy Godwin set the record at 75,065 miles in 1939 with the support of a bicycle factory, a manager and pacers. He went on to ride 100,000 miles in 499 days.

The Telegraph and Argus report was headlined Persistence on a bicycle and began “W.W. Greaves, the one-armed Bradford cyclist, is a hero.”

Greaves averaged 120 miles a day by the end of February. The snow and ice were replaced by gales, hail and rain but Greaves increased his daily rate to 134 miles. It rained through the summer and then turned foggy all November.

The cycling importer and patron, Ron Kitching, said:

Walter used to ride over to Harrogate and I asked him how he was managing with all the ice and snow. Apparently he just kept riding round and round the streets until they were cleared in order to get the miles in. I remember he used to ride with a feeding bottle with milk in it, and eat apples. He was a true vegetarian. And tough![11]

Greaves collided with a car[12] at Yarm in July and an abscess developed as a result. Greaves lost two weeks in hospital. He rode 160 miles a day while recovering from the operation. From 20 September to 8 October he rode 180 miles a day. He rode into Hyde Park, London on 13 December and rode laps of the Serpentine to match Nicholson’s record. He was joined by thousands of other cyclists.

A reception was held in a hotel that evening. Greaves had been a vegetarian since he was 20 and was a fervent teetotaller. Journalists at the reception offered him champagne to celebrate, making comments such as “Go on… We won’t tell!” Greaves said:“ “When I want to poison myself, I’ll do it with arsenic.”[7] ”

Greaves rode from 8 October until the end of the year to push himself further ahead Nicholson. He nevertheless rode 130 miles a day, finishing his year at midnight on New Year’s Eve at the steps of the town hall in Bradford. The Telegraph and Argus reported “astonishing scenes reminiscent of those associated with the public appearances of famous film stars.” The mayor gave him cheques and two trophies.