“That test is seriously flawed”: Met Police e-bike stop checks praised for speed but criticised by cyclists for lack of rigour; Woman dramatically intervenes to stop angle-grinding bike thieves + more on the live blog
Not the hardest test in the world...
“Ever wondered what happens during a London Met Police eBike stop? Wonder no more,” this Reddit poster writes.
Much has been happening with the Met in recent weeks and months that we’ve taken quite an interest in, be it their response to Richmond Park bikejackings, their roll-out of Sur-Ron electric motorbikes, or their rather indifferent attitude to hit-and-runs on cyclists…
It’s the e-bikes that are continuing to hold attention however, not least since there is great scepticism around if even the police know whether a bike is legal or not. After all, who remembers when West Midlands Police destroyed a legal e-bike hired through the local council, causing the force to announce it would stop and re-design its testing for illegal bikes?
So what have we got here? Captured near Tottenham Court Road, the footage shows our cyclist riding past a courier who looks, from a brief cursory look at the battery attached to his frame, to be riding an illegal bike, before our own cyclist is stopped by an officer at the junction ahead.
eBike Police Stop today near TCR
by
u/Jeff46K4 in
londoncycling
“Is it a push button one or is it pedal assisted?”
“It’s pedal assisted.”
“Can we jump round the corner and have a quick test? Hopefully it won’t take too long”
“It’s fully legal.”
“Yeah, well, as you can imagine recently, [unintelligible] so we’ve just got to check everything’s ok.”
What follows is around 20 seconds of the officer struggling before the rider puts out the kickstand, before he then half pedals the bike and watches the front wheel spin freely for a second or two before handing the bike back, and declaring it “all good.” The entire interaction is done in less than a minute.
Fellow cyclists are appreciative of the test, but there’s some questions over to the science behind the system…
“That testing of lifting the wheel and hand pedalling and then observing the speedo is seriously flawed. Who the heck thought that one up? In the OP video it looks like the officer does the same test but he does a half-hearted few turns, so rider was lucky.”
“I thought they were using rolling roads now for the testing. It’s easy to get any bike, even one with no motor, over 25kph by just spinning the wheel with no load. In this video it looks more like the police officer just trusted the guy and didn’t really bother checking anything except that he couldn’t find a throttle.”
“Nice enough policeman but aren’t the criminals they’re looking for just going to skirt around them? Feel like this is just another thing slowing the average person down for no reason.”
“This is a piss poor test. This doesn’t disprove whether the bike is push/throttle enabled nor does it do anything to check whether the motor is under the legal limit of 250W”
Right idea, but you suspect the execution needs a little refining…
A dramatic intervention
Some very eye-opening footage here shared by Bristol Live, showing a woman, seemingly the mother of the child heard in the background of this video, filming and preventing two balaclava-clad individuals using an angle grinder to attempt to steal a Tern e-bike.
View this post on Instagram
A few takeaways from this for me include how young and thankfully incompetent the two aspiring thieves seemed. Unable to navigate the bike’s highly complex kickstand, they seem to do a Columbo-style double back and second attempt for reasons I can only presume as being to get their better side also captured on camera.
As wannabe baddies it was also remarkable how they didn’t at any point even threaten violence against the woman filming them and stopping them taking the bike, just sheepishly turning away.
It also, though the phone’s portrait angle limits the surrounding view, appears as though it takes the thieves leaving to bring other people over. There’s also nothing immediately obvious to suggest any actually did call the police, but again there’s only so much you cand draw from a single angle.
Fascinating, scary, and incredibly brave stuff, though I doubt the police would recommend members of the public engage quite like this, given many bikejackers are likely to be far more prepared than these two.
Chain gunk!
It’s been a minute since I’ve had one this bad.
by
u/blumpkins_ahoy in
Justridingalong
Feel like there’s a market for short-form video content where people rid of themselves of evil black bike goo – that’s the technical term. I’ll have a word with Liam… that one not the other one.
Lovely relaxing bike ride
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I'm currently at the Liberal Democrat conference. There's a really good motion and debate on illegal electric bikes. Would be good to see some coverage of it here.
Another attempt to claim "exceptional hardship" that will hopefully be thrown out? "Spurs star Kulusevski's speeding case adjourned ... The Sweden international, 26, who already has 18 points on his licence... The star - who has a reported weekly wage of £110,000 - added that his young family relied on him to drive them." With 18 points, why has he not already been banned? Clearly doesn't think anything of repeated offences. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmx2z1491l0ro
@mitsky I actually have some experience of this. In short, no. I once found myself on a mental health commission and one of our proposals was a parallel of what you describe - if you give some budget to this initiative now then the clear evidence is that the police, prison service, primary and secondary healthcare services, social care etc will collectively save a large integer multiple of that money in the future. But none of those departments will give up any budget for the next period because they know they’ll be even more underfunded now and they’ll be re-baselined for the future so won’t see any benefit then. So nothing happened, but everyone is happy. What you really need is a dictatorship, benign or otherwise!
@Smoggysteve Financial planning, and I speak from bitter, bitter experience is an incredibly inexact science. The bean counters insist on a number against every variable, which are often just plucked out of the air (last year’s number plus or minus a bit, but never an obviously rounded percentage usually placates them). Then, at end of the year they send reports to the Board saying you missed your made-up target (overlooking the fact that you had no control over the outcome) and you are summoned to explain yourself.
"Not the hardest test in the world..." Crap test. Not sure I'd even have stopped, given that the policeman wasn't holding up his hand in the universal sign language that means 'stop'.
@mdavidford Four days to catch 54 people on their phones, that's pathetic unless Londoners are far more law abiding than Scots, I could spot 54 phone users in a morning!
Why don't the rozzers simply equip themselves with a cheap GPS speedometer, or even just download Strava or a similar app on their phones, and hop on the bike for a quick turn up and down the road, they would quickly be able to see if the bike speed was legal or otherwise.
@Pub bike Even in a ULEZ (as I – and I think you? – know, living in one) there is still a lot of pollution and there always will be as long as ICE vehicles are still in use. In London it's made a great improvement but the air quality on busy central roads at rush-hour is still pretty appalling, so mitigation measures are still needed. I didn't see her talking about unbuilt cycle lanes, why not plant trees alongside those that already exist? They can make a tremendous difference, a number of schools in my area have planted "living walls" to separate their playgrounds from the busy roads on which they are located and apparently they make a very significant difference to pollution levels.
Warms the cockles of my heart that the illegal e-motorbike bros put their lung-health first with their black balaclavas.
Children in cars should also wear masks. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/12/children-risk-air-pollution-cars-former-uk-chief-scientist-warns
4 thoughts on ““That test is seriously flawed”: Met Police e-bike stop checks praised for speed but criticised by cyclists for lack of rigour; Woman dramatically intervenes to stop angle-grinding bike thieves + more on the live blog”
Why don’t the rozzers simply equip themselves with a cheap GPS speedometer, or even just download Strava or a similar app on their phones, and hop on the bike for a quick turn up and down the road, they would quickly be able to see if the bike speed was legal or otherwise.
“Not the hardest test in the world…”
Crap test. Not sure I’d even have stopped, given that the policeman wasn’t holding up his hand in the universal sign language that means ‘stop’.
Another attempt to claim “exceptional hardship” that will hopefully be thrown out?
“Spurs star Kulusevski’s speeding case adjourned
…
The Sweden international, 26, who already has 18 points on his licence…
The star – who has a reported weekly wage of £110,000 – added that his young family relied on him to drive them.”
With 18 points, why has he not already been banned?
Clearly doesn’t think anything of repeated offences.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmx2z1491l0ro
I’m currently at the Liberal Democrat conference. There’s a really good motion and debate on illegal electric bikes. Would be good to see some coverage of it here.