Please give our live blog a little time to load up, as sometimes it can take a few seconds. If that doesn’t work, try refreshing the page.


Please give our live blog a little time to load up, as sometimes it can take a few seconds. If that doesn’t work, try refreshing the page.
If you’ve enjoyed this article, then please consider subscribing to road.cc from as little as £1.99. Our mission is to bring you all the news that’s relevant to you as a cyclist, independent reviews, impartial buying advice and more. Your subscription will help us to do more.
I'm in the happy position of agreeing with everybody here! I've never considered a bike with a stand, yet I'm impressed by the ingenuity and adaptability of this axle. I tow a Yak Bob with a Robert Axle, employing my El Cheapo Vitus gravel bike and I just have to be very careful where I stop. Hedges are generally a dead loss, and I seek walls, telegraph poles and signposts and generally lean the widest part of the Bob against it. One very awkward task is removing the two steel pins which lock the trailer arms onto the special mounting slots on the Robert axle, and when you have one out, the sodding weight in the trailer can twist the whole caboodle and bend the Bob fitting before you can get the other out and unhitch. I doubt if a stand would help with that. You can imagine that this combo is a real pain when you have to get it over the bridge at railway stations, and it nearly resulted in Merseyrail nearly parting me and the trailer on the platform from the bike on the train. It's a long story for another time. Another axle example recently featured on here, with a 12mm front axle bearing the Herculean weight limit of a monster American front rack.
This has nothing to do with the type of bike - it's the type of behaviour that's the problem. Banning the sale of such bikes will not curtail the behaviour. They'll just find another type of vehicle and continue to drive dangerously as there's such a lack of enforcement. I'd sooner see them ban the bally. But really, all that's required is an improvement to roads policing.
The EAPC Bill is welcome, but full of holes. What's to stop an overpowered but temporarily limited e-bike being sold and subsequently delimited? This is often a trivial process.
@KiwiMike Yeah, in my over four decades of riding all over Europe I've never 'been for a ride in the countryside'. That must be it. Or, and I know this is a wild concept, you just accept that I just voiced my personal experiences and never missed a kickstand, like I wrote. Anyway, what's the big horror of laying your bike on its side for the very few occasions where there is nothing to lean your bike against?
They may have looked, but did they see?
Ds2025: where they are going wrong is that they are crushing the motorbike rather than the person sat on top of it. If they did the latter this issue would be solved in less than 24 hours.
I came this way today with the car boot sale in operation. There was a marshal at the entrance, who stopped a car turning right across the cycleway as I was approaching. So that certainly works. I think it necessary for the marshal to be there, I couldn't say if the driver would have turned if he hadn't been there but you always have to suspect the worst. Unfortunately there is no marshal at the exit, and there was certainly a car stopped across the cycleway as I was approaching it. But he pulled onto the road before I reached it, and the following car stayed off the cycleway as I went through. Ideally there should have been a marshal there too. On the whole, though, it's a really high standard piece of infrastructure. Just a pity it doesn't extend a bit further.
“absolute carnage” So right! Just look at the bodies piled up, blood running in the gutters and injured people limping away. It's a bit of a problem with a road, delaying some people for minutes at a time: it isn't carnage, let alone 'absolute carnage'. Anyone who exaggerates so ridiculously really shouldn't be allowed to comment in public, unless they want to demonstrate their idiocy to all and sundry.
I'm criticising them for not riding in secondary position, not primary. At least 60cms (2 feet) from the edge of the road as the HC explicitly recommends. Leaving aside the small minority of riders who find mounting and dismounting a bike difficult - which sounds suspiciously similar to the motorists "but, but what about disabled drivers?" when talking about LTNs - what's wrong with able bodied riders walking the few metres over that narrow, Victorian bridge? Sure, if there's clearly no-one on it I wouldn't condemn anyone for riding it slowly, but if it's not clear forcing pedestrians to stop and squeeze to the side is, frankly, a rather entitled opinion. Plus it's easy to hold a road bike a little ahead of you and hold the saddle - normally no need to hold the bars if it's straight - so you're really not taking up much more room at all. There's a railway underpass near me that links to a shared then segregated path. It's narrow, and the path approaches at an angle so you can't see if it's clear, but many riders still choose to pedal through despite the clear 'no cycling' signage. Why?? Personally I don't go that way, except on foot, preferring the surrounding roads.
I think you're giving drivers too much credit. Many would not think twice about blocking the road if it makes their life easier, such as when turning right onto a busy road.
6 thoughts on “Live blog: Connor Swift gets a custom Genesis Zero SL to celebrate National Champs victory, Team Sky reveal full Tour of Britain line-up (with one small error), Cavendish battling Epstein-Barr virus +more”
Had to google what EBV is. So
Had to google what EBV is. So that you don’t have to – its the cause of glandular fever.
CygnusX1 wrote:
-nm-
Yes, the Dutch have two words
Yes, the Dutch have two words, fietsen and wielrennen. ‘I wish this was more openly talked about…’ Really? I wasn’t aware it was some big secret.
I suspect the distinction is highlighted by people who want to differentiate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ types of cycling. Of course the good type is the slow one that they personally do.
A lot of us ride road bikes for leisure and an everyday bike to the shops. It’s all cycling.
Sad to see a number of
Sad to see a number of cyclists in the Macron visit to Copenhagen wearing helmets seems to have increased. Is this just an aberration of the video or are more wearing them now then a few years ago?
In a TedX talk in 2016 Michael Colville-Andersen explained (in pretty robust language) how manufacturers have helmets to sell so ramped up ‘project fear’ to increase sales in Denmark. The result was an increase in helmet sales but a significant drop in people cycling. If this correlation is correct that is a pretty depressing way to do things.
darrenleroy wrote:
Danish government and indeed the EU road safety commission have been pushing to increase helmet wearing as the solution to cycling injuries/deaths. The EU ‘safety’ commission even use Denmark and Netherlands in a disgusting slant of stats to ‘prove’ cycling was more dangerous than the UK by using deaths per million population and thus making the case that that was due to low helmet use and that the obvious answer was to encourage more helmet wearing.
It’s a fucking disgrace how this supposed ‘safety’ commission can use these facts to massively distort the truth and to be allowed to push the problem/onus of safety back onto the vulnerable. it’s like they have some sort of an agenda and utterly ignored the fact that cycling in DK and NL massively exceeds that in the UK and other countries. Helmet wearing in places like Germany is huge and yet they have 400 cycling deaths a year, despite the larger population their miles travelled is still much less than NL as a total.
Macron in Danemark also said
Macron in Danemark also said that we (OK I’m french) are “reluctant to change, gallic people”. That can only mean one of two things:
– since he also cycled there, cyclist OTOH are open-minded, modern people, whatever french or not
or
– he’s got a brit counselor 😉