I’m glad Kuenssberg got rumbled giving him the heads-up. It shows that she’s a Johnson stooge and it also means the so-called interview has been pulled completely. Result.

I always assumed she’d given him the questions and probably some suggested answers in advance anyway. She’s basically the Tory MP for the BBC.

Offer a free breakfast to anyone travelling “actively” (walking / cycling).

Banking extra days holiday for anyone on active or public transport. 5 days cycled = 1 extra day of leave, that kind of thing.

The main difficulty is proving it. I know a local school ran something similar and all that happened was the parents dropped the kids off a street or 2 away and the little darlings walked 100m and claimed their free breakfast.

Depending on the workplace, you may need to consider how this impacts people who WFH or do hybrid working cos no-one likes to feel they’re being omitted from freebies so if the office cleaner is getting 5 free breakfasts and extra day’s leave for a week of cycling in but the Head of [Department] is getting nothing cos they WFH or live 60 miles away, it may not go down well!

TBH I was thinking car share might go better than anything else

A previous workplace of mine tried this (mostly cos the car park was too small for everyone!) and it turned out to be a massive PITA for all concerned.
A picks up B cos it’s on the way but when it comes to B’s turn to drive, they’re not going to go 5 miles the other way to pick up A.
C and D normally work 9-5 but today, at short notice D needs to work until 6.30 which completely screws them both for getting home.
Turns out that E and F work fine together in the office but can’t stand each other’s taste in car music and refuse to share the same space.

All of these were genuine reasons offered by employees.

I had the misfortune to catch the last few minutes of Badenoch’s so-called speech at the Tory conference.

It’s astonishing how, just when you think the whole shitshow couldn’t possibly be any worse, the next Tory leader (leader-in-waiting) manages to lower the bar again.

Badenoch is full on insane. Like, clinically bonkers, full on window-licking, howling at the moon insane.

It’s the AI voiceovers on videos that are the dead giveaway, they’ve not got the tone or inflection right. No pause or emphasis where you’d expect one.

Absolute pile of shite, the problem is that everyone wants a bit of the AI action cos it sounds cool, even if they haven’t got a clue what it is.

Naturally, when you return to cycling, you might be a bit unfit, or maybe the hip needs some gentle “riding in”.

Therefore you probably need a new e-bike ready for your return.

Just saying… ;-)

Best of luck with the operation!

This is the first time I’ve ever thought that anyone would find it acceptable to bring a bicycle into a shop. I don’t find it acceptable.

Depends on the shop. On my old commute I sometimes stopped off at the local corner shop so no chance of ever getting a bike in there.

But I also sometimes stopped at an Asda on the way and routinely wheeled the bike in, parked it near the entrance, bought my meal deal and went on my way. Never once had any issues (although it was early in the morning, maybe they’d have said something if I’d have tried it on a busy Saturday…)

I’d never expect to wheel a bike around the shop with me but – assuming of course that the shop is a reasonable size, and is not a stockist of expensive artwork / fine bone china / etc – wheeling it “just inside” and asking if it’s OK to just pop it there for a minute is seldom met with any complaint.

I used to do some food bank collection/delivery work on a community e-cargo bike, took that into the supermarket every time!

To be fair, for the average STW dweller with a garage full of tools and spares and the ability to confidently buy random spares online a good local bike shop probably is far from vital.

Oh I can buy random spares online and I’ve got a decent range of tools. However in terms of time and effort (and to an extent, effective working space), I’d far rather pass the bike to my (excellent) LBS and have them sort out the issues. I know it’ll be done properly and to a high standard and I also know that I won’t end up with brake fluid or tubeless sealant all over my kitchen floor!

Anything above minor cleaning and maintenance jobs, I’d rather just support my community bike shop – I can afford to pay him, he enjoys working on decent bikes, he earns money (and I’ll always take in a proper coffee and some cake from the local cafe so I get to support two community businesses in one go!)

And that goes both ways – because I support him, he’s actually willing to do the occasional “can you just…?” job without me taking the piss.

To be part of a “community” you need to give something back, not just take, I don’t think many bike shops do this.

Equally though, you’d be amazed at how many riders within “the community” will buy something online to save £2 over the price tag in the shop but still expect to turn up at the shop at 4.45pm on a Saturday with a “can you just…?”

there was an article on here a while back about getting a custom frame built. It raised an interesting (but probably very niche possibility) that someone commissioned a cableless hardtail or road /gravel bike in the specific period where first gen AXS existed, but UDH didn’t (or wasn’t ubiquitous). Hence leaving a custom frame owner with only the possibility of using first gen AXS for the rest of the hopefully long life of the frame.

Canyon produced a portless road frame for a year or two, not sure it’s available any more. Specifically stated in the product description that it could only be used with SRAM AXS.

Sram don’t have the patent on it being wireless, anybody can do this

They have the patent on using the same battery for the front and rear mechs.

Which is why Campagnolo wireless road groupset has to use a different battery on the front and rear mechs. Current Di2 gets round it by having the mechs linked to the same central battery.

Liz Truss is on stage at the Conservative Party conference. The Guardian journo, Peter Walker, is live tweeting it, it’s a mix of hilarity and batshit mental.

It’s an hour before Liz Truss makes her first and only appearance at this year’s Conservative conference and there is already a (small-ish) queue outside the venue. And I am part of it.

— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) September 30, 2024

There are races like the Tour Divide where racers simply roll up on a known date and race, there’s no organisation, I’m not sure how the law in various areas differs though.

That’s kind of how the Dunwich Dynamo operates. A FB page, a generally agreed date and some organisation around it like the cafe on the beach opening up especially early and Southwark Cyclists providing an online portal to book return coach travel. The “event” itself claims to be a tradition, a collective, a simple coincidence that up to 1000 riders turn up on that same night in July to vaguely follow some half-marked route to the coast.

And people have been killed and injured on that. Amazingly, to no real comeback from the law or any insurance.

We had an Irish footballer who’s gran died twice. Same gran.

I knew of a young rider who blamed his lack of performance every year on the death of a grandparent.

Oh I would have done some training / won some races but I was traumatised by the death of [grandparent].

Once he was on the 5th or 6th death, people began to suspect that he might just be a bit shit as a rider…

I always thought Floyd Landis was right up towards the top of the list, not only for cheating so blatantly that even the rest of the doped-up peloton couldn’t come near him but then the grifting, lying and “I had some celebratory whiskies” excuses.

They were a nightmare for shops. They’d introduce mid season models that were better than the current one.

Or disk mount forks and non in the rear or vice versa. Strange ideas at times

Anyone remember the 3-bolt Coda disc hubs they had for a time?

Meant you could only use their in-house Coda brakes (which were shit) unless you bought new wheels with normal 6-bolt hubs. Although Hope did come along and save the day with some 3-bolt rotors for a while.

I think the main nightmare for shops, apart from the half-year product cycle, was all their own-brand Coda parts which were invariably proprietary and crap.

I’m genuinely astonished that people have swallowed the kool-aid so badly to be giving away some of the rim brake road bikes and components I’m seeing right now

I still have a (very rarely ridden) rim brake road bike, the problem is not that it’s got rim brakes, it’s that trying to get decent parts for it now is like trying to get blood out of a stone. Anything of that era has a retro tax attached to it and nice rim brake / QR wheelsets are increasingly hard to come by.

It’s also pretty much worthless to try and sell it.

I don’t sell bikes.

I keep them so long that they are worth nothing, so give them away or store them.

Keep them until they break.

Keep them to pass along to kids (who then break them).

My first MTB, I gave away to a local Youth cycling club, they had a fleet of “loan bikes”. Admittedly mine was a fairly entry level thing but it had been extensively upgraded. However it was old enough that it was worthless from a cash point of view.

The bike was a 1994 model, I think I gave it away in late 90’s / early 00’s as by then I had at least one other, much better, MTB.

They looked great, but the name “crack n’ fail” wasn’t without reason

There was always a pile of broken Cannondale frames in our shop basement awaiting warranty.

Because Cannondale had one Europe-wide distributor at the time rather than a specific UK one, it took forever although to be fair they were generally pretty good at just replacing frames.

I want to say Endura strike a middle ground, but with the variable sizing and iffy build quality of my last few purchases, I keep saying away.

They used to be my absolute go-to for MTB clothing but like you say, the quality and the wild variability of fit now makes them a bit of a lottery.

And a +1 on shorts and trousers being too short but my other bugbear is how everything now is cut for kneepads which makes them ridiculously baggy. I want some nice knee length “baggy” shorts with a velcro or drawstring hem to pull everything in and prevent flappage.

It’s mostly a thing in road races where entrants are selected after the closing date based on their category and rankings.

Once the full field of (eg) 60 riders is selected, the organiser will put probably another 10% of entrants into a Reserve field.

Selection is being done 2-3 weeks in advance of the race and it’s a dead cert that at least 10% of the selected riders will drop out before the event – injury, illness, family reasons etc. as that happens, the organiser will move the Reserve people up into the “fully selected”.

Note that even if you’re still listed as a Reserve, you are obliged to turn up on the day, ready to race, there’s always a few no-shows on the day too and Reserve riders get moved into those gaps as the signing in closes. If you don’t get a ride, you’ll get a full refund.

If you don’t turn up, there is no refund available.

The principle is to ensure that a field of 60 riders stays at that rather than ending up with 40 on the day due to drop outs, no-shows etc.

It got so bad a few years ago that my workplace at the time (East Manchester) was emailing staff warning never to cycle it alone and facilitating group trips by linking commuters that used it and saying “there’s a meeting point at xxxx, wait there, a group of 4-6 will form and you can ride the Floop bit together for safety”.

Helen Pidd of the Guardian newspaper (another regular rider of the Floop) organised a big community event along it one evening to highlight the issues to the (thoroughly useless) police and that did galvinise them into action for a few weeks.

It’s Australian research. It doesn’t necessarily invalidate the findings but anti-cycling attitudes are even more prevalent than the UK.

There have been various, mostly small-scale, ad-hoc “studies” in both UK and US that have come to much the same conclusion though. A general “othering” of cyclists, cultural norms around driving being the “proper” or “normal” way of getting around therefore cyclists are different and somehow less worthy.

I had an old chap stop me and tell me my rear light was too bright

There is no such thing as a Goldilocks Cyclist where everything is just right. You’re either riding too fast (and therefore hurtling and a menace) or you’re riding so slowly that you’re holding up all the traffic.

You’re either dressed in all black and completely invisible (and motorists will shout out of their window to tell you how they haven’t seen you!) or you’re too bright and therefore dazzling.

Your lights are either pathetic and inadequate or they’re blinding everyone for miles around.

Sometimes all these things can happen simultaneously. I’ve had “sorry mate I didn’t see you” and “your lights are too bright” on the same ride. /shrug emoji

It looked incredibly shonky.

The ISS looks pretty shonky when you see pics inside it. Lots of exposed wiring. The explanation given on a science YouTube video was that they’d thought about making it all neat and tidy with panels covering stuff but that just meant that every time you had to access the wiring, you needed to remove panels and that was generally pretty inefficient!

I’d been shying away from the Canaries as didn’t really fancy any of them – but looking at some of the above answers, think I might stick it on the list. It’s probably the most accessible for decent weather in October. Not sure which island though.

The Canaries is reliably better weather – Gran Canaria, Fuertaventura and Lanzarote are all really well set up for cycling and they get far and away the bulk of the tourism so there’s usually some cheap deals somewhere. Lanza tends to get the bulk of the triathlete market.

Majorca – my club has just cancelled a planned trip out there based on the cost and the anti-tourist  stuff that’s been in the news. A mate lives out there (he retired out there before Brexit) and he said that April and October you can barely move for all the bloody cyclists (and he is a bloody cyclist himself, formerly a very good one!)

The one time I went to Majorca, we had 3 days of rain over the week that we were there and it turned the roads into skating rinks. Was basically just cold wet and miserable. On the other hand I’ve only had one day of rain in the 3-4 times I’ve been to Gran Canaria.

Auto Shenanigans – Proper middle age guy stuff, looking at random roading infrastrucutre

I really like this one. He did a history of motorways one, he does some occasional shorts on particular items and at the moment there’s a “Great British Road Journeys” series where he drives around places of interest using a 1923 Michelin Guide Book and the maps of that time, trying to stay on original roads and routes where possible.

GCN is usually pretty reliably good.

I like SciManDan too – science stuff and flat earth / science conspiracy debunking.

No different from any of their other specials other than it’s their last.

Fewer contrived stunts and challenges which is definitely a plus. I thought it had some amusing bits and it was better for being Three Blokes Cocking Around In Cars rather than the “hilarious” pranks and scripted squabbles of previous episodes.

Plus Zimbabwe did look stunningly beautiful.

What they made little effort to hide this time was just what a massive support crew they have with them!

My theory is that electric hire bikes have introduced non cyclist to the streets

The problem with those is that they’re charged by time. Unlike on a bus where you’ve paid a fixed fee, spending longer on a bike costs more.

The average journey on a Lime bike is about 2km. If you stop at every light, walk across every pavement, that can be £1 more than just cruising along kind of taking care of what you’re doing (ie, not running people over, not causing drivers to take avoiding action), but still technically breaking the law. You can save a fair chunk of money, especially if you’re taking several bikes a day.

And by the way, that behaviour is no different to a driver “just” parking illegally to “just” nip to a shop because it’ll save them paying £1 in the car park that’s 30yds away. No matter that the wheelchair user now can’t get past because they’ve blocked the pavement…

It’s the same type of behaviour.

a local problem could be solved fairly easily

My point (and the point the police are making) is that’s it’s not a problem. It’s an irritation, sure. But it’s not a problem. There are not queues of nearly killed people in every hospital, there are not piles of bodies strewn across the streets with bike tyre markings across their heads. It’s annoying at worst. So, quite rightly, the under-resourced police are going to concentrate on the things that are a problem.

So not a case of regulation, just a lack of enforcement.

My Mum, being a retired old biddy with nothing better to do, routinely goes to the local Community Policing / Safer Neighbourhoods / Neighbourhood Watch meetings which are – as with most meetings of that nature – populated by similarly old-aged biddies and this one comes up every single time.

Usually rife with anecdotes of how Mabel’s hairdresser said that her son’s girlfriend’s Mum’s best friend’s neighbour had been NEARLY KILLED by twelvtyseven rampant e-scooters doing somewhere between 40mph and the speed of sound and WHAT ARE TEH POLICE GOING TO DO?!

The police response is always the same – we can pull over someone on one of these bikes/scooters, confiscate the bike, fine them (which will never get paid) and that takes two police officers off the streets for 3hrs while they do the paperwork and meanwhile someone is ranting on UberEats that they never got their burger (cos that’s invariably the majority of people using these “e-motorbikes”) and someone else is complaining that the police never showed up after they’d been mugged at knifepoint.

I’ve been that cyclist, wrote off my Condor Fratello.

Had similar once – pedestrian looked down at me sprawled in the road and she ran off. Thankfully bike and I were both OK.

The helpful and considerate driver behind me hooted at me as I lay in the road. How dare I hold up an Important Motorist by daring to crash in front of them.

And possibly not even a cyclist, but an illegal e-motorbike rider.

No, it’s a well known fact that all London cyclists are budding WorldTour riders. The Telegraph printed a story a while ago stating that “we” (as the collective of all cyclists) had done 52mph along the Embankment, the noble Lord was “nearly killed” by someone pedalling at “at least 30mph” (in a city where the average traffic speed is about 8mph).

Quite frankly, if you’re not “hurtling” through London (cyclists always “hurtle”) at 30mph, can you even call yourself a cyclist?!

Sounds good, at the point where government finances and resources are at breaking point, having to create an entire new licensing agency and new laws requiring policing with their limited resources, it sounds like a real winner.

No-one ever understands this. It’s rarely pointed out to the frothing idiots either.

I seem to remember from somewhere that Robert Winston (baron or lord or something) was frothingly anti-cyclist.

Yep, he’s terrible. He had a column in one of the RW papers (probably the Telegraph but I can’t remember) which routinely went off on one about cyclists. Standard stuff about “I love cycling… but only when it’s done by Olympians in velodromes, I don’t want it anywhere near me”

Oh bless.

Has someone built some jumps on his estate or held him up for five seconds in his Bentley?

**** off.

Oh this was a Lords debate the other day which he “sponsored” (or whatever the term is). As happens whenever the Lords debate cycling there are one or two sensible voices (notably Jenny Jones) and a whole load of absolute waffle and twoddle.

If you have a few hours spare, you can read the full text of the debate here:

https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2024-09-12/debates/0AE6E116-272B-4ECE-8B85-7BDA98675D52/PedalCycles

I’ve skim read bits of it, stopping to facepalm and inwardly cringe occasionally.

It’s not about you though, with respect. We need more people coming into riding and TCs are a way to do that. So I don’t care if the TCs aren’t for me or you anymore, they’re for others. Wanting more tech trails to suit bigger bikes is pulling the drawbridge up if the older trails don’t stay there for others.

+1.

This is where the Sportive “industry” shot itself in the foot, as organisers competed with each other to come up with the hardest, the toughest, the hilliest, the longest Sportive around.

And then wondered why only 60 people signed up to it.

All the welcoming “hey, come and ride on some roads/trails you wouldn’t normally do, with a load of support and camaraderie and we’ll all have a great time” had disappeared in the quest for ever more ridiculous levels of gnarr.

A good TC should have a mix of everything. Yes, you might think the Green trail is so tame you could ride it on a road bike but Casual Family Robinson on the ropey kids bikes and the cheap hire bike NEED that kind of trail. It can’t all be Super Double Black Gnar.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved CyB and had many brilliant days there, but last time I rode Red Bull I realised that objectively speaking it was just….. a bit shit.  Sorry, but it was.

I’ll admit that I actually thought the same on that one!

Which I’d see as a case for MORE investment and more engagement with the volunteer trail builders, not less.

nah. They look rad :)

Which is offset by everyone going “half your fork is missing!” and other such hilarities. I used to work in a shop that sold Cannondale and by the time the 17th customer of the day had walked past the bike and said “is it supposed to look like that?” it got very wearing.

Much like riding a tandem and constantly hearing “he/she isn’t pedalling at the back!”

A friend had a pair of those Lauf (leaf spring carbon) forks on her bikepacking bike, she had much the same to the point where she’d actively avoid any bike-related conversations.

Who’s next? Lachlan? Currently averaging over 300 miles a day on his trip around Australia.

He did a lot of those miles in flip-flops as well cos he was getting hot-spot problems in his cycling shoes!

I’d be really interested to hear what Jenny Graham thinks of tihs attempt. It’s got a lot of differences to her approach but also a lot of similarities. I strongly suspect she’d be nothing but suportive.

One article I read somewhere (social media maybe?) said that JG was at the finish in Chicago cheering LW in. Does seem to be a thing in ultra-endurance racing where the whole community is really supportive because they all know that records are there to be broken and they understand what the athlete went through in order to achieve that. Seems to go through phases as well – there was a spate of Everesting records a few years ago when lots of people were at it and – as with this round-the-world record – part of the challenge is choosing the right hill, the right weather conditions and so on. The records will never be exactly equal if Person A does it on this hill but Person B chooses another hill; same as RTW where either you have an exact route to be followed (which is probably unworkable) or you just set some parameters and leave it to the individual to abide by that framework.

Hell of a ride, no matter what anyone thinks of the overall record.

CyB will wither purely and simply for the same reason it was built there in the first place. It’s a long way away from most population centres and in a not very popular location.

CyB used to be wildly popular! Llandegla still is really popular, you get there at 11am on a Sunday, there’s nowhere to park. On the other hand, last time I went to CyB last year, I thought I’d arrived on set of a zombie movie, there was no-one in the car park!

So what’s changed at CyB…?!

Is everyone off gravel riding instead? Is it really too far? Or has the lack of maintenance and general careless attitude about the place from those who are supposed to be managing it driven people away…?

Genuine question, I don’t know the answers.

Anyone any ideas on alternatives 100 milers on closed roads?

As far as I know, the only closed road Sportives left in the UK are Etape Loch Ness (April) and Etape Caledonia (May). Loch Ness is only 100km, the Caledonia I think is about 85 miles.

Quite honestly, you’d be better off going abroad. The famous Majorca 312 has a 167km (100 mile) option, that’s all closed roads. France and Spain both do a few closed road Sportives.

The RideLondon Classique Women’s race that went alongside the whole RideLondon weekend was moved (apparently by the UCI and without consultation but who knows…) so without that, it becomes a whole load of expensive road closures for very little return. If you can have the Women’s race (and the resulting tourism, TV coverage etc) it’s viable but without that it’s like the London Marathon but 10x as disruptive and costly.

London wasn’t able to just go “oh OK, we’ll do that weekend instead” because these things take years to plan and you can’t just change dates at the drop of a hat.

I did the original Box Hill event a few times, was good fun.

As they say though, it could probably do with a bit of a refresh anyway, here’s hoping it comes back for 2026.

BTW, were there petrol stations on your limited route as well?

Petrol stations, no issues, the organisation had provided fuel cards and a list of stations en route / near hotels etc, that was no problem. The car I had would do about 350 miles on a tank running in petrol mode (and there was actually a proportion of the battery that’d self charge cos it would often switch itself to EV for low speed stuff even when the main battery had no charge).

But 350 miles was fine for driving from hotel to race start, doing the race distance and then driving to the next hotel with a stop en route to fill it up.

Could never stop at a charging station on a motorway though, we didn’t have the time to sit there and wait an hour for a supercharger to top it up.

Finish race, sort everything, get to next hotel.

As I say, it’s quite a specific use case! It’s also why the majority of team cars are still full petrol or diesel estates. And it’s getting increasingly difficult to get proper estate cars as everything evolves to SUV styling.

I was driving a plug-in hybrid on the Tour of Britain so my first foray into the world of actually charging the thing.

OK, I was very restricted in where I could go – specific hotels, a defined race route and so on, it wasn’t a case of seeking a charge point and going to it. Thankfully the car ran on full petrol because it would have been completely unworkable to have a pure EV or something that “needed” a portion of charge to function.

I charged it twice (the hotels which actually had charging points, 2 out of 5) and had to download two separate apps, set up payment etc for each and work out which of the points were actually compatible.

I appreciate that it’s a very specific usage – I didn’t “know” the car (didn’t even know what car I’d be getting until I actually picked it up at Race HQ) and I’d not prepared any advance info on charging points but I just found it all such a faff. It should not need a different app for each version of charge point, should not need the thought of “oh I can use this one but not that one”.

I have a similar complaint about parking apps. I don’t want a **** app, I want to pay some money. It’s that simple. Or it bloody should be.