road.cc live blog: Terpstra takes E3 Harelbeke, buy Lance’s house, limited edition Cannondale Supersix, bicycle-to-vehicle beacons proposed + more
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Fri, Mar 23, 2018 09:00
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Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn’t especially like cake.
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Latest Comments
AidanR 58 minutes ago
Laudable effort. Will a full review of the bike be following?
TrainWalkWheel 58 minutes ago
By their very nature the dockless bike schemes will result in bikes being parked in stupid places. The user has little incentive to find the correct place to park it. More so if they are tourists with a cruise liner to catch and only 3 hours to explore. So, if the operation can't be made to fit within the councils required operating method, then it should be removed. I'm pretty sure another operator will come in and propose a system acceptable to the council if they believe they can make money. I strongly suspect that the current operators can only make money by tacitly allowing bikes to be left where the tourist money wants to leave them, so time to rethink the financial model me thinks!
tomlew 1 hour ago
@bikercub "If they are good enough to be supporting the Groupama-FDJ United World TourCycling team, we should be looking at them as a contender." No, that only means that they paid enough to become a sponsor. Let's put the "pros use better stuff" myth to sleep, finally. And by the way, the trickiest part of a GPS computer is not data collection - that can be done by absolutely all of them. The hard part is the general user interface and turn-by-turn navigation, none of which really matters for a pro cyclist - and that brings us back to why any GPS computer could be good enough for just about any pro cyclist.
Rendel Harris 1 hour ago
@mdavidford Absolutely, I am assuming that the OP means those lanes where it's so tight it's actually impossible for a cyclist to get through if there is a large vehicle, obviously if they can squeeze by each other nobody needs to go back.
Mr Blackbird 1 hour ago
You are quite correct about uniform signage. However this seems to be a fairly atypical set up. Having experience and knowledge of it would in theory make mistakes less likely. Part of my job involved writing operating and maintenance procedures for food manufacturing machinery. I quickly learnt that people need to be given direct, simple, non-conflicting, non-ambiguous instructions. If it is possible to make mistakes, then they will be made. The best of of avoiding a mistake is to design flaws out of the system.
CD1997 1 hour ago
I do not in anyway support the Daily Telegraph's continually mad anti-cycling journalism but, it must be said, that this particular section of cycle lane on King Street in Hammersmith has been an absolute disaster ever since it re-opened. It certainly wasn't perfect for cyclists before but ever since they remodelled the cycle lane to run as a two way lane on one side of the road it has become much much more dangerous and confusing for pedestrians, drivers, motorcyclists and cyclists alike. I'm not saying that all cycling infrastructure is badly designed but, on my 12 mile commute from home in South London to work at the West end of King Street, this cycleway is where I feel most unsafe. It's not an inditement on active travel but it should be a lesson in planning because it's been closed on 5 or 6 occasions since to be remodelled to correct issues that should've been obvious before it opened. I have been using this road to get to work since long before the re-modelling and it has definitely, in my opinion, worsened not just the safety of cyclists but also the relationship between drivers and cyclists in this area.
quiff 2 hours ago
In principle, it shouldn't matter if you're familiar with a particular junction - that's precisely why we have (relatively) uniform signage across the country (I had this from a driver recently - Him: sorry, I don't know the area. Me: but a no entry sign is the same everywhere...). But in practice in a busy environment like this, simply adding another sign saying look out for cyclists is limited help. I don't love cycling on contraflows / a two way cyclelane on a one way street for that reason. In fact there's a crossing I don't love as a pedestrian which is look right (bikes) look left (bikes) look right (cars), island, catch breath, look left (cars), look left (bikes). (Yes, you could wait for a green man, but then it's still look everywhere (Deliveroo)).
Mr Blackbird 2 hours ago
I'm not familiar with Jeremy Vine's favourite cycle lane. However I do have sympathy with drivers if they have to deal with "Look both ways for cyclists" as well as "One Way" and "No Entry" signs. Especially if the driver is not familiar with the junction.
chrisonabike 2 hours ago
@mitsky Alas for a second there I was awarding the motorist in the window there points for wearing hi-vis in their car, then I realised they were also wearing a motoring helmet...
quiff 2 hours ago
While I understand it in context, I quite liked this to conclude a bike light review: "it’s a reliable set for the price, so long as you aren’t looking to ride in the dark"
19 thoughts on “road.cc live blog: Terpstra takes E3 Harelbeke, buy Lance’s house, limited edition Cannondale Supersix, bicycle-to-vehicle beacons proposed + more”
Okay, I’ll bite…
Okay, I’ll bite…
Who will have to pay to retro-fit beacons to existing bikes?
Who will pay to retro-fit the detection and collision avoidance technology to all the existing cars trucks, vans, lorries, buses and taxis out there?
Who will be judged at fault in a collision between a beaconless bike and a sensor equipped vehicle?
I’d like to have device on my
I’d like to have a device on my bike that sent an electric shock to the bollocks of the driver of a car detected within a metre of my bike. Said shock to increase the closer the vehicle gets. I’d happily pay for that, in fact.
Eton Rifle wrote:
Not a bad idea, but being run over by a woman is going to be just as annoying and painful.
And yet, a car supposedly
And yet, a car supposedly dripping with the latest detection technology and fail safe automated braking systems ploughs into and kills a pedestrian crossing the road in Arizona. ?
ermmm… bicycles already
ermmm… bicycles already have retro-reflectors mounted on them… perhaps these vehicle systems ‘experts’ should consider devising some device which scans the field of view and detects reflected ‘light’… sort of like a radar does but with an infra red low power eyesafe laser?
I’m calling bullshit on the
I’m calling bullshit on the bike detection technology. Half the time, drivers can see the bike perfectly well, but will still insist on overtaking at inappropriate times/places and without any due consideration. How will a detection system improve that?
Why do we keep trying to
Why do we keep trying to invent things that dull the attention of road users? It’s bad enough that most cars resemble starship command inside now. The last thing we need is going from SMIDSY to sorry my detection system didn’t see you mate and besides I was looking at facebook anyway.
My brother recently moved to Australia and said the driving standard is dire over there and reckons part of it is everyone driving automatics. It’s just a another level of disconnect from driving.
Sensors to also measure
Sensors to also measure passing distance and batch report anything too close?
Seems to me that that whole
Seems to me that that whole thing would be monumentally hackable. The beacon will need to be small and low-powered so they’ll be really easy to hide. IBM announced tech this week smaller than a grain of rice that could be used for this.
What’s to stop you, for example, hiding one in a manhole cover or on a bollard and bringing traffic to a halt?
Or taking primary and riding at 5mph preventing the vehicle from overtaking?
Its all completely unworkable and the logical extrapolation will be to ban pedestrians and cycles (and motorcycles and horses) from areas where driverless vehicles operate.
And then we get to my neck of the woods where there are unfenced roads and livestock roaming about – I guess that means they’ll all need to be tagged too.
kil0ran wrote:
And this is exactly what we’ll get if this technology becomes mainstream. There’ll be places you can buy them in bulk from Chinese wholesalers, and they will be laid in weird patterns across the road to ‘assist’ motorists into a ditch. I could even lay them on the pavement in front of my house to stop people parking there!
Re ‘Ouch’.
Re ‘Ouch’.
A Darwin Award must be in the post – especially if next time he smashes his bollocks into that wall!
This appears to be a new
This appears to be a new version of victim blaming; it’ll be the cyclists fault for not fitting the latest gadget.
It is the responsibility of the people causing the danger to prevent/reduce that danger, not for cyclists and pedestrians to have to take actions to avoid being run over. Make the vehicle technology safe or keep it off the road.
Car detects bike with chip,
Car detects bike with chip, driver ignores the warning, status quo.
It will not work in
It will not work in Colchester.
On the subject of bicycle /
On the subject of bicycle / car sensors.
Lets go a step further so the software in the car can detect dangerous overtaking distances between the two sensors, then feed this back directly to the driver’s insurance provider, who can then increase their insurance premiums accordingly.
The government can offer a free standard version of the bike beacon, paid for by also offering a super-lightweight carbon fibre version for ‘proper’ cyclists who wouldn’t be able to resist the marginal gains.
Kojima wrote:
Better still, switch the car to limp home mode with a max speed of 15 mph so that affected cyclist can taunt them for miles and miles and ….
Most people probably already
Most people probably already have a highly detectable beacon – their phone. It’s likely squawking out all sort of radio signals (WiFi, Bluetooth, ANT+, 3g/4g etc.) right now.
It’s not “victim blaming” to envisage a future where road users are sharing speed, direction and position information in an effort to avoid hitting each other. It’s already used extensively in the air and at sea (AIS). At sea it’s mandatory for big heavy stuff to have AIS (>300t I think). E.g. http://shipfinder.co/ – and an awful lot of smaller craft use it as well along with sonar, radar and, yes, eyeballs.
Maybe Garmin will bake their LiveTrack system into all their devices in future and build automotive versions…maybe they have already.
“It is not easy for human
“It is not easy for human drivers to see cyclists on the roads” Manuel Marsilio – general manager of the Confederation for the European Bicycle Industry
Yes, actually it is QUITE easy to see cyclists on the roads IF you are paying attention & looking where you are pointing your two tonne lump of steel. With ‘friends’ like this in the industry, who needs enemies…
That Cannondale looks great.
That Cannondale looks great. You don’t often see British Racing Green on a bike.