Another cyclist has been stopped by police for riding along a motorway hard shoulder.
Police were called yesterday morning with reports from passing drivers a man was cycling on the M27 in Hampshire, heading Eastbound.
People driving on the motorway were advised to reduce their speed to 30mph while a patrol car was dispatched to find the man on the bicycle.
More motorway cycling madness: Man spotted on M57 at rush hour
The cyclist was stopped near junction 5 between Eastleigh and Southampton at around 8am this morning, and police spoke to him on the hard shoulder, the Daily Echo reports.
This is just the latest in a flurry of reported sightings of cyclists on motorways, including the man spotted riding a bike on the M57 near Switch Island – which prompted a police search in which officers failed to locate the cyclist – and a repeat offender cycling on the M25, both in April.
Earlier this month 52-year-old Simon Wagner was killed in a collision while cycling on the M3.
20 thoughts on “Another motorway cyclist stopped by police”
Why is this seemingly now
Why is this seemingly now happnening more often?
Is it through using Google maps?
Is it poor signage?
I love my bike wrote:
Maybe we just weren’t aware of them before the police started using social media.
Why were motorists in this
Why were motorists in this case advised to reduce their speed to 30 mph, when the powers that be are quite happy for cyclists to normally “share the road” with vehicles travelling up to 60 mph?
brooksby wrote:
not that it really matters, but you can cycle down non-motorway roads that have a 70mph speed limit (i.e., any dual carriageway with a National speed limit sign)
Ric_Stern_RST wrote:
Really? I thought the national speed limit on anything that isn’t a motorway was *60*mph?
brooksby wrote:
You’d have to be pretty crazy to ride along a high speed dual carriageway though. I use a very busy dual carriageway for my motorcycle commute. It does have a hard shoulder but it’s in poor condition with quite a bit of debris. I frequently see roadies riding along it and it always makes me wince. Running parallel is the old road which is a lot less busy. Yes, it has traffic lights and isn’t as quick from point A to point B but sometimes you have to ask yourself how much of a risk do you really want to take with your cycle commute.
OldRidgeback wrote:
But is that true? Dual carriageways have a lot going for them. No vehicles turning out of or into side roads, no oncoming traffic, lots of room for vehicles to pass, no blind bends, no parked vehicles, no pedestrians, generally good road surface with no man-holes or potholes.
Yes, you could get rear-ended by someone , but that’s the same on any road. At any speed, the results won’t be pretty.
. . wrote:
But is that true? Dual carriageways have a lot going for them. No vehicles turning out of or into side roads, no oncoming traffic, lots of room for vehicles to pass, no blind bends, no parked vehicles, no pedestrians, generally good road surface with no man-holes or potholes.
Yes, you could get rear-ended by someone , but that’s the same on any road. At any speed, the results won’t be pretty.— OldRidgeback
Good point actually about parked vehicles, side roads and so on – though I’d still feel very unsafe cycling on a dual carriageway with cars thundering past at 50-70mph. I used to do it but I sometimes wonder how I survived. I think part of the issue would be that motor vehicle drivers would be very surpised to see you there and for the few that are busy with their phones or cups of coffee it’d mean there would be a very high risk of a high speed impact.
I’ll stick to riding on the sideroads thanks.
brooksby wrote:
You’re looking for rationality in the UKs’ approach to road safety and cycling. Do you see where you’re going wrong?
Stick to cycling on those single-lane roads with passing 60+mph traffic (often close, to let you know you’ve been a bad person for daring to take “their” road). Perfectly safe, especially if you wear a helmet.
Cycle on a road with a *guaranteed* 3 metre odd lane dedicated to you… that’s madness and the world must stop.
http://www.bedfordshire
http://www.bedfordshire.police.uk/advice_centre/casualty_reduction_partnership/speed/know_your_speed_limits.aspx
On a dual carriageway: 70 for cars
60 for goods vehicles (including vans, apparently).
On a couple of occasions I have been shouted at by drivers for riding on the M27, a full mile before the motorway begins. For heavens’ sake, they don’t even know what type of road they’re on.
If you think about it, as
If you think about it, as long as you go carefully there’s no reason not to just drive anywhere you want. On the pavements, directly dropping your kids off on the school playground, how about a 5mph limit down the cereal isle at Tesco? Oh hang on a minute that’s like cycling, walking, driving the wrong way or riding your horse down the hard shoulder of the motorway, just fucking stupid.
Hope this doesn’t come across
Hope this doesn’t come across all UKIP but mighten it be that a lot of these cases are people new to the UK and unaware of the highway code?
HalfWheeler wrote:
You’ve still got to be pretty thick not to figure out you’re playing Frogger in real life trying to cycle on those roads.
Even if you don’t speak the lingo, Google maps has the cycle button when you plan route.
Some people are just stupid chancers who don’t give a toss. Sadly ‘cyclists’ are all the same thing is public eye so the moron on the bso wobbling down the M1 with shopping bags is the same as the guy with full lights and hiviz commuting to work.
Cycling is allowed here
Cycling is allowed here
Cycling is not allowed here
Mnay years ago, I saw someone
Mnay years ago, I saw someone cycling down the hardshoulder of the M8 in Glasgow. Then, the next time I drove along that bit of road, there was someone walking a dog at exactly the same place I’d seen the cyclist.
Tech Noir wrote:
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the statistics regarding smashes/deaths on the actual hard shoulder is at odds with how the police make it out to be per mile. Remember, hard shoulder NOT the actual live lane, the difference in that itself is huge. Hard shoulder is safer than a significant portion of 50/60mph roads and indeed a lot of junctions where cyclists are put at risk of death/serious injury every single day.
But crack on with ignorance and believing everything plod tell you!
As a thought, maybe we should reduce the max speeds of the motorway and the National Speed Limit to 50mph, would reduce pollution massively for one as well as lives.
“According to highways
“According to Highways England, over 100 people are killed or injured on hard shoulders every year”
https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/driving-advice/what-is-the-hard-shoulder/
Mungecrundle wrote:
Ah, but do they say how many of those were cycling at the time? I suspect cyclists make up a tiny proportion of that number – possibly none at all.
Thus I conclude that if one has to be on a hard-shoulder, one should make sure one is on a bicycle at the time. The logic is unassailable.
Heck, I bet far more people are killed in cars on motorways than while riding bicycles, so cycling on motorways is clearly far safer than driving on them.
(At least, if one uses the same logic that highways authorities use to determine if a bit of road design is unsafe for vulnerable road users)
But the toll on our roads of
But the toll on our roads of killed or injured in 2017 was just shy of 171 thousand.