Live blog: Ultra marathon athlete to RUN entire Tour de France route, Ian To targets LEJOG record, Mail pushes for Alliston perjury charge + more
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Mon, Feb 19, 2018 15:00
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Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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Latest Comments
quiff 28 minutes ago
Nick, brake to a stop. Now take your foot off the brake. No, don't put it on the accelerator. Now what speed are you doing? If it's more than 20, drive to a garage.
mdavidford 1 hour ago
@chrisonabike I think we probably do need a finer grained approach than power-of-ten speed limits, unless you're going to allow for fractional powers, which is going to put an excessive cognitive load on the poor old drivers...
mdavidford 2 hours ago
Were you always missing the first period?
chrisonabike 2 hours ago
@Rendel Harris indeed, but giving this a sympathetic reading it *is* a bit harder to see cyclists especially in low light conditions. I think this usually means "I was a bit startled when I noticed cyclists where not expecting them / so late that if I had needed to I wouldn't have had time for evasive action". That might be when unlit non-reflective cyclists appear from a side road - or where people are salmoning against traffic flow / on and off the footway. We all have tons of experience looking for motor vehicles and are familiar with where they'll be and how they will move. Cyclists are significantly smaller, have more complicated shapes and may not be exactly "where we expect the motor vehicles". They may be moving at unexpected velocities. Plus even if cars don't have their lights on they tend to reflect. I put this one in the "follow the opposite philosophy to 'shared space' for better safety" category. That is: safety between road users is enhanced when a) people can clearly see other road users b) and have as much time as possible to deal with them c) and know exactly where to expect them / what to expect from those other road users. Most humans perform very poorly when faced with the unfamiliar and worse when startled...
chrisonabike 3 hours ago
@ajuk.uk@gmail.com "There does seem to be evidence that 20 mph limits work on roads that already lend themselves to such low speeds, and I do think the lack of a 25 mph limit option is an issue for some roads." Again - not disagreeing that numbers alone are not the best way. But I ask: were people already doing 20mph or near that when those roads that "lend themselves" to that speed had a 30mph sign? I would expect in most cases the answer was "no, people saw thirty and that primed them for the 'expected' speed". Or perhaps "they hadn't noticed the signs at all but it seemed like e.g. a residential area and they recalled from all those years back 30mph probably made sense"? Since we've previously gone through the evidence * that merely changing a number on a sign *does* in fact change behaviour and lower average speeds, and AFAICS nobody has proposed a "a set amount" they hope it will constrain people to ... ... is it fair you're disputing the evidence because it doesn't fit with how you feel it *should* work / your local experience? Or do you believe that eventually everyone will revert back to the old speed or higher because 'freedom' or because nobody's actually getting nicked for ignoring the limit? (And if the latter - what's the point of proposing that the speed limits should help with policing, if there aren't the police?) While I can believe that the truly reckless and *some* less circumspect wrong'uns are more likely also to wildly speed, I think this assertion needs more scrutiny **. As for "forcing the police to target them" I think it's been amply illustrated on this site that many of the police don't feel forced into doing much if any enforcement on the roads (see wtjs etc.). Even where they are more active the level of enforcement isn't such to make many drivers worry about "what happens if I break the law *and* get caught?" I don't feel we need 25 or 32 or other intermediate speed limits. In practice where there's enforcement at all there *may* be the discretionary 10% + a few mph in play - so you might even be fine and not fined doing 35mph in a 30mph limit. But you're far more likely simply not to experience any enforcement. And even if you are detected it's still first chance, then maybe any number of 2nd, 3rd etc. with a reasonable lawyer / sympathetic magistrate. Although if you feel the most important thing is to identify indifferent drivers (and assuming we've got enough police / cameras / "spy in the car" black boxes from somewhere) then having lots of non-power-of-ten speed limit signs might be a way to spot who's paying attention or not. Or ... if we changed to km/h (imagine!) you get a finer-grained 10 / 20 / 30 etc. * The last time this topic came up, or the time before! ** I don't know if anyone has studied this, but I'm not sure of the relative amounts of harm caused by a) a small minority of reckless joyriders and "sod getting a licence" types (who *are* very likely to cause serious harm) and b) vastly more "average reasonable drivers" - who are human and thus cut corners and sometimes make unfathomable errors - who cause damage (up to killing people and destroying buildings) at a small but definitely non-zero rate overall. It wouldn't surprise me if the overall determinant of harm turned out to be simply proportional to the number of drivers times time driven for times some measure of speed. (Since speed reduces both time to do something about a situation and increases the harm, absent a lot of engineering to mitigate it - e.g. evidence shows motorways are statistically safe environments).
belugabob 3 hours ago
Now the wands are gone, I look forward to the cycling lanes being cleaned regularly - and not parked in (thereby leaving plenty of room for the buses and emergency vehicles) (all to delivered before Coventry win the FA cup again)
chrisonabike 3 hours ago
@perce everyone should wear lights, full stop. And punctuate properly - that really gets up my colon! Anyway, must dash...
perce 3 hours ago
@Ojisan My old English teacher told me i had to work on my punctuation, so I started going to school half an hour earlier.
60somethingcyclist 4 hours ago
Arrogant obnoxious Tory.
Rendel Harris 4 hours ago
How do you see them then? Do you regularly drive into black cars?
12 thoughts on “Live blog: Ultra marathon athlete to RUN entire Tour de France route, Ian To targets LEJOG record, Mail pushes for Alliston perjury charge + more”
I was in Nottingham on
I was in Nottingham on Saturday. I thought the roads where I live in Northampton were bad. But Nottingham was much, much worse.
If only the Daily Mail could
If only the Daily Mail could use its power and influence for doing some good instead of pushing a fear inspired agenda of hate…
At the end of the day he got
At the end of the day he got convicted so his experience (or lack of) counted for nothing anyway.
Odd one perjury as basically if you lose your case then what they are saying is they didn’t believe you…so surely you’ve perjured yourself by losing your case anyway.
Yorkshire wallet wrote:
Exactly. Surely every defendant who pleads not guilty and is found guilty is a perjurer. Unless the prosecution are perjurers.
racyrich wrote:
I haven’t looked it up but I thought you entered your plea before you were sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth etc. etc… therefore perjury doesn’t apply to your plea.
Mark.
racyrich wrote:
Next they’ll charge him with not taking the sentence with a smile.
Yorkshire wallet wrote:
Not really, the jury’s duty is to weigh up conflicting accounts presented by prosecution and defence and decided which account is correct; both sides can believe their evidence is true, Aliston can believe the collisison was unavoidale, the prosecution alleged it wasn’t, the jury went with the prosecution. It’s only perjury if you gave an account which you know wasn’t true, for example if Aliston had said he wasn’t there at all. Generally, as far as I’m aware, prosecutions for perjury only tend to occur if a defendant (e.g. jeffrey Archer) was exonerated on the basis of something which later proved to be a palpable lie. Any lies told during the process of being fond guilty are taken, I think, to be punished by the sentencing, for example people who admit guilt immediately tend to have that taken into account.
But even if Aliston did perjure himself it’s in relation to such a tiny matter – exaggerating his couriering experience – that it’s clearly politically motivated, as was the whole case, which received more media attention than any number of drink drivers killing people. Shameful abuse of the judicial system to hammer an anti-cycling agenda.
So how many 10,000’s of
So how many 10,000’s of drivers are gonna get investigated for perjury then?
Thought so.
StoopidUserName wrote:
Exactly: I wonder exactly how many of those “my client is totally remorseful and needs to keep their driving licence otherwise their wife will leave them, their kids will turn to drugs, and they’ll lose their job, just before the sky falls in”-type pleas are actually a load of foetid dingoes kidneys…?
Is that not perjury too?
Speed-bumps on a shared-use
Speed-bumps on a shared-use path to slow down cycles? Is it April 1st already?
Why don’t they copy the UK and just put loads of broken glass over shared-use paths – that’ll slow down the bikes even more.
Imagine how much better a
Imagine how much better a place the UK would be without the Mail, Sun, Star, Express
This perjury “investigation”
This perjury “investigation” by the Daily Mail is another example of the hypocrisy and double standards which ran through the coverage of the case. See
https://rdrf.org.uk/2017/08/21/the-charlie-alliston-case-the-real-story/ and