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Fire.
Fire.
Will be geting my fifth finishers medal tomorow dinnertime.Nice one. Good luck.
I think this’ll be my fourth. I’ll be aiming for lunch-time, but it’s not a race (must keep repeating that to myself as I normally fall into over-taking mode and go much too quickly for my stamina and end up collapsing after a cider on the beach). The weather looks fantastic for today.
I’ll wave if I see you.
I’ll wave if I see you.
You can buy rolls of specific
You can buy rolls of specific tubeless rim tape if you want to. Don’t go for ordinary rim tape as that won’t be airtight.
The proper stuff is probably lighter weight than Gorilla/Duck tape but is more expensive and often more fragile. I’ve made the mistake of damaging the rim tape when getting difficult tubeless tyres onto the rim which then made them impossible to seat, so I prefer to have something a bit tougher.
The old claim that it is bicycles causing traffic queues, and not all of the single occupant SUVs which are far far too large for an urban environment…Even worse in rural areas – there’s this pointless reasoning that to live in these areas you need an SUV/4×4 monster. Perhaps for two weeks per year they may be a tad more useful, for the rest of the time they’re the main reason why the roads are blocked when they meet each other at pinch points. And they blame us cyclists for slowing traffic down!
About 25 years ago I travelled up to the Lake District for a weeks holiday … in January, it snowed heavily on the way up, the M6 was white but managed to drive in the outside lane at about 30mph through the freshly laid snow. It was still snowing when we turned off and it was starting to get icy and larger vehicles and cars wheelspinning up the slopes, I managed to drive around them in places and was only blocked off by a snowdrift which the police couldn’t get through in their ‘landy’. We detoured around to the cottage (next the farm) we’d booked and the owners were incredibly surprised when they saw my F plate (that’s 1989 for you pups) MKII Astra 1.3L parked outside. 880kg, front wheel drive, 13″ tyres that had the pressures knocked off, I’d driven up and down dale in that car into London and up through Lincolnshire on my way to visiting my folks during winter time over the 6 years I had it and it never missed a beat nor failed to get through where many turned around.
Today’s fat bloaters with their overly large low profile tyres are garbage. She’d do up to 55mpg on the motorway if I was being extremely careful and averaged around 43ish including urban driving (I used to keep a weekly log), this was your bog std 5 seater mid sized PETROL hatch with a 75bhp non injection engine. I’ve moved people using it, could get a 2 seater sofa bed in the boot with the rear seats folded down not to mention bikes. I can’t remember the outside dimensions but it’d be slighter shorter than my neighbours Ibiza but a fair bit narrower however around 450-500kg lighter!
I don’t want a specific side to overtake, I want motors to be made smaller or simply forced off the infrastructure in towns and cities as much as possible. let’s give them a time slot between 10am-11:45am and 7pm-8:30pm Mon-Fri, 8-10am & 3-5pm Sat, Sundays they can fuck off and have to keep it parked up/off road.
I reckon that if you want an off-road vehicle it should be kept off the road – permanently.
You can also use Duck/Gorilla
You can also use Duck/Gorilla tape. There are thinner rolls that work really well for bicycle rims, but you may want to use the standard size for motorbike wheels. The best thing about Duck Tape (or similar products) is that you can tear it accurately to the right size width for your needs – just start the rip with some scissors and you should be able to just rip it in a straight line.
@brooksby – agreed. I think
@brooksby – agreed. I think it’s about time that left turn on red was allowed in the UK, at least for cyclists. It works fine in other countries with the proviso that other traffic, especially pedestrians, take priority over the left turners. (Turning into Jamaica St has its own peculiar hazards – lots of discarded Special Brew cans).
It’s tricky to come up with a fool-proof way of passing slow/stationary traffic. Both inside and outside passing has risks and I vary which I do according to the road and traffic conditions. If there’s little oncoming traffic then I would go for the outside, but otherwise it would depend on where there’s the most space.
At the moment, there’s also
At the moment, there’s also some fuss about “deadly” inflatables after a couple of children have unfortunately died of head injuries (as I recall, one inflatable took off with the kid inside and the other one suddenly popped). However, helmets have not even been mentioned in relation to those cases – double standards?
Apparently, “he sustained an incredibly serious skull fracture as a result of not wearing a helmet” so being knocked off his bike was merely incidental.
Fairly sure it wasn’t the wearing nothing on his head (like he’s done for most of the rest of his time on this earth) that caused the injury. Why do people like this see being “knocked off” as normal and to be expected?Metro is owned by DMGT who also happens to own The Daily
HeilMail but I’m sure that fact has no bearing on the standard of their reporting or any hidden agendas.
Would be nice, though I tend to think half the drivers like to deliberately block cyclists as they feel we shouldnt be able to bypass the queue.True. It’s not that they hate cyclists (well, it might be) but that they’re jealous!
Hence the rage about RLJ – I suspect it’s just that many motorists wish they could too. (EDITED:) Actually, many do. I notice far more motor vehicles either going through a light just turned red, or moving off on amber, than bicycles.To take central Bristol as an example, which you’ll be familar with, I do too – in absolute numbers – but I tend to notice a higher proportion of cyclists ignoring the lights than other road user types. That may well be highly inaccurate, either way, so i’m not really drawing too much of a conclusion from it.
I’ve spotted a different pattern between cyclists and motorists jumping red lights. Motorists seem to do it the most when the traffic light just turns to red and they speed up to reduce the amount of time between when the lights were amber and when they go through.
Cyclists are more likely to do it just before the lights turn green (i.e. get a head-start to go through the junction safely). Of course, there’s always the left-turn-on-red jumpers or junctions with very little traffic that tend to entice cyclist RLJers.
It’d be nice to have it
It’d be nice to have it specified in the Highway Code, but I don’t think it’s particularly practical. It’s difficult to enforce laws such as not using mobiles, let alone a subtlety such as where to leave room for a bike.
Also, it’s not clear which would be better. I prefer to pass slow/stationary traffic on the inside as you have protection from traffic going the opposite direction, but you’re more at risk of being doored or getting squished by a driver pulling in (especially if they’re squeezing past a right-turning vehicle).
I’d go for a recommendation of trying to keep in line with the vehicle in front, so at least the space on the inside/outside will be more consistent and avoid the need to weave in and out round a badly placed vehicle.
Commuting isn’t always fun
Commuting isn’t always fun and energising, so I’d recommend getting into a routine and just cycle out of habit. That way, you won’t be second-guessing yourself as to whether you want to cycle or not – you just cycle as a matter of course. Once it’s a habit, you’ll probably find yourself enjoying it more as your expectations will be lower (i.e. it’s just a ride to/from work rather than being a fun cycle).
I’ll bite: as others have said, how can we argue pointlessly about this matter unless we have some more detail on what the kid was doing or what the circumstances were of his being knocked off?(I mean, the photos make it look like a breeze-block dropped on his head, and no bike helmet would protect against that!)
The Mirror article makes the briefest possible mention of a van that was involved:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/policewomans-powerful-warning-after-blood-12829176
There’s no mention of the circumstances, so we can only assume that the van driver was so shocked to see a cyclist without a helmet that they had to knock him off his bike to ensure that it wasn’t an hallucination.
Apparently, “he sustained an
Apparently, “he sustained an incredibly serious skull fracture as a result of not wearing a helmet” so being knocked off his bike was merely incidental.
I’d much rather base my opinions on the emotional reaction of a mum rather than look at all the accumulated evidence around helmet wearing from experts, statisticians and helmet designers.
@Legs_Eleven_Worcester –
@Legs_Eleven_Worcester – sounds like confirmation bias to me.
There’s certainly lots of cyclists around with poor road-craft, but I prefer to celebrate that. Each person wobbling precariously on their bike is a person not sat in a car and is someone getting health/fitness benefits.
It’s easy to predict that a cyclist is going to overtake a slow/stationary bus, so give them plenty of room to do so safely (which usually means slowing down to their speed for passing the bus and then zooming off afterwards).
Overtaking on the left is not a good idea (filtering excepted, though) and to be honest I’m surprised that you have more women doing that to you than men. The usual archetype is that male cyclists are the more aggressive/speed focused gender and the way you describe the undertake makes it sound like a move born out of frustration.
Anyhow, we want people with poor road skills to be going out and about on bikes rather than being cooped up in a deadly tonne of metal. Damage limitation – get as many idiots onto bikes as possible.
Hence the rage about RLJ – I suspect it’s just that many motorists wish they could too. (EDITED:) Actually, many do. I notice far more motor vehicles either going through a light just turned red, or moving off on amber, than bicycles.