My hope with these articles is to get across to you the picture in my mind of what I’d like this website to become, the ideas that are currently being worked on as it begins to take form as well as other ideas that are floating around in my head somewhere, not yet solid enough for me to know how to try and take action on them.
The site is still in its formative days, at a point where some basic form is taking shape. To be more exact, it’s precisely at that moment where I’m feeling the need to write this post as an attempt to share my vision for it so that any of you who happen to read this can know enough to decide whether it might be something to get involved with.
Ultimately that’s the goal here, to build something that encourages you all to get involved with the cycling communities in your areas. Communities that we might already be fully contributing to or those that we haven’t yet discovered.
If you’ve spent any time looking through the site before landing here to read this then you most likely will have noticed that the site is currently focussing on the cycling community of Sydney and New South Wales. This is simply because I live in Sydney and am a part of several bunches that ride here. Choosing to keep the scale of our reach small to begin with: one, to not bite off more than we can chew and two, ensuring that what we build is something that the cycling communities out there will find beneficial.
Here I can touch on a long-term goal of seeing the site being useful to communities across all of Australia and why not dream big and vision what we build being available for cycling worldwide to take advantage of.
Grand visions aside, what I’m trying to achieve here is to create a one stop place for anybody old or new to cycling to visit to find the information they will need to join, grow and collaborate with the cycling communities local to them as well as those farther afield.
The plan to start off is simple enough, create pages for all the cycling clubs, bike shops and the rides that they and others put on regularly. Using the map feature of the site I hope to have all these different points of contact for our community in one easily searchable place.
Whilst working in a bike shop I’ve had many interactions with those new to cycling who don’t have any clue about the community available to them. My answers have always fallen far short of doing justice to how much cycling has to offer people here in NSW. We all know the benefits of being a part of the community so the goal is for this site to be an easy way to ensure that those who are interested have all the information they would need to get involved.
This conversation hasn’t only been with those just getting started with cycling, there have been many occasions on which I have mentioned things going on to people with decades of riding in their legs and they are astonished that they have never heard of it.
This site aims to be the last sentence of those conversations. “When you have a chance visit localcyclingclub.cc and see what’s happening”
Hopefully that explains what I’m hoping to create. Now to touch on what has been done so far, what I’m currently concentrating on and how I hope to move forwards with the site, with any luck, with your help.
For those visiting from the future, the state of affairs with the site as of January 2026 is we’ve got 80 or so pages published, 50% of those being bike shops, all created using information available to us by searching online for clubs and shops that are open for new people to come and get involved. We also have a few ride pages that have been created just from my knowledge of what’s on in the area that may not have a named host, the rides that just happen without one specific driving force.
This method of taking publicly available information to create the pages wasn’t my first choice. Originally, I had begun reaching out to the shops and clubs to try and explain what I was planning to create and would they like to get involved. This wasn’t met with much enthusiasm, in fact, it was predominantly met with silence.
Now this isn’t a dig to any of those clubs or shops that I reached out to. Through working in a bike shop I know firsthand the number of spammy emails we all receive that claim to be just the thing needed to take the business and community to the next level. Although I tried to differentiate from those when I reached out, I think it was clear that I didn’t achieve that.
In a way, I’m hoping that this write up can act as that initial pitch to all of you who might want to take advantage of what we build here.
With that in mind, my current position is creating new pages by searching online and adding anything I can find in terms of bike shops and clubs along with any rides that they welcome people to join them at. My plan is that when I exhaust google for all the information I can make use of, I will reach out to every community I have found to show them the pages I have built for them with the option to change in any way or even remove it completely if they would prefer not to be highlighted here.
I want to build the site with the community at the heart of it throughout. I keep coming back to the realisation that I’m the one building this which allows me to do anything with it, there are no constraints unless I put them in place. I want to be honest throughout and always be open to any ideas people from the community put forward. If there is something you think would work here to help towards the goal of getting more people involved in cycling, then please reach out and let me know.
Conscious of how much I have written just touching on the basic plans for the site I feel as though turning this article into a regular series of them may be the way to go. This way I’ll be able to go into more details with the ideas I have, talk about what I’ve been able to add since the last time. By committing a timeframe here too, I’ll be able to use my imagination of thousands of readers waiting for me to update them on my progress as extra motivation to put the work in and keep growing the site.
Let’s call it a monthly update. Please reach out if you’ve read this and would like me to add any pages for shops, clubs or rides you are involved with and would like to share. Also, if you’ve any questions or feel any urge to reach out it would mean a lot to me to hear that you have thoughts about what we’re trying to create here.
My email address is paul@localcyclingclub.cc
As of right now, I don’t have anywhere on the site to publish an article like this, so once I’ve figured out how best to do that, I’ll get this up as the first article written on the site. With that said, if you fancy writing up anything cycling related, send it across… turns out we also publish articles now.
Thanks for reading,
Paul
