road.cc live news blog – Wednesday

NOT undercover!

The 15.5mph (25kph) limit is stupid? What's stupid is charging down mixed use paths on an untested, illegal e-moto at 40 mph. Which is what these wastes of organs do.

@kyzyl2 I'm extremely sceptical that this app could measure power with any accuracy, but as far as I understand it is not the case that it completely ignores windspeed; as the inventor says, it uses weather as one of the variables. Presumably it takes real-time wind speed and direction from nearby weather stations and factors that into its calculations. Of course this may be wildly inaccurate if you're climbing up a bare hillside and the nearest weather station is in a sheltered valley half a mile away, but it does make some attempt to account for wind speed and direction.

@Rendel Harris we used to rent an allotment in a village near Basel and there was an annual autumn party/festival organised by the gardeners. One year as we were about to leave we went to ride our (unlocked - never a need here) bikes and my wife’s was missing. Our allotment neighbours were outraged and were getting ready to get the police in when… up the road rides a gentleman on my wife’s bike, weaving around in a drunken manner.. He gets back and receives the wrath of our neighbour (not us we were in giggles) and he explains that he had to go home to feed his cat and just needed to borrow a bike!

The physics principle exploited is that opposing forces equal applied forces. Conventional power meters measure applied forces--very well but admittedly not cheaply. This app appears to measure acceleration and slope to determine two of four important opposing forces. Notice something missing? Wind...the dominant opposing force when riding on the flats or in a pack. This app assumes that wind speed equals bike speed in order to "guess" the critical opposing wind force it does not measure. If you always ride solo and never ride when the wind blows maybe this app will work OK for you. Otherwise you are wasting your money. There is no such thing as free power.

Not gonna lie, when I saw the name LAP I thought 'Here we go again, yet another pretentious brand like MAAP, PNS, ASOS and Rapha that wants to grab a piece of the 'bragging rights' cycling category. But, to my surprise, what they bring to the table seems pretty well considered. Let's see if this idea gets some traction.

The difference in the UK is that the police don't try to hide their pride in paying no attention to bicycle theft, in order to maintain credibility with their motorhead mates. When the British Transport Police actually declared they weren't interested (OK, there were some provisos to that, but what they really meant was: cyclists can get stuffed) in cycle theft, they were forced to retract that officially but continued in practice to teach cyclists a lesson by making no effort to catch the thieves (I assume - no personal experience of this particular police-encouraged crime wave)

Might have been usefull to describe the bike / brand etc..?

Operation "Sorry Not Attempting Prosecution"? Certainly some forces see it as a success!

I have some Assos gear and generally like it but at 295 GBP, trouser legs that slip upwards while riding are most definitely unacceptable. That's a kill right there in my book. Hell, I own several bib shorts that cost me 1/4 th of that amount and while they are not so supremely comfy as Assos where the pad is concerned, no slippage.