Road cop tells close pass driver to hand in licence (video); Journo stumbles across his nicked bike; Zwift does UK crap infra; Telegraph cites ‘safety fears’ over lack of helmets on Bikestormz rides; €200 fine for killing cyclist + more on the live blog
SUMMARY
Alex Dowsett spots 'a toilet for cyclists' down under
If all you know is pedalling, this loo is for you…
Latest Peter Sagan collection drops from Specialized
The brand new Sagan edition S-Works Venge is here, called ‘Deconstructivism’ as Specialized have ‘broken down’ the rainbow stripes won by their main man and made the frame in a stealthy colourway that shimmers bright green in the sunlight: “A reminder of Peter’s unprecedented success at Le Tour”, say Specialized.
It’s disc brake only and comes with a CeramicSpeed bottom bracket, priced at £3,900 for the frameset. For now only the Venge frameset will be available in the UK from the Sagan collection, with more coming later in the year – head over to the Specialized website for more info.
'Those who ride bicycles in the road don't deserve human rights' Facebook group plays anti-cycling bingo
Spotted by road.cc reader Richard Burton, the post above sums this Facebook page up and we’re not 100% sure if it’s serious or not… but it’s good to know that the comments section appears to be almost 50/50, maybe even 60/40 people who are attempting to correct the author’s misunderstandings vs those who are lapping the untruths up.
It has numerous parallels with the infamous ‘Drivers for Registration of Cyclists’ group (now shut down) that was the subject of a fascinating feature by our friends at Cycling Tips. We’ll of course send a quick message to the admin of this page and see what they have to say, but in the meantime the link is above if you really fancy joining the ‘debate’…
Rapha launch new RCC membership model for 2020
The retailer’s new RCC membership is now live, which gives customers access to a number of benefits including early access to new Rapha gear and end-of-season sales, signature club kit, basic injury insurance, half price coffee at Rapha Clubhouses and hire of Canyon bikes from Clubhouse locations.
The prices have fluctuated over the years and were as high as £135 a year, but the new 2020 price is now £70 annually… if you live near one of the 23 Rapha Clubhouses worldwide and really really like their coffee, you might even make that back without even tapping into the other benefits. If you want to find out more and/or join, the link is here.
Chris Boardman and Andy Burnham launch report and call for funding for 1,800 mile Bee Network
Greater Manchester’s Cycling and Walking Commissioner and its Mayor today called on the government to commit to funding for the proposed 1,800 mile Bee Network, which they say will lead to 1 million more emission-free journeys by 2040. The 38 page long report includes a full design plan, a detailed breakdown of costs, health, environmental and economic benefits and the plan’s long-term potential.
Chris Boardman says a £160 million investment from the government’s Transforming Cities Fund will kick-start the delivery, with £1.5 billion needed over 10 years: “This investment would return a benefit of at least four to one, returning £6 billon in public benefits. To put this in context, enabling a whole city-region to change the way they travel and tackle the health, social and air quality crisis will cost the same as the amount already committed to a single junction improvement scheme in Bedford.
“We know which investment will return the best outcome for the UK and, ultimately, our species. We cannot afford to wait any longer to make the change in how we travel. Greater Manchester is ready to change itself and, in doing so, create an example for a nation. As Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself has said, “It’s the right thing to do.”
The curse of the Vuelta a San Juan continues as a dog causes a crash on stage 2
Yesterday we brought you footage of a intellectually challenged man causing a mass pile-up by allegedly touching a rider’s handlebars on stage 1 of Vuelta a San Juan in Argentina… and on stage 2 yesterday, it seems a rogue dog was to blame for this latest collision. It happened earlier in the race this time so as far as we know, the race continued as normal when all riders were back on their bikes.
The stage was won by Fernando Gaviria of team UAE Emirates in a sprint finish, not before another nasty crash shortly before the end in which Gaviria’s teammates were involved… this race is cursed!
Etapa / Stage 2
🇦🇷 El infortunio de una caída alteró al pelotón entrando al último giro del circuito pocitano. Los lanzadores de Fernando Gaviria se ven involucrados.
🇬🇧 A fall affected the peloton in the last turn in Pocito. Gaviria’s sprinters are involved. pic.twitter.com/cXpo7B7MxZ
— Vuelta a San Juan OK (@vueltasanjuanok) January 27, 2020
That Niner gravel bike...
Describe in three words… pic.twitter.com/4oNtS8x2rx
— david arthur (@davearthur) January 27, 2020
Reminds me of the Quagga…
Meet the quagga, an extinct subspecies of zebra with only half the stripes! 🦓😲 #QI pic.twitter.com/A6qaxSdsdO
— BBC Two (@BBCTwo) October 28, 2019
€200 fine for fatally injuring a cyclist.
The car driver who fatally injured Andreas Byskov Sarbo in the 2019 Tour de Himmelfart was sentenced to … a fine of 1500 DKK (~200 €).https://t.co/csSr3kjKln
— Lukas Knöfler (@lukascph) January 28, 2020
A motorist in Denmark who killed an 18-year-old cyclist taking part in a time trial at the Tour de Himmelfart last May when she drove on the course of the race has been fined just €200 for ignoring traffic instructions, but was acquitted of manslaughter.
Witnesses said that the driver, a 28-year-old woman, ignored the instructions of marshals and multiple warning signs as she drove along the course for 1 kilometre against the direction of the race, before hitting Andreas Byskov Sarbo head-on.
Speaking to Feltet.dk, former police assistant, Jørgen Faber Sørensen suggested that this sets a dangerous precedent that would allow motorists to get away with killing a rider, if they can prove that the race signage was adequate.
The decision may be subject to an appeal in a higher court.
Bicycles are more dangerous than cars according to this amazing logic
Some massive brain comments coming out today. Bicycles are more dangerous than cars at the same speed apparently. pic.twitter.com/FZbUglZX8e
— Sam – Wand Orca Enthusiast (@MCRCycleSam) January 28, 2020
I don’t even know where to start with this one. The logic (or lack of it) is outstanding.
'Cyclists dismount' sign appears on Bristol-Bath cycle path. Council quickly remove it.
😡 Vigilante 🚳sign appears on the Bristol-Bath #railwaypath (NCN4) near Whitehall Primary School. @BristolCouncil – can you remove it? pic.twitter.com/0E2uMOWNwU
— A Bristol Cyclist 🚲 (@CyclistBristol) January 28, 2020
Looks like this sign that appeared outside a primary school was put up by a local . One commenter gave the decidedly shoddy effort a “3/10, must try harder”.
Maybe is was an art project designed by one of the kids on Paint?
'You are what you eat'
You‘re what you eat. So what do professional cyclists eat?
Valverde: Good wine, gets better by age.
Porte: Ice cream, Always good when it is hot.
De Gendt: Pizza, Ever had bad Pizza? Unbeatable on a good day, still awesome on a bad day.
Campenaerts: Knifes, aero as a knife— Gino Mäder (@maedergino) January 28, 2020
We’d probably be something like a wedding cake. Looks fancy, but hiding a stodgy middle. Not as good as good as it could be.
Telegraph article describes 'helmet-free youngsters riding alongside police officers' in One Show segment on Bikestormz... and fail to mention what they're doing is perfectly legal
The Telegraph article, titled ‘Cycling trend backed by Stormzy and featured on The One Show sparks safety fears’, says that the One Show’s coverage of the Bikestormz youth movement resulted in a backlash, mostly because the youngsters featured were not wearing helmets.
Bikestormz rideouts often involve youths riding en masse in urban areas: “We’re trying to get the youth, like me, into riding bikes and not joining gangs, doing drugs”, says a young boy in The One Show segment.
The Telegraph article says that footage shows ‘helmet-free youngsters riding alongside police officers’, but fails to mention that they were not actually breaking the law by forgoing protective headgear. They quote Catherine Maddy of brain injury association Headway, who says: “We know how easy it can be to sustain a life-changing brain injury as a result of a cycling accident.
“Our position is based on key peer-reviewed research and expert opinion from leading neurosurgeons, coupled with the commonsense approach that wearing a cycle helmet will offer greater protection to one’s fragile skull than not wearing one.
“Our message to all cyclists is please use your head, use a helmet.”
Alternatively, Cycling UK say they are opposed to mandatory helmets and helmet promotion campaigns in their headline message on their website: “Neither enforced helmet laws nor promotion campaigns have been shown to reduce serious head injuries, except by reducing cycling. The remaining cyclists do not gain any detectable reduction in risk, and they may lose some of the benefits from ‘safety in numbers’.
“So instead of focusing on helmets, health and road safety professionals and others should promote cycling as a safe, normal, aspirational and enjoyable activity, using helmet-free role-models and imagery. Individual cyclists may sometimes choose to use helmets, either for confidence or because of the type of cycling they are doing. However, they should not feel under any pressure to wear them. For the sake of our health, it is more important to encourage people of all ages to cycle, than to make an issue of whether they use a helmet when doing so.”
Zwift sticks lamp post in middle of the road
A bit of extra authenticity for anyone whose tried riding on some of the poorer cycling ‘infrastructure’ in the UK …
Even virtual city planners get things wrong. Lamp post in the middle of the road on @GoZwift pic.twitter.com/WLUTjyANDT
— Rich Wood (@bigrichwood) January 28, 2020
Plymouth journalist stumbles across his stolen bike – and gets it back
A Plymouth journalist has written of how he stumbled across his stolen bike – and managed to retrieve it.
Max Channon says the bike, which he bought for £50 a couple of years ago and refers to in his article as Crap Bike MK 1, was stolen a couple of weeks ago outside Plymouth Live’s offices.
He then bought another bike, Crap Bike MK 2, “on a certain social media market place for £30* and tried not to think too much about the fate of poor Crap Bike MK I.”
A tyre on the replacement bike punctured, and he took it to Halfords to be fixed and said that on his way there to pick it up at lunchtime “the planets aligned and fate threw a bike-shaped spanner in the works.”
He wrote: “There, chained up somewhere I most definitely had not left it – with a lock that wasn’t mine – was Crap Bike MK I.”
He decided to wait it out and see what happened, and while he was waiting for 101 to be answered so he could finally report the theft, “a gentleman I have never seen before produced a key and began unlocking Crap Bike MK I.”
“I stuffed my phone into my pocket and barked: ‘That’s my bike!’,” he said.
“Said gentleman looked a little surprised (but not that surprised) that an angry middle-aged man who knows lots of swear words was claiming ownership of the bike he was about to unlock.
“The gentleman claimed he’d bought Crap Bike MK I for £10 at ‘the Sunday market by the train station’ – but handed over Crap Bike MK I, and disappeared pretty sharpish.”
He added: “Thus concludes the remarkable tale of how I got my stolen bike back by accident (or fate) – and ended up with two crap bikes.
“Does anyone want to buy a crap bike?”
*The fact that there’s a pretty strong chance that a bike being sold online for £30 had also been nicked from its rightful owner wasn’t mentioned.
Road cop advises close pass driver to hand in their licence
Twitter user JoolzP who is based in East Kilbride, Scotland, posted a video to Twitter last night that showed a BMW driver making a very close pass on her.
And while it didn’t happen on his patch, Sergeant Dan Pascoe of the Surrey Police Roads Policing Team – whom you may know are very proactive on Twitter in highlighting cases of bad driving, and dispelling myths about cyclists and the law – had some great advice for the motorist, telling them to turn in their driving licence.
Helpfully, he also included the address to which it should be sent.
If anyone thinks what the BMW does is sensible, safe or in line with that is expected of a competent driver, please send your licence to:
DVLA, Swansea, SA99 1AB.
Include a cover letter explaining that your no longer safe to hold a licence.Thank you. https://t.co/pqmkUNFNWW
— Sgt Dan Pascoe (@Broadsword999) January 28, 2020
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... 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.
@Zermattjohn handmade genuinely means handmade with Challenge. You cannot compare ride quality of a mass produced, vulcanized Panaracer tyre with these. The ride quality is incredibly supple, and can transform a riding experience. More expensive yes, but worth every penny!
@SecretSam 2019 Tour (don't see anyone else putting their hand up to say they won it), 2021 Giro, 2019 Paris-Nice, 2019 Tour de Suisse, 2018 Tour of California. So I'd say Lesterama is about right with his burned bright comment.
19 thoughts on “Road cop tells close pass driver to hand in licence (video); Journo stumbles across his nicked bike; Zwift does UK crap infra; Telegraph cites ‘safety fears’ over lack of helmets on Bikestormz rides; €200 fine for killing cyclist + more on the live blog”
When a government takes away
When a government takes away some rights, such as freedom of movement, it is always a spur to those who want even more rights taken away (from people other than them, of course.)
And today’s golden crowbar
And today’s golden crowbar award goes to…
Psu pedal foot down?
Push pedal foot down?
Quote:
I’d like to think this will turn out to be some Nathan Barley ‘too satirical for you’ type site, but…
Remind me again – irrational hatred of random people because of their chosen mode of transport isn’t a hate crime because…?
I can’t be arsed with cretins
I can’t be arsed with cretins like the ones responsible for this Facebook page, so I reported it for hate speech, hopefully a few others will as well, and this one will be flushed down the proverbial Facebook toilet fairly soon.
Quote:
The parents at that school – if it’s the one I think it is – are always having a go at the cyclists using the Railway Path. Problem is that they have to come out of the school and cross the Path, and it isn’t a real road so they don’t see any need to check before crossing. Granted, some (but not all, and not even most) cyclists do go fast along there, but there are (there seem to be) constant calls for speed bumps, zebra crossings, etc.
how has this not made Road.cc
how has this not made Road.cc news yet?
https://www.facebook.com/groups/stopkillingcyclists/permalink/2474192356164995/
incredible really, can only be good if you’re anti car I think
Who would have thought that
Who would have thought that the Torygraph would be so pro-helmet?
Personally, I think Stormzy is doing a great job getting kids to connect with cycling instead of fighting each other.
No surprise they went to a
No surprise they went to a head injury campaign group who, surprise surprise, are pro-helmet.
They should be speaking with Cycling UK who could give them info on the actual cycing risk (low) or Carlton Reid who’ll gladly point out that it’s vehicle occupants who should have compulsory helmets as they are at a far far greater risk of head injury. That’s where Headway should focus its energy.
Driving, walking, stair use
Driving, walking, stair use and especially showering helmets, come on Headway, they are all a commonsense approaches.
The headway spokesperson is
The headway spokesperson is so predictable. How about the thousands of head injuries suffered by the occupations of motor vehicles who end a drain on our nhs, they never have anything to say about that do they.
Oh yeah, I got on to the
Oh yeah, I got on to the filter list host for adblock and got them to sort out the comments section, so you’ll be able to see them now with adblock
I went out for a llittle ride
I went out for a llittle ride this afternoon, bit parky. I had waited for the hail to pass.
Got to the top of Caversham, Gravel Hilled it as the bridleway up would have been far too filthy. I saw 15-20, maybe more, Red Kites circleing around and catching thermals and wind currents. Never seen so many, I have been impressed by seeing 5 at a go.
What are they all living on?
Also, I thought that today was as good as any to remove my seatposts from the bikes, clean and grease, and insert. Better to do it before they seize in there for ever.
I’m not sure which article
I’m not sure which article this was apropos to, but this was pretty zen, and a bit of a change to all the close passes and helmet arguments. We all need to regrease our nuts from time to time.
We have to be relevant now?
We have to be relevant now?
Sheeeeet……
If the Beemer driver doesn’t
If the Beemer driver doesn’t hand in their licence, the justice system should remove it forever.
That was pretty awful. I
That was pretty awful. I could see the barriers coming towards me too.
I reported that group and
I reported that group and Facebook do not feel that the cycling hate group goes against their community ‘standards’
They just advise blocking it.
Yep – Zwift definitely got
Yep – Zwift definitely got that wrong – they should’ve painted a little white diamond around the base of the post.