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Video: 'Cher the Road'—is this the worst safety video ever?

Prepare to cringe

Road safety videos focussing on cycling often manage to be patronising, twee or cringe-makingly awful. This video from the Springfield, Missouri  Healthy Living Alliance hits all three targets and throws in some white boys rapping to compound the awfulness.

Previous videos on similar themes, such as those from Transport for London and Scotland's Niceway Code campaign have been criticised for victim-blaming or simply failing to understand the problem that it doesn't matter how nice people try to be to each other, fallible humans will still make mistakes.

This one will no doubt be criticised for the same reasons, and uniquely throws in a Cher impersonator because it's Cher the Road - geddit? Quite.

All that said, the prize for the all-time strangest bike safety film has to go to One Got Fat, a 1963 film featuring a group of kids in monkey-masks riding their bikes to the park for a picnic. The kids are knocked out of the ride one by one due to careless or unsafe riding, except for one. In case you've never seen it, here it is:

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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13 comments

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Edgeley | 8 years ago
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Damn, I had a fiver at 13/2 on Slim Jim McGuffney.

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dafyddp | 8 years ago
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Isn't this a day early?

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Bob's Bikes | 8 years ago
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Oh irony of ironies a safety film featuring a car driver looking out of his side window (instead of the windscreen) whilst driving  35

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Matt eaton | 8 years ago
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Lost me at 2 seconds in. Cyclist proceeding quite normally in secondary position stops and says to driver 'I'm sorry, I got in your way'.

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Skynet | 8 years ago
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Compared to most of the current music it's not that bad, but that's not saying much.

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bikebot | 8 years ago
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Either way, the "share the road" message doesn't work. As explained rather well by @bikeyface

Source: http://bikeyface.com/2014/11/13/sharing/

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vonhelmet replied to bikebot | 8 years ago
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bikebot wrote:

Either way, the "share the road" message doesn't work. As explained rather well by @bikeyface

Source: http://bikeyface.com/2014/11/13/sharing/

Car drivers need to learn to think of cyclists as though they take up as much space as a car, so they can pass accordingly and give us some more room.

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severs1966 replied to vonhelmet | 8 years ago
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vonhelmet wrote:

...Car drivers need to learn to think of cyclists as though they take up as much space as a car, so they can pass accordingly and give us some more room.

This will never happen.

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vonhelmet replied to severs1966 | 8 years ago
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severs1966 wrote:
vonhelmet wrote:

...Car drivers need to learn to think of cyclists as though they take up as much space as a car, so they can pass accordingly and give us some more room.

This will never happen.

Aye, but it'd be nice.

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Chris | 8 years ago
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Watching One Got Fat as I type. Very exciting. Can't wait to see who survives. Hope it's not the guy that hasn't even got a bike.

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pakennedy | 8 years ago
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19 seconds before I hit stop. That was about 18 seconds too much.

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Must be Mad | 8 years ago
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I've seen worse. I've seen a lot, lot worse.

At least this is fun, and the 'Cher the Road' bit actually stands a chance of worming its way into the minds of those in the big metal boxes....

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Jeroen0110 replied to Must be Mad | 8 years ago
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Must be Mad wrote:

I've seen worse. I've seen a lot, lot worse.

At least this is fun, and the 'Cher the Road' bit actually stands a chance of worming its way into the minds of those in the big metal boxes....

wow. I've not cringed like this for a long time! Poor you to have seen worse!

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