Italian bike porn now on road.cc

Finally some proper Gravel for the UCI World Championships! …no dates in the article. Racing starts today 10/11 Oct. Watch it free on SBS 6pm Go well Matt…

@Aluminium can - as an alternative to vans, yes cargo bikes (plenty in Cambridge), and I've been wondering whether supplies could be delivered from retailers - using delivery robots. and it's possible I suppose that ladders could fall in the same category - you could, instead of just hiring a bicycle, hire a ladder and it would arrive of its own accord.

... and we still had apostrophe rationing.

@Rendel Harris There was a bit in the bicycle hating Guardian, a nice little read, part of his justification was to acclimatise to the heat and humidity, which if he was in a better car might have been worth it. Good luck to him, chapeau.

@SecretSam That's not really fair, in fact not fair at all. It wasn't his fault that the last two mountain stages were shortened and on the first one he had dropped everyone and was a minute clear as he summitted the Iseran when the stage was neutralised, and on the second he stayed with or dropped all the other GC contenders. You seem to have forgotten his Giro win as well as Paris Nice and the Tour de Suisse. Only the fourth rider to have won the Tour and Giro before the age of twenty-five. Yes he probably couldn't have stayed with Pogacar even if he hadn't had the awful crash, and probably nor could any other rider in history except perhaps Merckx.

@lesterama Bernal has had two whammys. His crash, which he has probably never fully recovered from and Ineos taking a nosedive. They have no focus and no identity.

@Zermattjohn Read the comment I posted about my experience

I bought some Challenge Strada tyres. After a while the sidewalls began to detach from the tyre and the tread became rippled making them unsafe to use. The shop I bought them from asked me to drop them in and he would show the Challenge rep as he was due in the following week. The rep bizarrely firstly claimed that the tyres had failed because they may have been punctured (they hadn’t), then immediately claimed that they had failed because the rear tyre was more worn than the front! I emailed pictures to Challenge and was told they had failed because they had been fitted incorrectly. The black strip they had introduced to stop the issue I had was supposed to be above the rim. Which it clearly was shown to be correct on the pictures I sent to them which proved that the tyres were correctly fitted. This seems to be the norm now in the cycle industry, if there is an issue with a product, the company automatically blames the end user rather than look to address the issue, thereby pissing the customer off. A pissed off customer rarely returns.

@kingleo And there are hundreds, if not thousands of people holding up a shattered helmet saying it saved their life, the doctor/policeman told me.

I spend a month most years in China because of family, and a cargo bike there with an electric motorbike style front end and either LFP or advanced lead acid batteries, costs under £100 and is the backbone of every trade. There are a hundred different kinds but what they share in common is functionality and cheapness. Even the ancient pedal pulled wooden wagons with literally welded spokes from the sixties have been electrified with e-motors attached to the underside - and they cost sod all. In China cheap transport for business is a public good like drinking water. Because to get people to work you have to make work affordable. That's a secret of capitalism we in the UK could do better to learn.