Live blog: Woet Poels takes a wrong turn (video); cycling to work might be better for you than driving – who knew? (+ more)

You can't pull a wheelie? Riding hands free evades you? They signal a largely misspent youth and aren't anything to be proud of...much!

Having shopped a few times in Spalding, my main thoughts on leaving a shop are "That was crap. Where to next? There are no decent shops, and the award winning independent book and coffee shop has closed!" By the way, I'm a keen shopper myself and don't want to discourage shopping.

@Clem Fandango "We don't want to discourage cycling, we just want to stop people doing it," she said.

@Clem Fandango Imagine if instead of the tired refrain of "as a cyclist myself.. [spouts anti-cycling BS]" councillors shared their Strava / Komoot activity before making any cycling related proposals. It smacks of the deluded entitlement, albeit to a much lesser degree, as 70 y/o men legislating for women's reproductive health. No opinion is entirely invalid, but lived experience and/or extensive unbiased research makes some opinions more valid than others

@hawkinspeter Isn't the whole road.cc comments section the Mass of the Fermenting Dregs, at least in the eyes of certain commenters?

Yes - they look like the sort she'd be worried about.

@hawkinspeter - oooh Mol. Must be Tom Boonen's current hustle?

“We don’t want to discourage cycling – I am a cyclist myself.........,” she said. Busted.

The death of this young lad is a tragedy, and my thoughts are with his family. While Adam Hansen is right about the system used to control external traffic on a race, his comments about helmets are misplaced. “One thing we have to look at is helmets,” Hansen said. “They need a major upgrade. Bike helmets only need to meet standard testing like all helmets, EU standard CE EN 1078 is only rated for 19.5kph and I do not believe this is enough for road racing.” He's right that the standard is insufficient for road racing, but it is also insufficient for daily use, as all the reliable data shows that they don't reduce deaths. We don't know what the collision speed was in this incident, but assuming that the driver was doing 50kph and Finlay was doing something similar, a combined speed of 100kph, there is no helmet on earth that would have prevented the death. Even if such a helmet existed, it seems likely that other injuries would have been serious enough to have caused death. Another problem is that any helmet that could prevent brain damage in a 100kph collision would be the size of a transit van and weigh about the same, completely impractical to use. I haven't looked at the figures recently, but last time I did, the helmet rule for professional riders hadn't reduced the death rate, with the obvious caveat that the figures are too small to be reliable. I can understand Adam Hansen's immediate reaction to the needless waste of a young life, I hope calmer reflection will lead to the problems with the system being addressed, not a futile attempt to make helmets effective.

@Clem Fandango - I feel like some of the bands at ArcTanGent belong in this discussion