Commuter diaries – quick fix

"Thinnest bike lane in the UK?" August 27th: I thought it was April 1st. B&H council, hang your heads in shame. It isn't the cycle lane that's “Impressively dumb”. Still, it's good that they've kept all that nice wide cross-hatching in the centre of the road and the dedicated right turn lane: can't make the drivers too safe and cyclists don't count.

@ravenbait No, I did not say "any bike can catch fire". I said "you can’t take any bike into most closed indoor spaces". I did not say a word about the reasons for this.

There's no such thing as road tacks!!! They were abolished in the 1930s. I think you mean vehicle excise tacks.

Same for laptops, powerbanks, even phones. But yeah, this is where we get to when the government fails to do its job of establishing market regulation, effective enforcement, policing, etc - just the normal stuff of running a country. We end up with anything and everything on sale and in public with impunity.

@tomlew You said "any bike". My bike doesn't have a battery. Not sure how it's going to catch fire unless you're planning on coming round with a blowtorch, at which point it's not the bike I'll be worried about.

@chrisonabike I haven't heard of many cases of people tinkering with eCars that caused a fire. And neither have I heard of a fender-bender kind of accident inside a car park that would've caused one. And one last thing. Sorry, but this time this argument is perfectly valid: eCars have insurance, eBikes don't. Considering that you could leave the bike and it would catch fire a few hours or days later, this is a very different situation to the average car-vs-bike accident.

@ravenbait It's not about optimism. It is about the fact that a laptop display is much more sensitive than a battery. Getting the screen broken renders the laptop useless, so it's hard to imagine a situation in which a laptop is damaged enough to be usable overall with a badly damaged battery.

@ravenbait Wait until a fire breaks out in your house. Many insurance policies make a clear exception for ebikes.

@AidanR I do get your point about parking. However, I still believe that a train station is not the right place to store items which could be dangerous to people around. Petrol cans, large knives or guns are perfectly safe in the right hands, but they are forbidden anyway - and rightly so. Here we are dealing with an object which could cause a fire even through no direct fault of the owner (who would be hard to trace anyway in case of a fire, which is another problem) and even while they are away. I believe an exception could be made for separated e-bike zones meeting additional safety standards. But as long as those don't exist, I totally understand the ban.

@OnYerBike Cock-up vs conspiracy.