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Lost cyclist follows sat-nav over Manchester's huge M60 Barton Bridge

Lost cyclist follows sat-nav over Manchester's huge M60 Barton Bridge

Police advice: "If your sat-nav is telling you to do something dangerous, don’t do it."...
by John Stevenson
Fri, Mar 14, 2014 12:26
22

Yet another cyclist has been escorted off a motorway by police. Not in Surrey this time, but on the M60 in Manchester where the unnamed man followed his satnav on to the huge Barton Bridge across the Manchester Ship Canal.

Riding along the hard shoulder, the man reached the apex of the bridge, which rises to about 100ft above the water, then took his feet off the pedals and freewheeled the down the other side.

The Manchester Evening News’s Alex Hibbert reports that the rider was tracked on CCTV by Mike Duggan, a supervisor at North West Motorway Police control room

Mr Duggan said: “As soon as we got the call we started tracking him on CCTV.

“We were watching as he got to the top of the bridge, took his feet off the pedals and free wheeled down.

“He also veered across lanes and the slip road a couple of times. He managed to get all the way down to Junction 12, so he got quite far.

“When the patrol caught up with him he told officers it was his sat nav which had directed him on to the motorway. We’re not sure exactly what sort of sat-nav device he was using.”

The patrol spoke to the rider and then took him and his bike off the motorway. Mr Duggan added: “Hopefully we won’t see him again but you never know.

“My advice to people would be to not ride a push bike over the Barton Bridge, and also that if your sat-nav is telling you to do something dangerous, don’t do it.”

The Barton Bridge section of the M60 is notorious for traffic hold-ups, though in this case the confused rider seems to have caused no problems. During last month’s high winds, the bridge was closed after a collision between a lorry and a car, causing widespread traffic disruption.

motorway
Manchester
M60
Barton Bridge
John Stevenson

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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