Our live blog can sometimes be slow to load – please refresh your browser if it seems to be taking too long.
Live blog: Gran Fon … d’oh! – spectacular finish line crash at Italian event, Chris Hoy urges for cycling to be central to transport decisions, kid gets very own bike parking space + more
All today’s news from the site and beyond
Tue, Sep 25, 2018 14:03
Help us to bring you the best cycling content
If you’ve enjoyed this article, then please consider subscribing to road.cc from as little as £2.49. 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.
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.
8 Comments
Read more...
Read more...
Read more...
Latest Comments
Jakrayan 4 minutes ago
@Bungle_52 a close pass isn't automatically an offence as you say. However, on another occasion someone towing a caravan overtook my wife, who was about 20 metres behind me, on a very short straight forcing 3 oncoming car drivers to brake hard (the third one even came to a complete stop and you could see the brake lights in the video), swung in early and forced her into the gravel at the edge of the road - fortunately no kerb. They then overtook me, close pass and swung back in way too early again. So significant inconvenience and nearly caused oncoming drivers to crash and nearly put my wife into the hedge or even under the wheels of any cars behind. Pretty significant inconvenience IMHO. Kent plod sent a warning letter, no hint of a prosecution or even a driver education course 🤬
Smoggysteve 44 minutes ago
@mdavidford Yes there are lighter bikes and they are available, but if you were to take all restrictions off and allow brands to go even lighter - far lighter than is available now, there is a risk of 2 things. 1. bikes become so light and so brittle that they are not built to last and could become dangerous. 2. This could create a 2 tier system in the brands supplying frames. The mega brands like Specialized or Giant who are far bigger than someone like Wilier or even Colnago who are by no means as big as the some it then becomes a sport dictated more by tech than talent.
mdavidford 55 minutes ago
The actual title (as opposed to the captioned title) is even more irking (irkish? irkful?): "...a cyclists..."? - sort it out Danny!
mdavidford 1 hour ago
They might be, if there was a chance to pass safely, which there wasn't. They're not correct to delegitimise another road user proceeding entirely normally by implying, at length, that they're a nuisance and at fault, or to inculcate a sense of frustration in their learner at normal road use.
mdavidford 1 hour ago
But as you pointed out at the start of your comment, amateurs can *already* buy lighter bikes. And the UCI mandates that pro bikes have to be *available* to the public, but it doesn't go around forcing non-pros to buy them. Besides, I don't think anyone advocating for reducing or removing the weight limit is suggesting that there shouldn't be *any* standards - just that maybe there are better bases for it than weight. And I don't disagree that there may be a valid point there (leaving the question of whether a weight limit is the best way to achieve that to others to argue over). I was just questioning the suggestion that it's a non-issue because it only affects pros, when the discussion is in the context of pro sport in the first place.
mctrials23 1 hour ago
@Smoggysteve Replying to this comment because for some reason you can only go about 3 levels deep on comments now... Yes, sometimes carbon cracks or delaminates. Thats been happening for years at all price points and all types of carbon bikes. I haven't noticed that having any relationship with the weight of the frame or how high end it is though. Thats just an inherent risk in a process that has a heavy human component and perhaps not amazing QA in many places.
Smoggysteve 1 hour ago
@mctrials23 Yes bikes are brittle and carbon is easily broken - mostly down to accidental or misuse etc. But there are bikes that are breaking through normal use. Suddenly they just crack or delaminate. The closer to the limits you push these materials the more you will encounter this happening. As a consumer product thats not acceptable.
jackcycles 1 hour ago
"Undue hesitation" a very common cause of failing a driving test, and driving conservatively behind a cyclist where the examiner seems it possible to pass safely could cause it. The instructor is correct to point this out.
ttbkaboom 1 hour ago
It was this specific example of clickbait wasn't a life changing thing. Not the crash. Cheers
ttbkaboom 2 hours ago
It was this specific example of clickbait wasn't a life changing thing. Not the crash, which was horrible. Hopefully being a collarbone the surgery was straight forward and there won't be any lingering effects like with the horror crash he had in the Basque Country. Cheers
8 thoughts on “Live blog: Gran Fon … d’oh! – spectacular finish line crash at Italian event, Chris Hoy urges for cycling to be central to transport decisions, kid gets very own bike parking space + more”
“The incident was captured on
“The incident was captured on a video showing two men dressed in tweed and flat caps waving sticks and attempting to block the path of the cyclists on the A701 Edinburgh-Dumfries road near Broughton.” – I wonder what evidence would be acceptable to the PFO, then? I bet they’d have proceeded if it had been someone hitting cars with a stick.
I also bet they’d have
I also bet they’d have proceeded against the cyclists if someone had laid these two ruffians out.
Seems to be you get to about 65 and the law no longer applies to you. Look at all the driving cases where old people get away with hardly any punishment at all.
Kill a cyclist at 19 – send him down!
Kill a cyclist at 75 – unfortunate series of events. This has had a great impact upon the accused.
Yorkshire wallet wrote:
Well, I suppose its something to look forward to…
Facebook would be awash with
Facebook would be awash with chants of “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY!!!!” if this had been teenagers attacking people with sticks.
Reach 60 and you can do what the fuck you like.
StoopidUserName wrote:
There We Are Then,
StoopidUserName wrote:
There We Are Then,
Tour o’ the borders incident
Tour o’ the borders incident — I was there last year, in that first group; nobody got hit or hurt, a bunch of us got mildly inconvenienced by having to slow down for 30 seconds … a couple of guys were protesting against the road closures at harvest time and their perceived lack of community consultation. I don’t agree – but fair enough worth a shrug at best.
lead car saw them going past ahead of the cyclists and didn’t intervene or mediate
I don’t normally post or respond to provocations online – but I get increasingly frustrated how this ‘incident’ was and is portrait, in the local press and on sites like this one – not least by the organisers who seem to use the context well for some additional free promotion or their extremely lucrative event!
Quote:
Not just cycling: putting all forms of sustainable, non-motorcar transport at the centre of key decisions about infrastructure would be a good thing, rather than just designing layouts for cars and bolting on other structures as an afterthought, provided they don’t interfere with the core of the design. There really should be no need, in a city, for most of the motor vehicles to be there clogging up the roads.