As chief executive of one of the cycling industry’s most promising new companies, wheels might well have put her where she is today, but for Beverly Lucas, wings play just as important a part in her life.

The 44-year-old from Sheffield has turned globetrotting into an art form by living in Australia and running a company in the United States. To help bump-up the air miles, she remains close to her family in Sheffield where she grew up and also pays regular visits to the company’s manufacturing facility in Taiwan. All of which must play havoc in terms of jetlag.

“It’s funny. Since the birth of my two children, my body has learned to live on five or six hours’ sleep, so I can get by on that amount and still put in a good ten hours’ work,” Ms Lucas says from Bend in Oregon – her main home for the rest of the year as she works on the global roll-out of Knight Composites.

The company makes carbon bicycle wheels – “The fastest wheels in the world; that statement is actually true.” It launched at the Eurobike trade show in summer 2014 and hit the ground running. Knight Composites turned a “small profit” in its first month of sales and has been doing the same ever since. It has trebled sales forecasts to date. Ms Lucas puts this down to the company ethos which “at the risk of sounding cliched,” is run on the same principle as the wheels it creates, “fast and lightweight. Our overheads are minimal – we don’t have 150 staff and 40 people making management salaries. Jim [Pfeil – co founder], Kevin [Quan – engineer] and I make enough to feed our families and take them out to dinner once in a while.”

Knight’s founders have a cast-iron background in carbon bike components. Ms Lucas played a pivotal role at wheelbuilder Enve Composites and Felt cycles, Jim and Kevin are from Reynolds and Cervelo – all highly regarded names in the industry.

Ms Lucas’s late father, Gary Knight got her into cycling. He died suddenly when she was very young and is the inspiration behind the brand name. She was racing at the age of nine, for Rutland Cycling Club, and was once turned down for a job at Raleigh in Nottingham “for not having sufficient ‘man skills’.” Her lack of progress in the UK bike industry partly led to her move across the Atlantic: “My Mum says she always knew I would move to the US because her cousin did it and I always looked up to her.”

Work as a mechanic and bike shop owner followed. She met and married an American, a pro-team soigneur (massage therapist), had two children (Molly, 11, Cameron, seven), then lost her business and subsequently her husband to the financial crisis. She moved to Australia in the summer of 2012 virtually penniless. “I saw it as making something good out of something bad.” She hadn’t been in Melbourne long before the opportunity arose at (then unnamed) Knight.

Ms Lucas has already proven that the Pacific Ocean is no barrier to running a business: “It’s actually easier to run a global company when you are experienced in living and working in a number of countries,” she explains.

It has all the hallmarks of a logistical nightmare, especially as the company grows into new markets. “I can cover all time zones by scheduling work around my life,” but the key, says Ms Lucas, is technology. “I have my iPhone permanently strapped to my hip, and I was an early adopter of Skype.” The latter comes in particularly handy when dealing with manufacturers in Taiwan, where Knight’s rims are made.

“We went there because these engineers and manufacturers are arguably the best in the world in working with composites,” says Ms Lucas. “We use the best carbon fibre in the world, the same Toray T800 fibres you find in the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner.”

It is attention to detail such as this and Knight’s relative value against other brands that have garnered so much attention. It is only six months since the company’s first wheels went on sale at up to £2,200 a pair and distribution is already spread through 25 countries.

It would be easy to think Beverly Lucas has led a blessed life. She is on the face of it the definition of the American dream – she worked hard and she has made it. But her story is one of perseverance. A less driven individual might have packed it all in and gone home to Sheffield.

“A friend suggested I was the J.K. Rowling of the bicycle industry – ‘You’ve been a broke, single mum just trying to do the best for your kids, but you have this magic that makes people happy.’ Sounds pretty cheesy, but if I can continue to have opportunities to bring some mirth and excitement to people then that’s going to keep me in this business for another 20 years.”

In years to come, if her wheels, like her air miles, truly take off, the comparison may stretch a little further.

Five points to global working according to Beverly Lucas

Embrace Technology: Skype is invaluable

Know your timezones: And your trading partners’ business hours

Trust your partners and distributors: Respect their judgement

Focus your business: Keep overheads down

The world is round: You are always in the middle

Driving is being split along generational lines with a growing proportion of pensioners retaining their licences just as young people “fall out of love” with the car, according to research.

A study found that young people were ditching car ownership because of internet shopping, taxi-sharing apps and better public transport.

The fall was also attributed to the escalating cost of insurance for young people, with some being quoted almost £5,400 a year for comprehensive cover.

Older drivers, meanwhile, are hanging on to their cars to “preserve their independence”.

The conclusions are made in a report from the Independent Transport Commission, alongside the Office of Rail and Road, into attitudes towards different forms of transport.

It follows the publication of statistics from the Department for Transport showing that the proportion of 17 to 20-year-olds with a driving licence has dipped over the past two decades. In 2013, 31 per cent held a licence, compared with almost half in 1992. Among over-70s, the proportion of driving-licence holders had risen from 33 per cent to 62 per cent. In the mid-1970s it was 15 per cent.

“The research demonstrates that young people are ‘falling out of love’ with the car, and place greater weight on alternative consumer products, while older people see the car as an important part of their lifestyle,” the commission’s study said.

Researchers interviewed almost 4,700 people for the report, which sought to set out the factors behind changing travel trends.

They found examples of young people being quoted huge amounts for insurance. One 20-year-old, a Post Office worker from Manchester, said that he was quoted £5,394 for comprehensive car insurance.

In urban areas, the researchers found that pensioners often owned a car but were less likely to rely on them as they used free bus passes and senior rail discounts.

The number of vehicles on British roads has increased by more than 10 million in the past two decades amid fresh warnings over gridlock.

Figures from the Department for Transport show a record 35.6 million cars, vans and HGVs were registered in the fourth quarter of last year, a 1.7 per cent increase on the year before — the biggest annual increase since 2007.

In 2014 there were more than 40 per cent more vehicles than in 1994. The increase has been driven by a rise in delivery vans because of the internet shopping boom and more cars being bought.

Traffic on main A-roads and motorways was slowing down, with almost a quarter of all journeys subjected to delays in February this year, a 5 per cent rise on the same month in 2012.

Major road network upgrades are due to cost £15 billion over six years. Edmund King, the AA president, said this was a “sticking plaster approach”.

Choke Point

Too many vehicles, too much pollution, not enough action

The Times leader, 10 April 2015

 So much for the Bradley Wiggins effect. Britons may be keener than ever on cycling, but they remain hooked on cars and increasingly dependent on vans. The causes include inadequate public transport and the boom in door-to-door delivery for internet shoppers. The effects include road congestion that is worsening faster than new road-building can ease it, but congestion in itself is a mere inconvenience. The pollution it creates costs lives. It is a public health emergency that the next government must take seriously. If it did it would be the first to do so for nearly half a century.

New figures from the Department for Transport show that Britain’s roads are 40 per cent more crowded than in the mid-1990s. Meanwhile today’s official forecast is for air pollution levels so high, especially in parts of the southeast, that even perfectly healthy people are advised to cut back on their exercise. Industrial pollution from the continent and traces of Saharan dust are among the culprits, but they are minor ones. To blame our bad air on others would be as foolish as ignoring it altogether.

The Social Progress Index this week ranked Britain 87th in the world for air quality. The tiny particles that foul our urban air kill 30,000 people a year excluding premature deaths attributable to nitrogen dioxide, a main pollutant from diesel engines. The root cause is indolence: no central government has grappled in earnest with air pollution since the Clean Air Act of 1968, and no local government has seized control of the issue since Ken Livingstone introduced London’s congestion charging 12 years ago. Boris Johnson in particular has failed to lead, waiting seven years to act. Last month he announced the introduction of an “ultra-low emission zone” for the capital, but it will not come into force until 2020. By that time thousands more will have succumbed avoidably to pollution-related illness.

A link between airborne pollution and heart disease is well-established, although a recent study found that it could take as little as two hours’ exposure to typical pollution levels on London’s Oxford Street to induce a measurable stiffening of human arteries. Like tobacco smoke, particulate pollution from traffic also causes lung and bladder cancer and is classified by the WHO as a carcinogen. Large-scale studies over the past two decades have linked exposure to particulates and nitrogen dioxide to cognitive impairment in children, heightened risk of type 2 diabetes, weakened immunity and even fractured DNA in sperm.

A main cause of Britain’s worsening air quality has been excessive subsidies for diesel engines on grounds of fuel economy. They emit less carbon per kilometre than petrol-driven vehicles, but four times more nitrogen dioxide and 22 times more particulates. In Delhi, diesel engines more than ten years old are being outlawed. The next British government should stop incentivising diesel and encourage the electrification of fleet delivery vans instead. It should close the loophole that allows the removal of air filters from diesel lorries, ensure that no new schools are built within 150 metres of major roads and create a network of ultra-low emission zones urgently rather than content itself with one in five years’ time.

Air pollution kills too many and appears to dull the brains of many more. If it didn’t, tackling its causes with the vigour deployed against tobacco would surely be a no-brainer.

Where Scotland led, Britain’s biggest cities are following. Not to independence, but towards radical devolution that their leaders claim is the key to a sustainable increase in growth. This claim is untested, but worth testing. The political case for devolution to the country’s ten “core cities”, as they call themselves, is even more compelling. The Scottish devolution promised at the time of last year’s referendum demands nothing less.

Britain is the most centralised advanced economy in the world. Central government’s share of total public spending is twice as large as in France and nearly four times that of Germany. Just 3 per cent of taxes are raised locally. In Liverpool, 95 per cent of public money spent is channelled through Whitehall. There, and in every other conurbation, too much tax is wasted.

The central proposition of yesterday’s cities’ summit in Glasgow was to use a deal already struck between Whitehall and Manchester as a model for up to nine more similar deals, from Leeds and Liverpool to Newcastle and Glasgow. Clusters of city councils, headed by elected mayors, would raise and spend more taxes locally. If Danny Alexander has his way, these taxes could include stamp duty, worth up to £7 billion.

This scheme would go beyond the “northern powerhouse” promised by the chancellor and entail a fundamental shift of power away from Westminster. It would improve local accountability. It could boost growth and cut waste. Most importantly, it would help to meet the requirements of fairness after the referendum in Scotland. Devolution there may save the Union but it will create a chronically imbalanced system of government. William Hague’s proposals for an English veto on English-only issues are unlikely to be the last word on the subject. Reviving our great regional cities by easing the dead hand of central government can only help.

The “devo met” scheme floated at the cities’ summit was pitched as a homage to the barons who presented Magna Carta to King John 800 years ago. In reality it is a cautious return to serious reform of regional government after the more recent failure of less serious efforts. In the 1980s, Ken Livingstone and Derek Hatton made city government in Britain a byword for militancy and political corruption. A decade later, new Labour’s misconceived plans for regional assemblies were greeted by voters with indifference.

The Manchester model is more auspicious, for three reasons. It is economics-led, based on the theory that public money is a better stimulus if pooled and spent locally than handed out by central government which usually fails to co-ordinate its efforts. It has had cross-party support from the start, notably from Sir Richard Leese, the Labour council leader, and Greg Clark, the Conservative minister for universities, science and cities. And it is incremental, with money and power ceded by Whitehall gradually and on merit.

The deal agreed last year means a modest extra £1 billion for Manchester to spend on local transport and services by 2017. Similar devolution to all ten of the country’s biggest conurbations would mean the transfer of about £14 billion in the short term but could, they claim, add £222 billion to national GDP by 2030. Such figures may prove fantastical but it is clear that too many British cities are failing to fulfil their potential. It is time for Whitehall to let go.