Road safety videos focussing on cycling often manage to be patronising, twee or cringe-makingly awful. This video from the Springfield, Missouri Healthy Living Alliance hits all three targets and throws in some white boys rapping to compound the awfulness.
Previous videos on similar themes, such as those from Transport for London and Scotland's Niceway Code campaign have been criticised for victim-blaming or simply failing to understand the problem that it doesn't matter how nice people try to be to each other, fallible humans will still make mistakes.
This one will no doubt be criticised for the same reasons, and uniquely throws in a Cher impersonator because it's Cher the Road - geddit? Quite.
All that said, the prize for the all-time strangest bike safety film has to go to One Got Fat, a 1963 film featuring a group of kids in monkey-masks riding their bikes to the park for a picnic. The kids are knocked out of the ride one by one due to careless or unsafe riding, except for one. In case you've never seen it, here it is:
Acknowledged by the Telegraph as a leading cycling journalist, John Stevenson 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 editor 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 and these days he lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.