Live blog: Who’ll be the 500,000th cyclist on the Embankment Cycle Superhighway? and much more

@Aluminium can and even if the camera identifies the thief, the police won't do a great deal. My bike was stolen from our work lockup, all seen by CCTV, and the police knew who it was (a well-known local by all accounts) but the policeman admitted to me that gaining a warrant to search his address for it was never going to be granted. Bicycle theft is treated with about the same urgency as phone snatching. The copper told me that they want to get these guys arrested for crimes that will get them put away, like drug dealing. Nicking stuff to fund the drug dealing falls outside that. (This was all revealed to me by the cop in a strange, Friday-evening email that I think he sent after a few beers!).

@mdavidford I suppose 'illegal e-motorbike' would be acceptable. I do still think "illegal e-motorbike" specifically conjures up images of Sur-rons and the like. Sometimes that is correct - certainly for the bikes in the top picture on the Police Scotland facebook post, I'd be perfectly comfortable calling them all illegal e-motorbikes. But I think "illegal ebike" is a broader church and is more understandable when talking about the end of the spectrum that is closer to a legal EAPC. E.g. ebikes that are illegal because they have a throttle but aren't especially fast or especially powerful (commonly used by delivery riders round here). Legally they are not classified any differently from "illegal e-motorbikes" and so that term is technically accurate, but linguistically I think "illegal ebike" paints a clearer picture.

Helmet impact testing only involves a head? Looking at videos of testing appears to confirm this. Presumably this is taken into account somehow in the methodology, but it seems like having such a small mass attached to the helmet, rather than a whole human, is an obvious flaw in the process.

@lesterama I have one of each as I couldn't decide :)

I was just reading on the BBC website about the Lear ebike that got iced up at 30000 feet, dived to ground level in about 90 sec and crashed in flames, at a speed estimated at well over 57 mph in a Florida carpark. It is amazing that no motorists or pedestrians were injured or killed. The lycra clad lout cyclist presumably fled, as they could not be found at the crash scene.

@Paul J or 'English English' seems similar to our Gaelic 'polis', our nick name for cops, is original I believe, but its all Greek to me

In other news, any helmet you actually wear is always better than one you don't... Truism, but it often gets lost in the wash...

Fairlight or Mason? One of them will probably be my next bike.

@OnYerBike "legally it applies to any non-EAPC ebike" I assume you mean an Electricaly Assisted Pedal Cycle (EAPC) that conforms to the EAPC Regulations 1983 . . . , rather that an EAPC that doesn't (ie. one legally considered to be a motorbike).

@mark1212123 "You know how as a society we pay workers to do things that makes our lives easier, maybe we could reimburse motornormatives £20ph to become aware of the dangers and problems they pose?" Well currently all taxpayers are effectively paying motorists *not* to be aware, as although I believe the motoring-specific taxes cover "the road budget" (or did several years ago when I looked) they don't cover the "externalities of motoring" eg. the "off-budget costs" *. Like other "costs" eg. schools, keeping older people alive, art etc. we could say "we're all happy to pay, because we just love mass motoring for convenience, even though it's the source of many complaints and some deaths". We implicitly do, and we're often prepared for a few *others* to be KSI for "progress", so I'm not sure that the public would reject that if it was spelled out in that way. OTOH once people have had the chance to experience a different way (at least in urban areas) the results (from many places now) consistently show they don't want to go back to "traffic in towns" even if that means less motor convenience! * Not counted by design I think, although some say it's because they're too hard to quantify or "nebulous". Plenty of studies have tried though, and suggested that overall motoring is a net cost to everyone.