It is NOT progress to tell kids “you can play out there once a year under strict controls”, any more than the SkyRides do anything in the long term for cycling other than tell people “it’s not safe to cycle except when we shut the road once in a while”.

Fair play to those who organise these, they’re doing the best that’s doable, but we shouldn’t let the powers-that-be off here.

Kids already play out in our street every day, in Central Reading.. 20mph, speed bumps. It doesn’t need once-in-a-blue-moon closures, it needs motorists to accept that they can’t drive everywhere at the speed they want to.

As both a cyclist and a driver, it still royally riles me when a cyclist squeezes ahead at a junction, then grinds off at the pace of a tortoise ensuring that all the the cars hes just jumped past are stuck behind him.

Again, tough tits to the drivers. It’s safest for the cyclist to be at the front, and hence visible to them. If drivers had a better track record of not blindly hooking and killing cyclists sharing a queue with them, it’d be less tough tits, but for now, tough tits.

Are either of them Vittoria? If so, throw them in the bin.

Just that I don’t think there is any argument that, rightly or wrongly, it is very irritating to car drivers.

Tough tits. It’s their choice to be sitting in a vehicle that is too wide to get through.

Mandatory helmet laws out there too, by the way

I’d have zero issue with them enforcing it on roads from a personal perspective. Quoting figures of children sat on the sofa really doesn’t concern me

I don’t really see the relevance though. Lawmakers need to consider the overall effect of the law. It’s not about any individual’s personal perspective.

And no, the kids shouldn’t be out grinding out strava segments, that’s a straw man. But if they’re riding bikes rather than sitting on the sofa, there’s a benefit to them, and a wider benefit to society.

Personally I couldn’t care less if my emails are read and Skype calls are intercepted – the small likelihood of someone looking at my web browsing history of the niner and stw websites or reading order emails from merlin cycles seems like a fair deal if it means that those who would do my friends and family harm are identified and dealt with.

First they came for the whistleblowers…

You may wish to get some shopping trips in quick.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/9612225/Number-of-obese-people-in-France-doubles-to-seven-million.html

Hmm, from that article:

That means that 15 per cent of the French population is now obese and 32.3 per cent overweight.

From the NHS:

A survey published in 2012 found that just over a quarter of all adults (26%) in England are obese.

15% vs 26%? I rest my case about French food.

(and yes, that 10% inactivity *could* be made up with activities other than cycling, but who’s to say they are safer? Injury rates per mile are just as high for walking as for cycling. It’d therefore be important to also mandate helmet use for walking. Oh, and armbands for swimming.)

And when your compulsion saves a handful of lives, possibly, in a good year, how do you defend against the larger increase in inactivity deaths that would result from compulsion?

If cycling rates drop by just, say, 10%, it’s perfectly credible to believe that could result in far more deaths, given the far higher harm to society that inactivity is causing.

As I modelled earlier:

120 deaths from cycling. Most wouldn’t have been prevented by helmet compulsion, fair to say? Let’s say 10, very generous.

So that’d be overwhelmed by just a 0.01% increase in inactivity deaths, which given a 10% drop in cycling is perfectly credible.

The benefit of wearing a helmet is outweighed by nothing, other than if the helmet you were wearing was 1) dangerously radioactive 2) lined with razor blades 3) made of glass. What are the downsides of wearing a helmet in an accident?

This is a thread called “Helmet compulsion”

Oh and the big fallacy that its safe on a bike in Holland, with 200+ deaths in 2011 it is worse than the UK by almost 100%.

My word.

I think we’re brainwashed in the UK in to sheepishly baa-ing along to the line that subsidies to farmers are bad, mmkay.

“Blah blah blah”, goes the press. “French farmers are massively subsidised”, blah blah.

Well here’s a fact: French food, ordinary food-in-the-shops food, is **** GREAT compared to the same stuff here. I’d challenge anyone to a blind taste test of, say, two supermarket tomatoes, one here, one in France. I’m confident the French tomato would win that taste test 95% of the time, and the other 5% would be people who like tomatoes that taste mainly of water.

Why not just enforce it on the road? The above picture isn’t on the road.

Because there’s a mountain of evidence that’d need to be climbed to demonstrate any kind of net benefit.

There are 120 or so deaths of cyclists each year.
Let’s say (HIGHLY generously) that 5% of those deaths would be prevented by helmet mandation (not just by helmets)

There are 90,000 deaths from inactivity each year.
You’d have to show, on this measure, that helmet mandation would not have an impact on activity rates that led to a 0.006% increase in mortality.

Confident?

The Home Office has defended the detention, saying police must act if they think someone has “stolen information that would help terrorism”.

That seems a reasonable justification to me, from the government’s POV, if my emboldened bit can be backed up.

Erm, but “this could help terrorism” is such a meaningless and thin statement. Almost anything could arbitrarily to be described as “possibly helping terrorism”.

It’s a dead easy get-out-clause for a government caught with its pants down on any matter. E.g. when the Telegraph uncovered the expenses documents, I’m sure the government could have concocted an excuse to stop on that story too. “Sorry we arrested your journalist and confiscated your files, but that material contained information on MPs movements and addresses that could help terrorism”

37″ inside leg

I second Stonor. I can’t keep my front wheel down on the bugger.

Bells seem to irritate people.
A polite “good morning! Can I just come past you on your right, please? Thank you! Nice day” type of thing works wonders.

(although I still laugh at one former riding companion, in reply to an irate “where’s your bell”, simply replying “ding-a-f*cking-ling”)

actually can see how frustrating it must be if you live in that area…

Anyone from that area who thinks bikes are the major problem on their roads is suffering from an almighty case of cognitive dissonance.

It’s an area where kids get banned from walking or biking to school because of motor traffic, ffs:
http://www.thisissurreytoday.co.uk/Children-banned-walking-cycling-North-Downs/story-18210883-detail/story.html

My 2004 MX Pros will still be walking the earth, with the cockroaches, after the apocalypse.

and that doesn’t look ridiculous when I turn up at client sites in it.

Appreciate I’m not being helpful, but I do think some people in the marketing departments of mid-range car companies need to be paid a bigger bonus.

£4k on a Mazda Bongo, £26k on adventures.

5h 07m for me. My fastest ton by a long shot. I never rode with any particular group, so had some time in the wind alone, but it was often easy to get in pace lines, ride with them for a while, maybe tow a few people up to the next one on occasions. I started with the F start group and seemed to be among a lot of “F”s all day, and didn’t really see many solid organised groups, just lots of odds and sods. Great fun, really amazing riding those closed roads.

Some of your employers need to be reminded that the last release of IE7 was five years ago, and the product itself is seven years old.

Get OS map, find bridleways near front door, ride bridleways near front door.

Report it. They’ll at the very least least flag the number plate and look for their behaviour in future. That’s better than nothing at all

Can’t you just change your password?

(edit, I have no idea if that’d stop what you need to stop)

Rule #42
// A bike race shall never be preceded with a swim and/or followed by a run.

If it’s preceded with a swim and/or followed by a run, it is not called a bike race, it is called duathlon or a triathlon. Neither of which is a bike race. Also keep in mind that one should only swim in order to prevent drowning, and should only run if being chased. And even then, one should only run fast enough to prevent capture.

The Rules

Hope this clarifies.

He had a contract. He knew the rules. He broke the rules. He gets punished. Hard to see how he can complain really.

So whistleblowing is unacceptable in every circumstance?

In this case though, 18 SECONDS with your eyes off the road while piloting a ton and a half of metal is an appalling lack of concern and care from the driver and in this case, I wholeheartedly agree with the charge. 18 seconds isn’t careless, it’s downright negligence.

18 seconds was a balls up by the forensic analyst. It assumed the cyclist wasn’t travelling at any speed at all. If he’d been doing 20mph, he might have been in sight for over 50 seconds.

There are in the order of 100 cyclist deaths per year in the UK. This always feels way smaller than would be indicated by the number of stories you hear where “the helmet definitely saved my/my friend’s/my relative’s life”, particularly as in many cases the lethal injuries aren’t head injuries.

One interesting thing this all implies is that the claims that 99 was much cleaner than 98, but Lance’s team spoiled the “tour of redemption” thing and were wildly at it, have some validity

Jonathan Vaughters tweeted the other day, something like “well, you could test my sample from the 1999 Dauphine and it would come up negative, but…”

they can test my samples from Paris-Roubaix and my Olympic medals for the next thousand years, they’re not going to find anything.

That means nothing. EPO glowtime is short.

I never started the thread!!!! I only joined in on this page!!!

I misunderstood your opening line, apologies

Not sure why people cite the Netherlands a s a safe place to ride, having spent 2 weeks there on holiday with a bike I can assure you it is not.

http://www.bikexprt.com/research/pasanen/helsinki.htm

I really would urge you to take 15 minutes to watch this TED talk. You may end up disagreeing, fine, but Mikael Colville is one of the foremost experts on cycling culture in one of the two most successful cycling countries in the world, so I think it’s a pretty long leap to call him ridiculous.

Especially if they asset there is no downside to helmet wearing.

There is a big downside to the whole culture of helmets, in that collectively makes people see cycling as much more hazardous than they should. There’s nothing wrong with wearing a helmet. There’s a LOT wrong with being overcritical of others for choosing not to.

Anyway, it feels much nicer sometimes riding without a lid. Particularly when climbing a big mountain, for instance.

Hey, crosshair, if you have such little respect for the opinions of others, and prefer to laugh and call people “ridiculous”, why bother starting the thread? Your tone is very patronising.

Anyway, picking out the comparison with cars (which is “ridiculous”), you outline a bunch of things that you assert prevent head injuries. And yet…

“Car crashes remain a significant source of head injury in the community. Car occupants have an annual hospital admission rate of around 90 per 100,000 population. Of drivers who are admitted to hospital, the most serious injury is usually to the head (O’Conner and Trembath, 1994).

In a previous study, McLean et al. (1997) estimated the benefits that are likely to accrue to Australia from the use of padding of the upper interior of the passenger compartment. This study specifically examined the effects of the ammendment to the United States Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 201 (FMVSS 201) in which passenger cars have to pass head impact tests with the upper interior. That report estimated the total annual reduction in harm to the Australian community to be around $123 million.

But more impressive were the estimates of introducing protective headwear for car occupants. The authors of the report estimated that the annual reduction in harm would be in the order of $380 million.
http://www.copenhagenize.com/2009/10/australian-helmet-science-for-motorists.html

Yes, things have come on since 1997, for sure, but car accidents remain the biggest single cause of major traumatic head injuries. So no, the comparison is not “ridiculous”, it’s valid, because it illustrates that there is a practical line that gets drawn somewhere. For some reason, people want to set that line much lower for motoring than for cycling, and that’s why there is a massively entrenched PPE culture around the latter, but not the former.