Anything which gets house prices back to a level where people on average earnings can afford to buy has got to be a good thing.

I took my iPod into an Apple store to get some help with a suspected dry joint in the headphone socket which leads it to go onto pause all on its own.
Apparently they’re designed so they can’t be fixed…
Options:
1. Buy a new one for £160
2. Buy a reconditioned one for £90

If you can’t get into it to repair something as simple as a dry joint, how come you can sell reconditioned ones?

Consumers can be quite dim sometimes. Or maybe we just have too much money…

One of the great things about bikes is the basic technology (frame shape, bearings, chain drive, wheels etc was 100% spot on from the start and despite billions of £ and $ spent on trying to improve it, what we ride these days are fundamentally the same as the Rover Safety bicycle from 1888…

Rover Safety Bicycle[/url]

Glad you’re mainly ok OP.

FWIW I ride very slowly across roundabouts and eyeball anyone on the left, ready to stop if they pull out – waay to many people not looking properly or being impatient. not enough people seem to understand priority to the right!

Whoever worked that out is definitely cleverer than me 😀

Anecdotal experience in recent weeks suggests the media hullabaloo is leading to more considerate driver behaviour in London and its environs. Certainly Tfl and Andrew Gilligan are at pains to demonstrate they’re dealing with the poor infrastructure.

Although I’d like them to focus more on making bullying and incompetent driving socially unacceptable… they blame Tube passengers for delays (don’t hold the doors open) rather than the infrastructure but don’t blame drivers for killing cyclists – they blame cylists and the infrastructure… 😯

OP – why not reply to that email and ask them to explain why taking your property and passing it on for auction is not common theft? It’d be interesting to see their response…

The usual: not overeating in the first place and doing lots of riding. Plus a few days out on Lakeland fells in the bit between Xmas and New Year. Very much looking forward to it 🙂

Couple that with a one to cyclists reinforcing that RLJ is bad, see and be seen, don’t undertake in traffic and increase your awareness and I’m there.

I’m not in favour of compulsory training for cycling as it reduces its accessibility (and requiring a test and a licence doesn’t seem to do all that much for the competence of drivers!) but massive encouragement to take Bikeability would sort out the issues you mention…

Personally I don’t think we need massive infrastructure creating segregation – only infrastructure which drives behaviour change.

The empathy issue is key I think – we need to work on the lack of understanding of how it feels to cycle with massive chunks of metal being driven at speed past you or on your wheel.

Drivers need to chill out and grow up – with each other as well as with cyclists.

Cycling community needs to do 2 things, which are both IMO very easy:

1. Massive campaign of myth-busting – all the ‘all cyclist RLJ’, ‘hi-vis and helmet will reduce the deaths’ ‘road tax’ etc and get some facts into people’s thick heads…
2. Get the general public to understand the amount of aggression and harassment faced by cyclists. It’s not acceptable towards women, disabled people, racial minorities etc so why to people choosing a different form of transport?

I think the massive amount of debate after the recent deaths is beginning to make a change though – lots of courteous driving today when I was out…

You’ll know if you have a psychopath in your midst, their games and lack of consideration (whilst simultaneously appearing to be unaware of the damage they’re causing) are breathtaking.

They’re usually the person that everyone is really angry with (because they’ve been repeatedly screwed over), and no-one can understand why nothing’s been done about them… the reason being the people in authority are as screwed over by their manipulations as the rest of us/scared of the consequences if they do stand up to them.

It’s not actually a very amusing experience…

This is an eye-opening read…

Robert Hare

1. Threads like this, reminding us of all the positive things in life (usually the most simple)
2. Time with good friends, just having a good chat
3. Autumn riding – the colours and the light make you sooo glad to be out in it, instead of in a car/house/train

I assume this is Bikebiz just stirring things up. As in it won’t actually be enforced…

I can’t believe they’ll seriously try and enforce it – far too many people riding SPDs for a start. Plus they can’t ignore the fact there aren’t any night-legal SPDs available for us to buy even if we wanted to…

If they can prove a cyclist ever came to harm or harmed someone else because they didn’t have pedal reflectors I’d be amazed.

A brief look at collision data would surely show that enforcing laws around driving and drinking/mobile phone usage/speeding would have a much more significant effect on road safety for all road users.

Would screw up commuting for a lot of people, which is dead against Government’s push to increase cycling rates, and puts paid to the Dunwich Dynamo for one 🙁

Probably plenty of coppers commuting to work will be breaking the law too 🙂

Exercise as a form of weight loss is stupid, just don’t eat the stuff in the first place.

A wise man once said “You can’t out-train a bad diet” My running times got a lot better when I really focussed on cutting chocolate and excess sugar from my diet… funny that

That calorie checker is scary. Roughly a third of the amount of sugar in dark chocolate as there is in milk.

Given the way retailers position chocolate prominently in the queue areas I do wonder if in future years when the full impact of the majority of the population being in poor health finally hits us, whether government and/or individuals will take legal action against them – similar to the way we did with big tobacco eventually

I went to John Lewis at lunchtime to get my xmas shopping done.
Noticeably very few people looked happy…

No wonder ecomm’s getting so popular!

Someone needs to explain the economic argument to fat people. ie: it reduces productivity – less energy, more likely to be off sick, and it adds massive cost to the NHS (illness) and transport system (everything has to be stronger and uses more fuel because the aggregate mass being moved is greater)

It also means we’ll have to import people who are healthy enough to be properly economically productive

So a significant proportion of the UK is eating it’s way to crippling our chances of remaining a rich country…

Pretty much renders it unsellable without a respray, surely?

JFletch. I know it’s anecdote but London was rammed with cyclists this morning – as many as I’ve seen.
Coldest day of the winter so far and only a couple of weeks after we lost 6 riders…

Oh, make sure he buys 650b wheels if he wants the road to come alive

My Time RX Instinct is a beautiful bike to ride. Would cost £4.5k as it currently stands.

BUT. Being a fit and strong rider IMHO brings more pleasure than riding an expensive bike. The Time would be a total waste if all I did was bimble around slowly on it, like driving a Ferrari around a city at 12mph instead of the open road or a race track…

The idea above about getting a cheap winter bike to build fitness and then a nicer summer bike will bring him more pleasure and get him fitter IMO

Education and cultural shift (however you think that’s going to happen) isn’t going to solve this one alone.

On the one hand, I agree with this. On the other, it’s already begun. Using London as an example of what can be achieved nationwide:

“Cycling in the capital is on the up; since 2001, cycling on London’s major roads increased by 173 per cent. The Mayor wants to go further to really make a difference to how Londoners get about their city.

The Mayor is working with TfL to deliver a 400 per cent increase in cycling by 2026, compared to 2001 levels, while making two wheeled transport safer, more attractive, and more convenient. TfL is investing more than ever before in cycling and funding is increasing to the point where levels of investment are approaching those of other leading European cycling cities.”

From London.gov.uk

The current fuss is mainly because the masses aren’t very good at coping with change, they’ll get used to it eventually…

I suspect that central and local government have looked at how much debt we already have, looked at the costs of the obesity and mental health crises, looked at the costs of congestion, looked at the costs of pollution, looked at the capacity of the current transport infrastructure and realised that getting more people on bikes will make inroads into all of these problems which are going to cost us an absolute fortune at a time when the developing world is very keen to eat our lunch…

Sadly if you’re in good physical health and of healthy weight in the UK, you’re in a minority, so they haven’t half got a way to go 😯

Park Big Blue Book.
Although you can dispense with the book and just take the laptop to the garage and use their t’interweb version

I think local authorities will do free maintenance courses too. Saves a whole lot of ‘learning by wrecking’ as I did 😀

I was going to jump on the OP’s extremely dodgy use of statistics

ahem, Mayor of Bogata’s actually 😀 which he used to justify massive improvements in the quality of life in his city

I run and cycle. It can be tricky doing both as cycling will shorten your hamstrings and give you back issues.
Get yourself to a physio for a proper diagnosis first.
I would make sure you have a full and proper stretching regime: running stretches after every run, cycling stretches after every ride.
Foam rollers are miracle workers… self-massage basically.
Ask your physio for appropriate exercises. British Cycling have published the post-ride stretches they give to their pros – you can’t get better advice than that!

Don’t take this the wrong way but can you lose some weight? Carrying a few kg less over that distance will make it a lot easier.

Worth doing some core strength and flexibility work to keep you supple, keep injury at bay and to give you more power for the hills (and more energy spare for everything else)

Equally is it worth looking at your bike? My carbon summer bike w/carbon cranks and carbon soled shoes is so much more efficient at putting the power from my legs into the road that I’m less tired after a long ride than I am on my winter bike.

Not saying you have to spank a load of cash but if you can make your bike any lighter or more efficient it will help. Incremental gains and all that…

Don’t know Snowbikers but Rich at Cycleactive transformed my riding a few years back – he’s highly respected as a coach and trainer – he has background in outdoor education from Outward Bound rather than a mountain biker who turned into a trainer

One of the great things about skydiving is if anything goes wrong with the plane you’ve got a pretty good chance of surviving – just get out the door!

Car design needs to make the driver feel more vulnerable.
Penalties for aggressive and lousy driving need to be stiffer. Loss of licence for life, loss of car. And when people are found driving whilst banned, jail sentence…

Hope the old couple are ok

Report him. People with anger issues like that are a danger to everyone around them and probably shouldn’t be given a driving licence until they’ve received counselling!

I had a similar incident – run off the road but Police weren’t interested unless I had full reg, make of vehicle and location. I got the distinct feeling they would have preferred it if I hadn’t called. Might be wrong but they weren’t making it easy…. so hope you have better luck.

The key element that the media fail to emphasise about cycling in the UK is the level of aggression and harassment we face and it needs to be brought out into the open and made socially unacceptable. It’s already illegal but that doesn’t seem to make much of a difference!

Mind you, lots of drivers being very courteous today so I guess recent events are making an impact somewhere

I don’t think people notice good cycling – they only notice the bad cycling – confirmation bias + just following the crap they’re fed by the media and ignorant friends and colleagues.
Plus a group of cyclists sitting at a red light simply isn’t noticeable, it’s what you expect to see + they’re not moving…

People fail to notice bad driving partly because it’s the norm and essentially socially acceptable, and partly because they do it as well… people behave as badly as they think they can get away with generally.

It also doesn’t help that some people are simply thick. Like the ill-educated bloke who told me that ‘push-bikes are for the road’ as I had to brake to prevent myself from hitting him as he walked straight up a cycle path towards me this evening which he mistakenly thought was a footpath… no doubt he’ll be telling all and sundry about the law-breaking London cyclist 😯

The two things the cycling spokespeople are failing to get out there are:
1. The stats which prove that cyclists are NOT causing their own deaths and injuries – we need some serious myth-busting to counter the misinformation
2. The daily experience of persecution and harassment because some people driving can’t cope with ‘other’ people on the road

I tried to take mine off when I got back in June. Gave up. I think I’m going to have to take a scourer to it and risk scratching the glass

Was it Speckled Jim?

Agree. I went to Guernsey a couple of years ago – there is one main road round the island (less than 50 miles in total), most of it limited to 30mph and just a short stretch at 40mph. But I also saw drives with shiny new Maserati’s, Ferraris etc on them – made me smile at the pointlessness of it

There’s never been a clearer illustration that cars are primarily used as status symbols rather than forms of transport.

On the OP, maybe we should all get gilets with ‘more people are choosing to ride bikes, get over it’ – Richard Dawkins style 😀

If the horse had looked up would it have had a slacker head angle?

Apparently they want people to submit their views on the topic:

… by 26th November…

I get comms from CTC, BC, 2x road clubs, spend hours on here and Roadcc and heard nothing about their request for submissions. How long would it have taken someone to email the main membership groups and asked them to communicate to all their members?…

So there’ll be more ducks

The behaviour demonstrated by many of those cars in the video will be enough to put many off riding on the roads at all. It’s bullying pure and simple.

The reason I believe this chap is getting such a hard time on here is that he simply isn’t likeable

Stop talking sense! It’s not allowed

He is trying to gather sympathy

This is a good reason for him not to be given his licence back.

Shame he’s not going around saying ‘thank God I didn’t kill anyone, what an idiot I’ve been’

We need a maturity test as part of the process to get a licence

There’s some appalling driving in that video (or at least the first 3 mins I watched). The real problem is that, pure and simple.

On the other hand it looks to me like if he rode more primary then a lot of the close overtakes would be impossible and the left hooks, he’d have more space to get away from. That said, I ride primary coming up to and through pinch points and get a hell of a lot of grief for it so it’s something of a no-win that one.

He really needs to find a way to deal with the general dim-wittery and prejudice of your typical British driver though, for his own enjoyment of riding.

Overall though you can see why in surveys the main reason people give for not taking up cycling is that it feels too dangerous. This is not a great example of the ‘famous’ British tolerance of minorities.

The white builders lorry that cuts him up and sticks his brakes on isn’t fit to be in charge of a vehicle, it’s not terribly different from going up to someone in the street and pushing them over just because you don’t like the way they dress…

Nor can I easily tell you what it will be like for us suddenly to be the biggest and most economically powerful country in Europe

Given the general atmosphere in the UK I suspect that vision is quite compelling for an awful lot of people of both the left and the right… and more so than anything either Dave or Ed have come up with in the last five years…

Whether you like/approve of him or not, the UK needs a visionary leader that promises us a better future… and for most people ‘wealthier than I am now’ = ‘better’

There’s something about isolating someone in a metal box where they feel safe that seems to encourage anti-social and aggressive behaviour. We really really need to get people out of cars, it just seems to make people fat and angry!

You get some inconsiderate behaviour on the Tube and trains and pavements in This London but never on the same scale of aggression and danger.

I avoid driving these days if I can… have you ever tried keeping to the speed limit and only pulling out of a junction when you can see and there’s proper time?… great way to make yourself unpopular. I suspect the only reason deaths are falling is because the people in them are better protected, nothing to do with better driving.

This idea that some people seem to have that cyclists are law-breaking, anti-social animals whilst everyone else is a paragon of virtue is such total nonsense. We really really have to get that message out and change the tone of the debate…I get the feeling drivers are acting as Police, Judge and Jury when they close pass etc – they think we ‘deserve’ punishment for being ‘in their way’…

More Police, zero tolerance on aggressive and dangerous driving, loss of licence and vehicle, make it socially unacceptable to drive like a moron… there’s so much we can do.

All I can say is it’s a damn sight easier being an adult than it was being a teenager. Everything’s changing so fast (physical, hormonal, social) you have no idea who you are or what life’s about – you’re still a kid but want to be an adult but no idea to go about it and you’re parents don’t seem to want to treat you like an adult and also seem to have forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager…

At the same time adults seem to think you should be grateful for everything you have, including your youth!

No easy answers I’m afraid but maybe try and get where he’s coming from – it’ll be bloody hard for him to tell you himself, he likely doesn’t know how to express it…

Lots of people I know found teenage years difficult but turned out ok…