Happy Christmas from road.cc!

@mdavidford I think we're conflating two different things here. 1. That the throttle did not cut off at 25kph. We can assume it will never cut out. 2. That the bike is capable of 58mph. Not a valid test with no load. I still hold firm on the nads, though.

@Robert Hardy indeed, just because its rated for 2 kW doesn't mean it's putting that out under no load. They probably looked up the model number.

I.e. that wasn't determined as a result of the 'pick it up and rev it' test. It may just mean they got back to the station and looked it up on the internet, or even that it advertised the output on the motor itself.

It was a road in public park and the spot where she was killed was in close proximity to warning signs to traffic of the need for caution as regards pedestrians. If they had been cycling with due caution it is much more likely that they could have stopped in time and very much less likely she would have been killed.

Cycles are better than cars per urban mile travelled in terms of injuries contributed to, but not by as much as to justify complacently dismissing the issue. I don't think it unreasonable for cycles to be expected to keep below 20mph in 20mph zones. That is a fair lick by any standards on a bike and considerably faster than the vast majority of other cyclists on the road.

Not quite sure how he determined the 2kW thats pretty close to the heat output of a 3 bar electric fire, if it wasn't moving to generate sufficient airflow it wouldn't take long to be glowing red! Certainly the motor couldnt demand and output that kind of power without the resistance of the road against the weight of rider and bike and some frighteningly aggressive acceleration.

@mattw "I think we already have a “safety system” on our roads – that interventions are evidence based." Partially. We can - for example motorway design/rules are a fairly good example of a broader "safety first" approach. (Possible exceptions being the removal of some the hard shoulders to add capacity - more on "capacity" later). BUT contrast what happens on other roads. Particularly our "multi-function" urban roads which act as both "places" (parking, lots of pedestrians about) and "routes" (motorists wanting to pass through). Under e.g. the Dutch system that would be a fundamental conflict of interests which would need to be resolved (streets / roads should serve a single function). There is a fundamentally different starting point: the Dutch system starts from "*everyone* can travel *safely*". But baked into the UK system is the notion of "flow of *motor* traffic" being at least as important as safety. Thus it ends up making it OK to provide for vulnerable road users effectively as an afterthought - and particularly at the expense of their convenience, because that motor traffic capacity is one of the most important things. (In the machinery of local government we have all kinds of metrics related to this which ensure that happens e.g. "journey time reduction" etc. which is what Chris Boardman et al. were looking at). This also helps explain why "our roads are relatively safer than other places in Europe in that context" We have achieved safety by literally driving the vulnerable road users off the streets! As many streets have effectively become roads it then becomes logical to all that they are "for" motor traffic, and people should just get in the car. That has become self-reinforcing. And for anyone left who can't / won't it's "well ... take your chances; or use the narrow footway, wait several minutes to cross the road at the lights or descend into the occasional unpleasant and socially unsafe pit of an underpass..." Note that NL road safety is still very good *despite* having a sizeable fraction of the population cycling, including the rather young and old. (Cycling is (in isolation) probably inherently a little more risky that walking - I don't have numbers though). And IIRC it's safer specifically for *pedestrians* there (despite all those dangerous cyclists...)

In this case, it got to that speed by use of the throttle alone, when power should have cut out well before that, so it's not quite such a terrible test as the one where they turned the pedals and said "there - see - it's doing 45!". That said, reaching more than walking pace with just the throttle should be a fail*, so the actual speed it reached is neither here nor there. [*unless it's ancient]

The Mekon

LeBron's rack just looks like a Canyon LOAD front rack to me - £38 on their accessories page