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

Quote:

Speaking to the Evening Standard during a visit to London, he said: “Putting cycling right at the centre of any key decisions about any sort of transportation, or any type of infrastructure being put into place [will promote cycling in London].

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.

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!  

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. 

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.

"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.