If you put a faster rolling tyre on the back, what happens is, as the back is goes faster, it overtakes the front, and then becomes the front, so you end up riding backwards down the trail. As the back (which was the front) is going slower than the front (which was the back) the front accelerates away, stretching the bike, which then means you can’t get round the next switchback and the bike gets stuck.
Or something like that.
Go round your local trails on a Sunday and you’ll see lots of elongated bikes stuck between the trees at sharp corners with bemused-looking riders scratching their heads…

Am I the only one who thinks maybe there are just too many cars on the roads if it’s creating this much conflict?

If everyone cycled a bit more often the problem wouldn’t exist…

Rule #22 26 is all wrong and always has been. It should have always been 650B and will be so until we decide that it should really have been 650.00001B

CFH showing his age 😀

I’d like to see ramps on the left hand side of the road of pedestrian crossings and zebra crossings so I can get clear big air right across and disappear off up the road in a cloud of my own glory 😀

Pricey but a bottle lasts for ages.
Only problem I had when I put it on my collarbone scar was it stained my work shirts.
Don’t know how effective it was but the scar healed pretty well

The Picolax thread could well be surpassed here 😯

It’s impossible – too many variables and anyone who says they can prove wheelsize makes a definitive difference to how fast you can ride is basically lying. You can believe it if you want, but it’s impossible to prove it.

How quick a bike goes down a given trail has more to do with rider skill than anything else… some days I’ll ride a trail faster than other days – depends how fit I am and how smoothly I’m riding…

This company sacked the driver

If it was anything like this then send them this link to show that some companies take their responsibilities to other road user seriously, and that the Police may also become involved if you choose to

I’ve stopped reading all newspapers (incl broadsheets) on the basis of the number of times I saw bias and misrepresentation. I figured if I can see inaccuracies in the stuff I know about then the other stuff is probably pretty similar…

But then again, my Dad has been telling me not to believe everything I read in the papers for decades now so it’s hardly ground-breaking insight!

People believe things they know to be untrue for their own weird reasons… have you ever tried getting someone to change their view on whether cyclists should pay road tax!

Why do people always have to find excuses to be prejudiced? Just because you’d like other people to be friendly to you doesn’t mean you have to insist on it like some bloody dictator!

To the OP – I’m not going to go around waving like a lunatic to every other cyclist (or anyone in any form of transport come to that) just because you have this idea we should all be sooper-friendly to each other!

Not least because with the state of the roads and generally low standard of driving you need to have your wits about you if you’re travelling at any speed so keeping hands on the bars is a pretty sensible strategy.

To be honest I’d rather you thought I was grumpy than be taking my teeth home in my pocket 😯

Problem is too many people utterly over-estimate their driving ability/ability to deal with the unanticipated. 5 people dead each day are the proof of that…

It’d be good if people could take pride in driving well but there’s sweet chance of that going by current behaviour. In the meantime, I’m going to invest in a company making self-driving cars and then cycling and driving can become enjoyable again 🙂

Name me a major UK bank who hasn’t had an IT breakdown in the last year?

Hacking or creaking systems?

Says I can’t use it with software that blocks ads in place – is that right? I’ve got it for a reason!

Edit did you know if you type in “adXXXXXing software” (as I tried to above) it gets changed to “freeloading” when you send the post?
That’s pretty cheeky

CBT – it’ll deal with the root cause rather than the symptoms. CBT IME is one of the best things you can ever do with your life and everyone should give it a go.

Good luck, too many people lack the courage to deal with their problems and just spend their lives taking them out on the world around them… it take balls to deal with it

Pivot founder Chris Cocalis: “It quickly became apparent that we weren’t going to be able to use the geometry we wanted to use with a conventional saddle on our upcoming 27.5? carbon downhill bike. We wanted to maintain the same travel, chainstay length and rider positioning as on our current 26? Phoenix DH bike and this presented an overall clearance challenge with current seat and rail profiles. Something had to give,

brooess, that’s just as ridiculous a statement as a wheel size specific saddle!

He does basically admit the bike design won’t work unless they change the saddle…

Isn’t it an offence to fail to report a collision if you’re in a car which is involved in one…?

If it is, I might ring the Police from my desk on Monday and tell them what he told me – when he’s sitting right alongside, and then pass the phone across and tell him the Police want a word…

Honestly, this kind of crap really has to have consequences…

Um, the problem is (and he’s essentially admitted this) that 650B wheels are too big for the size frame/rider they’ve designed the bike for!

And you wonder why we ‘put up with’ 26 for 30 years… cos it worked!

I predict the imminent death of 650B when it becomes clear you can’t actually design a mountain bike that works with those size wheels. Blithering idiots 😯

False courtesy is to be avoided as it breaks the right of way and leads to dangerous situations like this.

But whatever the legal ins out outs, when filtering I think you should always be ultra-careful of this kind of behaviour as people do it thinking they’re being nice and so see nothing wrong with it.

Basically as my Grandad said to my Mum when she was learning to drive (late 1950’s), assume everyone else on the road is an idiot…

My winter bike. Very comfortable, great stable ride and looks very classy. Not a slouch but don’t buy it if you want lightweight.

Cliff Richard

I was about to say that!

If representatives of other key user groups – horse riders, walkers etc weren’t consulted then that’s pretty poor tbh. Surrey Hills are rammed full of people all year round and only a proportion are bike riders. Seems a bit daft not to have shared the plans for the new trail with other users and adapted them accordingly….

This study here

Five separate junctions actually…at two separate times of the day… pretty comprehensive. I wish they’d also recorded the number of amber-gambling and RLJing cars for some perspective

They should redo that study, things have changed, a lot

They should – the absence of official figures mean people fill the vacuum with personal anecdote – which more often than not will come from confirmation bias and availability bias ie: people seeing what they want to… which I assume you are, as much as the next person…

Oh and they should have talked about Bikeability and the fact it’s often free of charge – their riding skills were exceptionally poor… the point about cycling in traffic is it gets a lot easier when you do it skilfully…

A missed opportunity to get any of the positives about cycling across to the masses… and I’m not sure any of the relatives of those who died last year would be chuckling at the throwaway comments about cyclists getting hurt…

Pandered to too many negative stereotypes and too London-centric. FWIW, when TfL published a study (teams of researchers standing on multiple junctions counting cyclists) in 2007, 84% of cyclists stopped at red lights.

Boardman et al massively missed the opportunity to put out all the positive messages and stats. That fake disapproval to the ‘films’ was weak – they really should have countered with a load of myth-busting facts.

Maybe it comes across as taking it too seriously but given every regular cyclist I know has tales of harassment and near-collision and the main reason people give for not cycling is fear of getting hurt, I’m not convinced light-hearted humour’s quite the solution TBH

The good point about Top Gear doing a cycling piece however is that Clarkson and BBC have clearly realised that being anti-cyclist is inappropriate and out of touch… as more and more people take up cycling despite the negativity, the tide is clearly turning and the antis are realising they’ll just look stupid if they carry on being anti… so we’re definitely making progress even if it’s not always obvious…

Given the very well known damage caused by passive smoking it’s pretty anti-social behaviour…

I don’t quite get the “mind your own business” angle – the guy’s basically waving poison around and making other people breath it in. That kind of is everyone else’s business

Fundamentally it’s just a shame he doesn’t have the emotional intelligence to understand the effect his habit has on other people and wait to have a fag at a later moment…

5 years time, after we’ve all replaced 26 with 27.5, we’ll be told 27.5 is no longer supported and actually, 25.5 was the right thing all along..

We just need to get people out of cars – people are too isolated from the other road uses and too safe from the results of their own bad behaviour.

The Tube can be a very unpleasant place to be in rush hour in terms of loads of people crammed into a tiny space – people get grumpy and will moan a bit but you simply do not see the same levels of outright aggression/violence that you see on the roads.

Mainly because a) anyone who starts anything risks a punch on the nose b) you’d have to stand there for the rest of your journey with all your peers looking at you just after you’ve had a childish tantrum…

Riding home last night, trying to get through the gridlock around Kennington yesterday I pulled out to filter and nearly hit another cyclist – I hadn’t looked properly. I said sorry, he said no worries and on we went – no aggro even though the consequences of me knocking him off in traffic would have been worse than if we’d both been in cars and I’d done the same thing.

The fundamental difference was I was able to look him in the eye and say sorry – one human to another, face to face… and that’s what you lose when we’re all in cars…

Plus driving is such a dire experience these days, it’s fundamentally frustrating so the second you get in a car, your anger levels are rising…

He’s very bright – he’s tapped into the nastier side of the British/English national character but he’s done it in a way which comes across as reasonable rather than the reality of his beliefs which is pure xenophobia.

But fundamentally he’s just a populist chancer taking advantage of our current difficulties to get popular even though he’s no serious intention to run the country – he’ll fade away when people realise he’s all mouth and no trouser. I think he’s just infantile – enjoying getting a reaction from the liberal and tolerant faction.

The only reason to worry about him IMO is he’ll tear the Tory vote apart which means we’re more likely to get another hung Parliament and coalition rather than a strong government next term.

Human-driven cars seem pretty good at creating gridlock.
Did you try and get through Brixton this morning after the flood at Oval?
Self-driving cars could have re-routed people across a much wider area and kept the roads free. As it was, even on a bike it was impossible to make any progress…

Cars seem to turn people into psychopaths – aggressive bullies who have no care for anyone else’s needs…

The sooner self-driving cars come along the better, driving is encouraging so much unhealthy behaviour it’s astonishing.

Just for perspective, c3500 people died in The Troubles from 1960s-1998 but 1754 died on UK roads in just one year in 2012, and we continue to treat driving as some kind of human right which must be defended at all costs…

If London’s rubbish, how come so many people are moving here? 😀

For those who don’t understand, this is the issue with the 650b “revolution”

^^^^ this.

For the hard of understanding, it’s not the introduction of a new wheelsize that’s causing the upset, it’s the “we’re not supporting 26 inch anymore even though it’s what you all have and you’re happy with and means your whole bike will have to be ditched because you can’t get spare wheels or forks for it anymore, even if you don’t want to spend cash on a whole new bike, or, in the middle of an economic crisis, don’t even have the cash”

The apparent lack of real different in the new wheel size is not why people are upset, it’s being forced into buying something they don’t want…

My Sky broadband is borked and until the engineer comes I’m using the Fon thing – where you use spare broadband from all your neighbours wireless.

Interestingly, a speedtest test shows my upload speed is 2-3x what I get from Sky when it’s working so they’re clearly throttling the line…

If they all say 27.5 is the future then thats it isn’t it?

Not necessarily. If enough suppliers of 26 bits keep supplying to meet demand then we’ll keep riding our 26ers, which we’re quite happy with, no?

.as long as I can get parts for it. Think we are getting forced into this and theres no stopping it.

This is my point – if we can get parts for 26 then why would we buy a whole new 650B bike? By and large we don’t want 650B in the first place and no demand = no market. Simple…

I’ve been buying each new innovation (front suss, v-brakes, full-suss, disc brakes etc) for 20 years of mountain biking as they offered something that was clearly an improvement but I’ve not seen the industry forcing a new standard like this before and creating so much resentment… that speaks volumes about whether the demand is really there…

why would manufacturers ignore a massive worldwide market for components anyway?

This is where people underestimate the value of capitalism – the profit motive – where there’s cash to be made from meeting needs, someone, somewhere will deliver…

So if enough people like Cy at Cotic call bullshine on the way the industry has forced 650B on consumers, and supply us with the kit we need to keep our installed base of 26 alive, then we’ll happily keep what we have and won’t buy new bikes… and 650B will fade away…

It wouldn’t be the first time that nimble small players have blown apart the apparent market power of the incumbents.

Well we’ve seen what happened to the 29er revolution…it didnt quite happen

So why does the industry think the 650B ‘revolution’ will happen? Seems a bit naive/desperate to believe it will tbh

The o.p. has gone all quiet.

sadly he’s done his job. Shill/troll comments like that are just one more thread that create doubt in the minds of the easily-led… best thing we can do with threads like this is to ignore them. (Yes I know there’s irony in that comment!)

It’s the same trick the Daily Mail plays – manipulating social media by putting out a story which they know will poke reasonable people into a reaction, which then creates a debate and we do their publicity for them, which is ironically the very thing the commenters are arguing against…

Chatting to a guy on our club ride today who’s just bought a 2-bed house in Croydon for £250k. No-one likes Croydon, it’s undesireable and even the Economist had an article a few months ago suggesting that the wealth is gravitating either into central London or out to the stockbroker belt and places like Croydon are heading into decline…

Anyway, he said places were being sold within days of going on the market and for over the asking price…

Coupled with the comment above about houses in Surrey which aren’t selling, but being put on the market at a higher price suggests that things have gone beyond a properly functioning market and sellers are getting greedy and buyers are panicking… which looks like bubble territory to me.