“On a positive note I am now 10g lighter #marginal gains”: Pro out of Tour de France after losing part of thumb in crash; “Ridiculous” cycle lane shortened leaving cyclists stranded; Today’s Tour stage ripe for a mountain ambush? + more on the live blog

Did I miss something yesterday? As far as I could see (and there were multiple replays, slightly ironic that Rob Hatch is continually saying "This is just what we don't want to see" whilst we are shown the same crash over and over) Gavira's crash and the other riders subsequently coming down was a pure racing incident, nothing for which one could blame the organisers.

@Rendel Harris being slightly pedantic, as I understand it, light segregation dividers have no legal significance and therefore irrelevant whether or not a driver saw them before parking in the cycle lane. It is the solid white line demarking a mandatory cycle lane and/or any separate parking/waiting restrictions that carry the legal weight. More seriously, whilst I agree that of course all road users should be continuously looking out for hazards, it also behooves the council not to go out of their way to create hazards by installing infrastructure that is hard to see. I'm not personally familiar with the relevant stretch of road, but from StreetView and the image on this article, it certainly appears to me that the offending divider is of the type that is meant to have a wand attached - the vast majority of otherwise identical dividers along Hertford Road do have wands. And presumably, the wands exist precisely because it's pretty obvious that without the wands, the dividers are not especially easy to spot. I would agree with the victim that this is further compounded by the highly variable approach to the cycle lane. Depending on where you are on Hertford Road (and in some cases which direction you are travelling), the cycle lane varies from entirely unprotected, through light segregation, to proper separation. Finally, there's the poor design of the cycle lane being interrupted by the bus stop that forces cyclists to leave the cycle lane to go around stopped buses, and navigate the dividers in the process. It can be tricky to scan effectively for hazards in front whilst simultaneously looking behind to find a gap in the traffic to move out, and then timing the manoeuver to be both in a gap in traffic and a gap in the dividers. Slowing down only makes it harder to merge into the traffic. So not an easy manoeuver to begin with, let alone when the hazards are hard to spot.

Yeech! I think you should at least give some sort of trigger (or perhaps thumb shifter) warning before sticking that in front of us!

Given that the UCI wouldn't allow a two week tour, are you suggesting they set up a breakaway women's tour and split the sport?

"... when his wheel hit the divider..." Come on. If a driver hits someone the reports would not say "... when the bonnet/front grill hit the pedestrian..."

While the failure is on the Highway Authority for installing something that the briefest H&S analysis would have show to be a serious hazard, the fact that these things are installed so widely implies that there is something very wrong with the system. If they did a risk analysis and it said there was no problem, then that analysis was flawed: if it said that there was a problem but ignored that conclusion, then their decision was flawed: if they didn't do a risk analysis, then they're incompetent. Any cyclist would have told them that having a black lump on a black surface is an accident waiting to happen, so did they even ask any cyclists? I just did a quick google for 'cycle lane dividers' and the first eight were all contrasting colours, some with reflectors.

"Because we know some of you really love seeing mountain bike content on road.cc, often telling us in the comments that you really, really want to see more mountain bike content on road.cc, we now go out of our way to bring you as much mountain bike content as possible on road.cc. So here’s another for ya…" Love it!!😂

My favorite quote regarding power accuracy "it’s close enough to train and track with" - unless they are magicians, that is not possible. The only way this could be true is if you're aiming for an increase in your power from one ride to the next of at least 10%, otherwise the inherent noise in their data sources is going to dominate everything. Good luck with that 10%-per-ride power increase.

@C3a No. They don't, but cyclists (competitors in my argument) are obliged to follow the rules of the road and not ride at speeds which are unsafe for the conditions.

@AidanR Alright, bad analogy. What if a driver pulled in and parked in the cycle lane, inconveniencing cyclists, and claimed in mitigation that he could not see the dividers? I'm not defending the design of the cycle lane, which could indubitably have been done much better, but I maintain that a competent and careful cyclist will be scanning the road surface for hazards, especially when manoeuvering, and should have spotted the offending divider, which, contrary to the claim made, is not actually invisible even if it is less easy to spot than might be desirable.