I don’t un5rstand this. Can’t you just keep using the bike you already have? Or are there sentry points on the trails blocking your path if your bike doesn’t meet the shiny new standards?

yes, of course I can. I still am.
Until something wears out – tyres, forks, wheels. It’s a 26″ Soul with 1 1/8 forks and headset and spares are already getting hard to find.

Couple of years ago I wanted lower rise bars. No more 25.4mm anywhere so I had to buy used – a long way from ideal and you have to buy what you can get, not what you want.
Tyres – currently running 2.25 Nobby Nics. Quick google search suggests when these wear out I’ll be struggling to replace them…

And, really importantly, it’s a premium bike, cost me premium prices. Usually when I buy a replacement bike I sell on the old one to help fund the new one. Who the hell’s going to buy this one in a year’s time if I’m struggling to get spares now? I can quite seriously see me having to take it to the dump… a premium bike that cost c£1800 to put together reduced to scrap metal… who wins here?

It’s a bit like London housing, game the market so only the super-rich can participate… until all the buyers walk away in despair and you have no more customers… seriously, as a marketing strategy this is massively flawed. UK consumers don’t have the ££ to spank like we have been for the last 15 years

There is no choice
Yes there is, but or don’t buy

Well, that’s not really a choice, as you know. If you love mountain biking and use it to keep physically and mentally healthy, it’s not a choice at all…
If you, like most people in the UK, are a bit skint, buying a new bike is not an option… so giving up is all there is to do…

I suppose it’ll lead to more people like me crossing over to road, which is currently having a really positive effect on growing cycling participation overall, which is fantastic. Not sure that’s the objective of the MTB industry though…

As a market growth strategy it’s pretty stupid and smacks of desperation.

god dam you bike industry for giving us choice

There is no choice, that’s why people are so fed up with it all. A new wheelsize whilst still supplying those who want the old one is choice. Moving wholesale to a new wheelsize and then another less than 2 years later, totally removing support for the installed base and forcing a whole new bike to be bought when all you actually needed was a new tyre is taking the proverbial…

Either way, I was thinking about buying a new full suss but this has convinced me to keep my 26″ Soul for as long as I can until the industry stops messing about. In the meantime, I’m riding mainly road, in part cos I can keep riding the bike I have… don’t know about you but I don’t have £2k+ every two years to buy a new bike

This story + the still from the video was front page on this evening’s Evening Standard. IIRC, angry–tight-leather-jacket man was too.
Media shapes & reflects public opinion so it looks like maybe public opinion’s beginning to switch against lousy driving…
Certainly my experience on the road in recent months on club runs is drivers being more courteous and less abusive, which suggests the idea that cyclists aren’t the devil’s spawn may finally be getting through
Time will tell

People are this stupid, yes. Worth bearing in mind when riding and driving…

I’m not very happy with mine either – not that great a fit – especially after a century ride and massive pad. Nothing like as good a fit as my 12 year old Enduras…
If I didn’t think second hand bibs were a horrible idea I’d have sold them on by now and bought some Assos instead

Re advice, try Citizen’s Advice. If photos were inaccurate, you may be able to argue misleading info.
The flat I currently live in is a dark, tatty basement flat and is on the market and the photos on Rightmove are touched up to a degree that I would call misleading and misrepresentative – it’s common practice so CAB no doubt have some experience with such things!

Other than that, I would walk… the signs are already pretty bad that you’re dealing with a dishonest estate agent and landlord.

I got rushed into taking a place last year and discovered fault after fault after fault: stank of smoke, broken tiles, damp – including rising damp which had been painted over)… and also an online review where they’d threatened previous tenants with court action over deposit repayment. The neighbours said the estate agent had tried to threaten them too…

My gut feel when I took the place was that I couldn’t trust them, so if that’s how you feel I would steer clear… it’s your home after all

I saw Leftfield at Glastonbury in 2000. The main thing I noticed was the stench of weed in the air… I think there was a higher % of dope than oxygen!

I remember the days when feet sticking to the floor from the amount of beer down there was a ‘good thing’. These days I’m a bit more like the OP and I’d prefer a comfy chair 🙂

Hiding from the bottles of piss and sand flying overhead at Metallica at Donnington in 1995 was ‘fun’. Even better when my mate was hit by a flying slice of watermelon.

I knew I was getting old when I put earplugs in when I went to see Motorhead a few years ago. Unlike when I was a student, I had to be able to hear when I went to work the next day…

Going to see the antics of people like Iggy Pop and Ozzy make me realise it’s my own choice to get old and grumpy!

Re levels of personal debt. This is scary…
It suggests no real rises in income, rising cost of living and an inability to deal with our addiction to shiny things/learn the lesson of 2008…
If there’s one thing you need to do in a crisis, it’s to stop doing the things that got you into the crisis in the first place…

Anecdotally, everyone I talk to who I think is a ‘critical/independent’ thinker – whether a Brit, Polish, French person is pretty negative about the future… deeply aware the problems have not been fixed and the massive levels of debt built and building up and the asset bubbles growing are just the preface to another crisis – except this time Central Banks will have no room for manoeuvre…
Just spend a bit of time on FT and Economist websites and read the comments in any story about the global economy and you’ll see what I mean. Any ‘recovery’ is an illusion… the fundamental weaknesses remain
Psychologically the shock of this one to the population as a whole is likely to be worse than 2008 – too many people ill-informed or putting their heads in the sand and buying shiny things and going ‘oh I’m loaded, my house went up £10k last month’ 😯

Cheery front cover of the Economist this week:

Worth reading the comments below the story too… Economist readers are not an optimistic bunch right now!

Worth reading the stories and comments on the FT too – an equally doom-mongery bunch at the moment, and strikingly different in their views to that of the editorial team!

I reckon it’s touch and go whether we hit another crisis soon… certainly anyone getting into BTL in the UK at the moment on the assumption house prices will keep going up is unwise… the pumping of housing suggests an acknowledgement of failure to provide any real economic growth or wage growth.

The problem with banker-bashing (as badly-behaved as the financial sector certainly was) is that it’s a misdiagnosis of the problem, which is much more to do with the end of post-war growth and the effects of an ageing population and shrinking working age population. Looking back, we started getting offered loads of debt in the early 90’s. this was to disguise the fact our ability to produce rising living standards was no longer there. Being stupid, we didn’t spot this and just borrowed endlessly to buy shiny things without understanding it would all go bang at some point. Which it did in 2008.

We basically have fewer people to produce GDP, having to support more people no longer producing GDP whilst also having to pay off massive debts accrued over the last 30 years which takes up a chunk of today and tomorrow’s GDP.

I also think we’ve got too fat and lazy and would rather spend our days dicking about on the internet and social media than work hard. I think we’ve lost our hunger and our drive which means we’re not producing as much GDP as we used to. Not good in a crisis.

Anyone who thinks it was the bankers whatdunit is economically illiterate and anyone who thinks they can maintain our current super-materialistic standard of living is being naive IMO.

What might save us is new technologies making it easier to produce economic output with fewer people, new technologies and an entrepreneurial spirit allowing anyone with a smart idea to set up a business cheaply and easily, and immigration to maintain or grow the size of the working population. Even then we’ll be hampered by having so much of this wealth taken away to pay off the debt we’ve accrued

I love fairweather riders. It means the sun’s shining 🙂

Living my life by my own standards rather than anyone else’s
Riding bikes
Being nice to people
Walking
Sunshine
Nice people

I hope these first attempts at proper infrastructure inspire more ambitious schemes in the future.

I think this stance is important. Be cautiously positive.

If they’re not very good, we should say thanks for the investment, they’re a good start but not good enough… be positive and show support but maintain pressure until we get something decent – be clear about what we do want.

Whilst also remembering that this magical ‘something decent’ is the roads we already have, but with proper enforcement of existing law and culture change to deal with the ridiculous tantrums some people have when they drive… the rest of Europe seems to manage to mix cyclists with drivers without acting like toddlers!

In the meantime, even the weak effort so far has led to a massive increase in people riding in London so really, there’s great hope here for the future

It demonstrates massive lack of faith in cycle superhighways IMO. If he thought they were good enough for people to use them because they’re the best solution available, then he wouldn’t have to put in punitive measures to force people to use them, he’d have confidence they’d use them anyway…

Given people don’t need a licence to cycle and are on the highway as of right, is there any legal basis people can be punished for using it if they’re riding in a manner which is otherwise legal?

He also has to accept capacity issues… how can someone use the lane if it’s already full?

I suspect he knows full well how badly this will go down with the cycling community in London – it’s probably a pretence to keep the antis quiet for a while.

And anyone who dismisses this because it’s ‘London’ – come and cycle round London – the rise in numbers in the last few years has been massive – it’s wonderful to see and it’s a great proof of concept that with the right pressure and the right approach, we can make all UK cities cycling-friendly – the whole country will benefit from the example London is setting right now

My, probably unfounded, fear is a lack of affordable spares for my bike before I’m ready to change it

Agreed. I did a quick search for 2.25 Nobby Nics 26 inch (my current tyres) and all stockists had them as unavailable…

A few years ago I had the same problem when I wanted to replace my 25.4 handlebars…

Judge people by their actions, not their words – it’s the dropping of standards that lots of riders are already happy with that tells you these changes are about the industry and not customers…

Talk to them, tell them you’re not happy and want a refund.

My garage serviced and MOTd my car and gave it back with the engine warning light on. I asked them to check it. They realised they’d knackered something, I said fine so long as you fix it FOC. They did. So they still have my business in future.

If they won’t give you a refund, maybe trading standards?

Rusty, in this case the marketing dept has **** all influence! Ash is his own man,

Actually, by being on this thread, openly as a Charge employee, Ash is engaging in social media marketing best practice – he knows this is a contentious strategy by Charge, he’ll have been keeping an eye out for such a thread and has (sensibly – from a marketing point of view) openly engaged with his critics on it…

So in this instance, he is the marketing dept! As he should be. The brand are risking alienating their customers with this shift and the most important thing is to get involved in the conversation. In part it gives him insight into how we feel, and it also helps him sell the benefits of the new product. All above board and, as I say, social media marketing best practice. Still marketing though…

just more choice, not all those choices will be for ‘you’.

No – less choice. If you read the headline on Bike Biz, it was “Charge ditches 29ers and 650B for 27Plus” – ‘ditches’, not ‘adds to range available’…

I work in marketing – which at its best identifies consumer needs and meets them – often by increasing choice. Good marketing also starts with insights into consumers – not with product development for the sake of it.

It’s not the new wheel size that’s the problem at all in my view, it’s the refusal to support existing legacy bikes that most people own – therefore forcing upgrades at a time when a lot of people are pretty skint.

You didn’t see hardtails phased out when suspension came in, or V-brakes when discs came in… but back then the industry was growing fast and there was plenty of money coming their way…

I suspect the wider economic environment has far more to do with this than the bike industry discovering revolutionary innovation. This is incremental fiddling at the margins… which ‘happily’ leads to needing to buy a whole new bike.

I understand why lots of people are peed off with this wheelsize thing, i, as a product manager, am too for the most part – but i would like to say that the ‘industry’ isnt just trying to change for the sake of change in most cases, if it were we wouldnt just hop onto something for the sake of it anyway.

Innovation is fine. It’s the lack of choice which is not – from a consumer’s point of view. ie: stopping supporting existing legacy kit – it forces us into buying new bikes whether we a) want to or b) can afford to.

I was about to buy a new bike (27.5) but am losing confidence it will not be obsolete in a couple of years. I can’t afford to spend £2k+ on something which will be worthless (ie: no resale value on the 2nd hand market) within 2 years when I’m struggling to put together cash for a house deposit…

FWIW I work in marketing and this forcing of new standards on customers is not marketing – marketing is identifying (genuine) customer needs and meeting them whilst leaving the ultimate choice with the customer.

I’m not having a pop at Charge specifically for this – it’s the whole industry – it’s trying to do something similar by introducing discs to road bikes – except roadies have a different culture – more conservative and resistant to change. No-one in my club rides discs for either winter or summer bikes and there’s no sign of anyone wanting to either. A very few have electronic shifting.

It’s hard not to be cynical when the industry forces these changes at a time when UK consumers are clearly slowing spending on almost everything including the weekly shop – I’d be surprised if the cycling industry’s balance sheet/growth projections weren’t suffering too…

They’re forgetting that people aren’t feeling that wealthy at the moment – I suspect a lot of people just can’t afford to sell their current bike (now obsolete so worth very little) and buy a whole new one.

Innovation which allows us to incrementally upgrade existing bikes, ok. ‘Innovation’ which makes expensive existing bikes redundant, requiring a full replacement, not so good – not when people are short of cash…

So if I’m going to buy a new bike in the next couple of months, what wheelsize do I buy whilst remaining confident the industry won’t have decided to make my bike obsolete in 18 months’ time?

The essential design of the bicycle – diamond frame, chain drive with bearings for forks and bottom bracket + hub and spoke wheels was so perfect that despite 100+ years and huge amounts of ££ and $$ spent, we’ve not really been able to make a huge amount of progress.

To me, that’s a triumph of design and engineering. One of the reasons I love cycling is the mechanics are still accessible to an amateur like me and I can do most of my own maintenance, whereas I can’t fix my phone or my car – they’re too complex.

From the late 1880s – the Rover Safety – the fundamentals haven’t changed much really…

I was more impressed to see a fixie being ridden in East London by someone without a beard

And wearing his own clothes instead of his sister’s

Always makes you laugh when you go to a gig or show, and the vast majority of the audience are watching it on the 3″ screen of their phone whilst filming it!

Chipps wrote an intro in the mag quite a few years ago now about actually enjoying the scenery when we’re out riding instead of missing the scenery because we’re looking at it only through a viewfinder…
Good point that – too busy capturing life for posterity to actually enjoy it in the first place.

It hasn’t even started yet, there’s more to come…

All hell’s going to break loose once live video streaming apps go mass

Live Video Streaming[/url]

And when camera drones go mass… well that’s already begun

In some ways our obsession with tech is bad – witness the beautiful view from the top of Holmbury Hill yesterday and some woman failing to enjoy it, but stood there fiddling with her phone all the time we were there… there goes her chance to send a bit of dopamine flying round her bloodstream…

On the other hand, notice how many people who’ve been getting away with doing very bad things for decades are getting found out now. It’s getting harder and harder to hide things now so many people can capture and broadcast what other people are doing…

Yesterday was also a good day, so I did. MTB Saturday, road Sunday. Can’t think of a better way to spend a sunny weekend 🙂

One of the lads on our club run this morning had to do a short ride so he could get up there and take advantage of his VIP ticket…
Last 5 mins should be interesting, at least 🙂

Remember two things:
1. Regular cycling gives you the body of a man 10 years younger
2. Regular mountain biking means you’re still a kid at heart

You’re a hell of a lot younger than anyone else your age 🙂

I’m 42 and about as fit as I’ve ever been – when I was running a lot last year I’d regularly beat blokes 10 years younger. Today I went out mountain biking and couldn’t keep up with the blokes I was riding with. One’s 50+ and the other 60+…

I asked a barber once to clipper back and sides #3 and then trim the top. He took the clipper to the whole lot… I never went back!
I didn’t know what to say – I think it was a language barrier so didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d just ruined my haircut!

I’m not surprised – we’re close to bust as a country – there’s far less money than many realise – when you factor in the ageing population… and pensions and NHS are going to be higher up the list than cycling.

The good thing is that cycling IMO has mainly been a grass roots thing – people just getting on bikes – we’ve had precious little proper action from local or national government, yet still participation has risen massively – so higher or lower government spending may or may not really impact on the numbers…

The marginalisation of cycling is everything to do with the debate in that the anger and violence towards cyclists only really started when cycling began to demarginalise itself about five years ago. The underlying issue is people struggling to cope with change – I find walkers are much better with MTBs than they were in mid-90s – they’ve basically had time to get used to sharing the paths now.
Central London is far better to ride in the outer London IMO – in terms of lower levels of abuse – because the numbers of riders are just so huge now, it’s normal to encounter a cyclist when driving in the centre.
In time, therefore, I think the acceptance will come, but UK is a right-of-centre/conservative (with a small c) country – we don’t do revolution, we do quiet evolution so it’ll be a few more years yet until the antis untwist their knickers

(so if you disconnect the battery and wipe it’s memory it’ll think there’s nothing in there as it can’t ‘see’ anything).

So I need to fill the tank, use it and then it will have a base from which to calculate? whereas now it has no memory of previous usage and therefore can’t calculate what’s left… that makes sense.

I love STW sometimes 🙂

I also suspect that you could probably have driven it to a garage to fill it rather than getting a jerry can

Possibly but this is South London and the way people drive round here, if I’d run out on the way and hard to park it, someone would’ve rear-ended it in all probability!

I’ll take it to the garage later on and fill the tank – the fuel gauge is now showing fuel in but the ‘miles remaining’ on the computer is still zero… so it may well be going back to the dealer for being looked at.

I tried the match thing. My eyebrows will grow back, no doubt 😳

You might be over thinking this?

Possibly. I’ve never handled petrol before except the standard going to the garage so just wary…

This is interesting… at least in a ‘something useful appears to be being looked at’ kind-of-a-way

Adjusting traffic light phasing for cyclists

It always amazes me how apparently smart bosses seem to miss what everyone else in the office has noticed – that x is a) incompetent and b) does no work

I guess they’re smart about psychology, they know how to manipulate their boss in such a way that the boss doesn’t spot it.

IME they tend to get found out eventually when their time comes to an end and they try and find another job. In the meantime, they know they’re having to play games to disguise the fact they’re incompetent and don’t actually know how it feels to do a good day’s work which, in fact, is one of life’s more satisfying moments…

Making some streets bike only might though.

I think there’s something on the way for Tottenham Court Road re making it bus and cycle only

Tottenham Court Road

Only buses, bicycles and local access would be allowed on the street from 08:00 to 19:00 Monday to Saturday, but side streets should still give other vehicles 60% access to Tottenham Court Road, the council added.

Quietly, there’s a lot going on in London to improve the situation for cyclists. We need to expand to the rest of the UK though. My experience is that as soon as you’re out of London, the attitude of drivers is more aggressive and negative… Bromley and Beckenham for e.g. are still in Greater London and it’s noticeably more fraught than Brixton

+1 for the view that the response is an uncorking of the bottled up frustration of cyclists who have come to expect harassment and abuse as ‘part of the experience’ of riding…

You can only mistreat someone or a community for so long before they push back – history has show this repeatedly.

For cyclists, social media is an outlet for this, whereas when you’re out on the road and on your own there’s very little you can do to fight back/stop it happening in the first place.

To me, the social media response has come about because a) it happened in the first place and b) the Police response was inadequate. I think it’s a good thing that the anger among cyclists is palpable if it raises the profile of the debate and becomes the beginning of a real and proper rebalancing of how we use our roads…

The one thing people forget in priority conflicts (whether bridleway or road) is that ‘manners’ is undefined and very subjective – what one person thinks is ‘manners’ someone else thinks isn’t e.g. joggers coming at you 3 abreast think you not moving out of the way is rude, but you think they’re rude… and from there comes a load of passive aggressive conflict e.g. silliness like this

Road cyclists dawlding about on Sundays for a social bug me as well.

We all need to remember that in most situations everyone has a right to be there and when it comes to bridleways, everyone’s out for some exercise and fresh air and in that respect we’re all on the same side.

Just think about what you can do to make the situation better, forget your own needs, smile, be generous of spirit and remember that people often don’t hear or see bikes coming, often make mistakes when moving out of your way and often have a different definition of ‘manners and politeness’

I do wonder how we can all get so uptight about leisure pursuits!

+1 on the trolley. I don’t understand why people take them – a thing with small plastic wheels designed for urban use won’t survive a 45 min walk across a farm!

Expect discomfort and embrace it – it’s what makes Glasto such a great escape from normal life 🙂