Live blog: “Little tykes” pose as marshals to send sportive riders wrong way, tree in bike lane + more

hopefully they won't have moving cyclist avatars on the live map, and instead just give a proximity-based audio notification about cyclists ahead ... otherwise, there's bound to be some idiot who will go 'hunting' when they see a bike icon on the move.

@Rendel Harris Be optimistic. I am sure we will see just as many ' driver recklessly continued along the B4516 despite being warned that cyclists had been there in the fairly recent past' and 'driver failed to make use of product alleged to improve safety' statements.

@eburtthebike "I fail to see what the speed of the vehicle being overtaken has to do with the overtaking vehicle passing too closely." The HWC guidance is at least 1.5m when overtaking at speeds up to 30mph, and more if faster, so e.g. evidence that you were travelling at 30mph (and so being overtaken at more than 30) may be relevant to the passing distance. Of course, that still leaves them with the professed evidential difficulty of actually measuring said distance.

I guess the problem is everyone says they want a simple steel / mechanical bike but then when the wallet leavres the pocket they buy a carbon / electronic one. Entry level buyers are all getting junk e-bikes. Radavist hipsters want 1980s lugged bikes.

@open_roads I was looking for a flat-bar performance hybrid bike recently. I know they're inherently cheaper than drop bar bikes but the level of kit and integration available on non-electric versions is insane for the price. I ended up buying an equipped Trek FX Sport Equipped for £720 brand new. Dynamo lights, rack, full mudguards, Tiagra/Deore level shifters and brakes. Cube, Merida, Orbea, and Giant were similarly good value; it was just unfortunate that the Orbea I wanted wasn't in stock as I'd prefer to have given my money to a Basque co-operative rather than a US megacorp. That's a very difficult market for a low volume regional supplier to operate in. I would likely have bought a Temple had they been available to order but I suspect I'm a bit of a niche customer having had a Fairlight previously.

@Rome73 It doesn't seem to have held back Atherton who seem to be doing a pretty good volume of export orders. So perhaps although the Temple Cycles bikes were great, they just weren't highly differentiated enough - the market for classically styled bikes is pretty saturated in Europe and the urban premium market has rapidly shifted to electric bikes. The wider bike retail trends are likely to have played a role too. The likes of Dorel and Pon are shedding hundreds of thousands of bikes in different brands from their EU inventories and at massive discounts - the overall market for selling full price bikes is incredibly tough. If the big players can't read the market correctly, the little players face a huge challenge. Given much of the enormous fundraiser appears to have been spent my guess would be that Temple spent too much on fixed costs (2 x shops, 1 x Factory) and that margin / cashflow / liquidity was the core problem. TLDR Really sorry to see Temple Cycles go - their bikes looked great. But they have done well to plough through the fundraiser cash in such a short time. Cash is king.

@samuri I was going to say the same. 1) Drivers need to use their eyes. There is a reason the practical driving test involves an eye-sight test. 2) I am imagining that (as You've rightly said: everyone would need to use it to make it work) we will have to put a chip in every human at birth which is internet and GPS connected... I'm sure Lone Skum is working on it right now. And Bill Gates was trialling this with Covid vaccines. #sarcasm

So massive investment for a small company and still didn't make any profit. Pity the workers who are losing their jobs and suppliers that may not get paid. But, the directors are allowed to start a new limited company

So massive investment for a small company and still didn't make any profit. Pity the workers who are losing their jobs and suppliers that may not get paid. But, the directors are allowed to start a new limited company and still pay themselves....

It's always a shame to see a local company go under especially given that Brexit presumably kicked all their EU sales. But they also never seemed like great value for money. As far as I could tell they were in the same vein as Genesis: making old-school frames out of standard steel tube-sets, fitting some quite nice finishing kit and then charging premium prices for them. They looked like nice bikes when I've seen them out on the road, but the designs don't look like anything special. When you compare to companies like Fairlight who are using custom tubesets, offer so many sizes that they're near-custom fit, and then let you spec pretty much every component for the same money, the value for money for a Temple just wasn't there.