road.cc live blog: STOLEN BIKE ALERT! + Peter Sagan’s #PowerShower,and more
Black Friday morphs into Cyber Monday, while Chris Boardman and Peter Hitchens both pen columns opposed to cycle helmet compulsion
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Gm_Crop 5 hours ago
I'll counter that by saying the Bryton 750se I have drives me nuts at times. Inconsistantly picks up on routes created on Komoot and the app re-syncs every few seconds when trying to set up the device and sends me back to the home screen. The most infuriating one is that I turned live track on. Once. It now won't turn off and repeatedly flags up the live track is starting, and then disconnecting every few seconds whilst riding. I haven't timed it but it wouldn't suprise me if 10-20% of the time the the screen is covered with an error message. That's been about 6 weeks now. Other than that it's great :/
IanGlasgow 5 hours ago
RE: Police launch road safety operation... by clamping down on cyclists using footbridge Meanwhile in Glasgow, Police Scotland are riding their motorbikes over the pedestrian and cyclists only bridge. https://x.com/FietserGlasgow/status/2065106152917012523?s=20
Rendel Harris 7 hours ago
@Paul J Van Schip certainly seems a bit of a dick, but he's a European and multiple World Champion on the track, pretty sure you don't get there without having some talent in your legs.
Bill H 7 hours ago
Poor Vincent cannot get over the simple fact that given the choice people prefer dedicated cycling spaces, rather than pretending to be cars like vehicular cyclists.
pbunyon 7 hours ago
What is the point of the fancy air sensor if it can't account for changing weather conditions?? If all you care about is a delayed approximation of aerodynamic watts in steady conditions, you don't need any special sensors for that. Just your speed on a decently flat course is enough to approximate rolling resistance and drivetrain losses. And the rest must be aero. If you assume a less aero body position at the same watts, your speed will drop while rolling resistance also drops, which means approximated aero watts goes up. And that's enough to demonstrate what you've shown in your testing protocol ("I sat upright and the number went up a little while later").
chrisonabike 7 hours ago
Your correction is accurate - it's almost always been "the (lack of) thought that (doesn't) count". "Massive" - less than a billion a year spent on active travel (trying to catch up / building a network across the entire country) Not massive - 6 billion every year (2026-2030) spent on road *maintenance* of existing "already built, goes everywhere, very convenient" road network for inactive travel Ultimately the reason "cycle infra" is *needed* is those unbelievably colossal amounts spent every year (and for more than a century now) on making mass motoring not just viable but apparently the "best choice" for most journeys. As the Dutch and others have shown, the majority of people *are* prepared to cycle and even mix with very light, slow local motor traffic *if* cycling is also made safe and convenient for the whole of their journey (including secure parking at both ends). (The history of the financial drivers of the current situation are a complex topic but note that while people complain about "crumbling roads" and underfunded motor infra - with some reason - by us continuing the fuel duty escalator freeze (for example) we're actually helping motorists pay *even less* for that activity / subsidising more of the cost of driving than ever.)
belugabob 7 hours ago
yes, but people will still object - which was my point.
Astralstroll 10 hours ago
So ' Priority of Road Users' and 1.5 metre clearance at 30mph has been been reduced to 'sharing'? NCN route 2 here in South Hams is an absolute scream with white vans, tractors and total idiots who refuse,or are totally incapable,to reverse on high Devon banked lanes ...means you have to get off and pedal back to a passing place....could be at that all day...so I don't bother...
Mr Anderson 11 hours ago
@MaxiMinimalist Agreed. The big problem I see now is today's parents grew up being driven to their schools, and therefore, see private motor vehicles as the only viable form of transport. The vast majority of UK infant and primary schools have a catchment area that is within easy walking distance from home to school. Yet, the traffic caused by pupils being driven to/from school is astonishing. Banishing the "School Run" should be a priority for all schools.
MaxiMinimalist 11 hours ago
When I was a kid (that was during the previous millenium when phones were connected to a plug in the wall), I rode my bicycle to school, music academy, sport grounds, parties even during the winter. The government didn't have to spend, correct that, didn't have to think of spending massive amounts of money to build cycling specific infrastructures. Over the past 3 or 4 decades, cars have grown bigger, taller, safer (for their drivers) and faster. Meanwhile, motorists have become abusive, aggressive, hypersensitive to people moving on two wheels, aka cyclists. Spending billions upon billions on new infrastructure won't address the crux of the matter. Sadly.
19 thoughts on “road.cc live blog: STOLEN BIKE ALERT! + Peter Sagan’s #PowerShower,and more”
Who is Chris Voardman? (sic)
Who is Chris Voardman? (sic)
The Hitchens article was
The Hitchens article was pretty good , although it could have done without trotting out the old RLJ line – this is the one paragraph the article could have done without:
I guess the MOS publishing this article means they can tick the box marked alternative viewpoints and carry on as normal with their bike-bashing agenda, which predictably is what you will see in the comments (don’t go there if you want your blood pressure to remain normal) this one’s a peach…
Hitchens lives in Oxford. He
Hitchens lives in Oxford. He cycles.
Obvs he is utterly unsound on nearly every topic other than cycling, but on this one (ignoring the RLJ comment, possibly put in by his editor), he is ok.
Christopher Hitchens???
Christopher Hitchens??? Messages from beyond the grave it seems!
MrB123 wrote:
Good point. Said deceased Hitch drank like a fish, smoked like a Bali volcano and probably never sat on a bike beyond the age of 11. His brother doesn’t smoke, has always appeared not to need alcohol in order to spout the views of a pub bore, but does cycle.
The Times has dropped any
The Times has dropped any pretence of being pro-cycling, not printing the CB article and then printing this:
“Sir, The possibility of compulsory cycle helmets (Leading article, Nov 25 and News, Nov 24) has received the same negative reaction as mandatory motorcycle helmets and car seatbelts in the 1970s and 1980s respectively. Both of these are now accepted as normal and life-saving. One would have thought the cycling lobby would be keen on anything that makes cycling safer. To the suggestion of high-visibility clothing I would add third-party insurance and a change in the law which assumes that in a car-versus-cycle accident it is always the car that is to blame. Cyclists cause accidents as well.
John Deards”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/should-cycle-helmets-be-made-compulsory-fp57hjbvl
Quite why an editor would publish such completely wrong nonsense is hard to divulge, but it is clear that the Times is now with the vast majority of the media, and is anti-cycling.
The cycle -ball defense is up
The cycle -ball defence is up the court as it’s a free kick a bit like what you get with a penalty corner in field hockey, you have limited defenders in the ‘area’.
As for the helmet debate, circa 160,000 serious head injuries admitted into hospital annually from a reported 1.4million head injuries total.
the total cycling KSIs of all types of injuries, on road and off road, single person and including motorvehicles and also including non admissions AND children is 3397, (I can’t find data as to how many of those are head injuries only)
Roughly 75-80% of incidents involving a motorvehicle are the sole fault of the motorist according to police stats, though IMHO I’d reckon it to be even higher given how the police can’t be trusted with how they interpret incidents through their motor-centric biased eyes.
Yup, plastic hats for people on bikes is surely the solution, wankers!
BehindTheBikesheds wrote:
Thanks for that. Have you a link to your data source(s), please?
Eton Rifle wrote:
Head injury data is a bit hit and miss and variable in the numbers as no-one seems to like collating it and even some hospitals are loathe to actually respond (around 16 basically gave researchers the middle finger) or simply don’t manage to put the reasons for the head injury on the form.
here this suggests closer to 200,000 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25340248 but that’s just for admissions and reported head injuries, non reported probs push the total of head injuries and serious head injuries up a chunk more.
The KSIs you can find on the .gov site for all years.
The other thing is child head injuries, there is the thinking that putting a helmet on children who cycle is a good idea, personally i think it’s wrong thinking. I have expereincean in this, my son cycled along a quiet 60mph road downhill to high school for 7 years and he wore a lid once before he started there (& still alive now at 26.lol)
We already know the groups that are effected most by risk compensation, adult males particularly those in competition (injury rates, crashes and deaths gone UP since helmet mandation in 2003) but also children. Children take a huge amount of extra risk when they feel protected, this is well known and is recorded many times over in various testing.
Put children into an environ where they feel safer and they will push the boundaries even more, much more than they did before, also adding up to 20% the weight of their heads and increasing the circumference significantly also means banging your head with a helmet (& obviously saving the childs life/saving from total disblement …not) more often than without.
Headway even come out with total lies to a parlimentary committee no less stating that 20,000 children would be saved from head injuries if wearing plastic hats which is utter gash and exceeds the current number of total serious head injuries suffered by children from all walks of life by 14-15,000, and also ignoring the other million plus head injuries that occur elsewhere, wankers.
The last lot of figures i found was 12 child head injury only deaths as an occupant of a motorvehicle in England & wales, the total number of child cycling deaths for the whole of the Uk was SIX, not all of them would have being solely due to head injury and unlikely that a helmet would have made a jot of difference even if they were wearing one.
figures for child only head injuries below but from 2009-10, good luck finding more up to date numbers.
Yes some amazing and welcome
Yes some amazing and welcome rational words (excepting the RLJ stuff) from Peter Hitchens.
And to be fair he has been one of the rare columnists to express spot-on anti-car sentiment before.
Will post link if I can find it.
emishi55 wrote:
Here it is:
One Reason Why I hate Cars
18 January 2012 1:34 PM
OK, so the bus video has been
OK, so the bus video has been removed and replaced by someone who was safely overtaken by a Merc.
Is this going to be a new feature where praise is given on safe overtakes? Otherwise why the fuck would you upload such a video to Youtube?
don simon wrote:
being tailgated is an offence, it’s also very intimidating to say the least with some nobber trying to push past when there’s clearly no safe gap to get past. Maybe you enjoy being tailgated by 2 tons of german wankwagon that has the potential to kill you, personally I don’t.
BehindTheBikesheds wrote:
I don’t see anything wrong in this video. I believe the wide angle lens of the camera makes it look like the Merc is closer than it really is. If the cyclist didn’t have the camera I don’t think he would have noticed anyhting other than a car wanting to get past. Impatient? yes, but not dangerous or illegal.
BehindTheBikesheds wrote:
Cameras can, and often do, foreshorten distances. So it’s difficult to say whether any law was broken.
Cars sit on the tails of bikes, this one didn’t seem so intimidating as to warrant being called a nobber, they weren’t trying to push past either, I suggest they know the road and were accelerating at an upcomping opportunity and then sitting back when they realised the pass was unsafe. They then waited for what was a safe pass. And overtook.
Cars have a right to use the road too, share it nicely.
don simon wrote:
Not like that and law-breaking ia red herring. The rider clearly felt intimidated or they wouldn’t have posted the video. Isn’t that enough? You think they should “man the f%@& up? In fact, the driver overtook at the first safe opportunity – jolly good – so why in the name of kacked pants are they getting close, falling back, getting close etc when there isn’t an opportunity? Crap driving, pure and simple. No excuses.
PS hilarious reflection of the rider in the mudguard.
Jitensha Oni wrote:
Perhaps they should man the fuck up! You can say fuck here as we are mostly adults, not all though, so I have to be a bit sensitive with the snowflakes. That was not a dangerous pass, nor was the run up.
Bit 50:50 for me, the pass
Bit 50:50 for me, the pass was safe and he/she was a reasonable distance away the majority of the time. The negative being the frequency of trying to look to pass when clearly not safe. Pretty much the exit of every bend saw an acceleration and crossing of the white line getting nearer to the cyclist. An extra second given each time to see there wasn’t a passing opportunity would be a higher standard of driving.
It is sad though that if 100% of drivers were like this then my journey would likely be better…
I’d argue that impatient
I’d argue that impatient driving always has the potential for danger…