Onehundredandsixtytwoquid!

Okay, the vested interests are clearly not just with the motoring lobby.

What’s Britain then? Safe for cycling?

Yes. It could and should be much better, but cycling’s pretty safe.

Our British culture, and most others (with a few exceptions) has firmly internalised the notion that cycling is a relatively hazardous activity, and should be treated as such.

And yet the cultures that have *not* done that are the ones where cycling is safest, AND where it is treated best by policy makers.

There’s a bit of chicken and egg in that, of course, but that doesn’t invalidate the point.

As a result, we’ve gone beyond any real sensible consideration of risk, to a point where “no helmets are bad mmkay”, cyclists are expected to wear high viz (yet black coloured cars are fine), and it’s exclusively the job of the cyclist to make cycling safer. When stuff happens, it’s treated in a non-ideal way because “cycling is dangerous” and “he should have been wearing a lid/vest”.

Sensible consideration of whether to wear a helmet might go along the lines of “well, if I’m going to be doing 25mph on a club run, where I might touch wheels and go down fast, then a helmet might be an idea… whereas when I potter to the shop at 15mph I think I’m fine not to bother”. Instead it’s quite normal to people to look at a picture of an experienced cyclist climbing a big feckoff mountain at 6.5mph and tut because his lid is on the bars.

Seatbelts are often used as a parallel example but they’re really not. The survival improvements from seatbelt use are orders of magnitude higher than those from cycle helmets. It’s made a HUGE difference.

The fact is, cycling is NOWHERE NEAR as dangerous in itself as it’s made out to be, but there are plenty of vested interests in making it seem so (hence oil companies – who will of course be DIRECTLY and strongly impacted by an uptake in cycling – sponsoring helmet schemes and doing what they can to reinforce that perception).

I don’t think anyone’s saying it’s a BAD idea to wear a helmet and in many circumstances it’s a very sensible one. But a bit of proportion and focus-shifting would really really, REALLY be good for cycling.

Can I argue if you dont shop in tescos in open toes sandals then non helmet wearers are hypocrites

You’ve kind of lost me.

(and pertinently: If it became expected that you’d need safety equipment at Tescos – after all, cans can fall off shelves any time – what would that do to people’s attitude towards the activity of going to Tescos? That’s kind of where cycling is now – the PPE culture adds to the sense of danger for what is basically a safe activity)

Same as putting on shoes when you walk outside in case you step on a sharp stone.

I think that’s false equivalence. Shoes are utiltarian, not (edit)specifically PPE. A fairer analogy: Do you wear steel toe capped safety shoes every time you go to Tescos in case something runs over or falls on your foot? It could happen, and you’d definitely be safer with the toe caps.

(I recently rode up Ventoux and bought one of the photos of me from one of the roadside guys. My lid was strapped to the bars for the ascent. The first three people I showed it to said stuff like “tut tut, no helmet”. Well no, I was riding at less than 7mph up a steep mountain, for about 14 miles in 30-degree heat and bright sunshine. Heatstroke was a far bigger risk than head injury. But it’s all about the sodding helmets. We’re bonkers)

PS I think people claiming that helmet wearing is a red herring becuase it diverts attention from safety is itself a red herring.

That’s not really what’s being claimed. In my case I’m saying we need to be very careful of disproportionately entrenching the PPE culture, because it harms the fundamentally safe activity of cycling, and diverts attention to the wrong place. Less simple than you make it.

In short, I wear one, but we need to stop harping on about the bloody things and hold the right people to account for the right things.

By the way, there was a recent high-profile campaign in the Netherlands to give out helmets to kids and encourage them to wear them. The sponsor? A certain very large Dutch oil company.

Remember, folks, it’s also important to dismount at roundabouts.

Indeed other things would offer us protection as well but it is not an either or

No, it’s not, but as the TED talk I linked to argues, the general PPE culture around cycling actually harms cycling.

I think there’s a lot of wilful or accidental confusion of two different arguments here, and on a broad scale, that confusion is dangerous to cyclists.

I choose to wear one on the road bike, usually. I’m happy on occasions not to. Frankly, the main reason I wear one is to stop some motorist’s defence lawyer from reducing their liability after they’ve pranged me off, and to keep observers/loved-ones happy.

Absolutely it offers a marginal degree of protection that might apply in some circumstances. I might be grateful for that, but I think the chances of such a circumstance occurring are pretty low. I don’t, for instance, choose to wear it in the shower (a common injury location, where ironically a slip is much more likely to replicate the actual tested circumstances applied to the lid). Likewise, I’m not going to buy my child a safety helmet for toddling around (they exist!).

Those of us using the Netherlands example DON’T miss the point in the way that’s been implied. ABSOLUTELY general riding conditions are better there. However, the way we’re conditioned in the UK to advocate helmets as a necessary sticking plaster probably does an awful lot more harm than good, because our version of safety for cyclists is handing out high-viz and helmets, rather than dealing with the real dangers to cyclists the way Holland has so successfully done.

So who here thinks people are stupid if they don’t wear a helmet when they walk to the shops?

Look at all these people who WILL SURELY DIE

Oh, hang on, they’re riding in the safest place for cyclists on Earth.

Like I say, I wear one, but the way many people harp on about them being completely essential and it being stupid not to wear one… it boils my piss a bit because it’s just playing into the hands of people with vested interests against cycling.

I thoroughly recommend this brilliant talk.

“Copenhagen’s bicycle ambassador talks about how important the bicycle is for liveable cities and how bicycle helmets are threatening bicycle culture.”

I wear one but I’m very dubious as to how much protection it really gives. All the “my helmet was in pieces” stories do forget a bit that helmets DO break into pieces very easily. I’ve done it with a light impact that I’m sure wouldn’t have done much damage to my unhelmeted head.

ANYWAY, what I don’t agree with is the “it’s stupid not to wear one” line. In the Netherlands and Denmark, injury rates are a fraction of UK injury rates, yet helmet use is near enough zero.

Basic health and safety theory – the top of the triangle is the most effective measure:

Focusing on helmets gives the motor vehicle lobby a big straw man. It results in articles about cyclists hit by cars that focus on the fact that “the cyclist was not wearing a helmet” even if they died of chest injuries. It misses the point hugely and therefore it’s dumb.

Boiler room scams have surely been on Watchdog lots of times

The Swiss have a number of bilateral trade agreements that in effect give them the same status as other members in specific industries.

But it’s still a right bugger dealing with the separation in some industries like IT, take it from me

Seriously, if you want to throw away your money, throw it in my direction. 12% a month is absolute pie in the sky. Do you really think if there was any way of turning £10k into a million in just over 3 years by investment growth alone, they’d have to cold call you to sell it?

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=4671695&page=1

I’m with merkel on multiculturalism….it did not work.

*looks out of window*

Well, nothing’s on fire here.

Is it being sold to you by the representatives of an east African prince?

Most multi-cultural areas are just normal working and middle class areas, getting on just fine, with the added benefit of a bit of interesting cultural diversity.

There are a handful of places where things have got really polarised, and again that’s something the racist organisations seize upon and turn into a nationwide issue. Like I say, I’ve never seen a single piece of BNP literature in over a decade in West Reading, and I live in (by census measures) one of the three most multicultural wards (out of 16) in an already quite diverse town.

So my view is that racism is absolutely stirred up by the media and the far right on the basis of exaggeration (the “our towns are turning into single-race ghettos”) and outright falsehood (“my old school is 100% asian, oh, apart from all the white and black kids in its photo, erm”)

Oh, they’ve come out to play in the working class mining area I grew up in, for sure, despite the fact that there is far less non-white-British makeup to the ethnic split there. They play in areas of reduced economic opportunity, regardless of ethnic division, because it’s so easy to stir up a sense of immigration being the problem.

Interestingly and on a slight tangent, it’s interesting to see how well UKIP does in deprived seaside areas (e.g. Lowestoft) when about the only thing keeping those places afloat is EU support.

its actually living in places that have seen massive demographic changes that causes the racism.

Really? It seems to me that many of the key target seats of the further-right parties are very white, often provincial/rural areas where the only fuel is the media, not reality. I live in a very multicultural, inner-“city” part of Reading, and the BNP and even UKIP barely ever show their face here because they’d get laughed out of town.

Oh, and Ofsted describe the school as outstanding. Sounds like an absolutely wonderful little school, actually.

Yunki: The primary school I attended now has 100% Asian children. They do not celebrate any Christian beliefs. They do not celebrate Christmas or Easter.

From Stag Lane’s website:
“The highlight of the term, as always, is the Christmas
show which the staff and children have been working very
hard towards for the past several months.”

“100% Asian”? Clearly absolute rubbish.

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, of course. Mine is that you’d have to be something of a blithering idiot not to see the benefits of our current role of being an Anglophone member of the EU, with such close trade ties to the United States.

Anyway, this just reminds me to work on my French.

I don’t think my own position is particularly unique. In my case my company relocated a job from the US to the EU and I was the beneficiary. If it’s no longer sustainable for that job to be in the UK, then it’ll get shifted to mainland Europe, no bother at all.

Hence we lose the tax take on jobs like this, and I’ve yet to see that impact factored into any of the “out” camp’s calculations. It’s all just narrow-minded “we get back less than we pay in”, without a single consideration of externalities.

But this is just a guess.. what happens in situations like this if we leave the EU? Good news? Bad news?

What happens? The likes of you and I bugger off and take a decently paid job into the EU, I’d guess.

I’d need to consider leaving the UK if we leave the EU. I work in a global company as a European point of contact for the European market. Would be a good excuse to move near some French mountains I guess.

The UK contributes more to the EU budget than it receives in EU funding.

You’ve summed up the horrible narrowly economic attitude that always buggers things up in the UK.

Our return on investment on EU costs is not just direct funding.

Hundreds of people riding unmarshalled is daft it holds a lot of people up and can lead to traffic trying to force its way past

Hundred of people driving unmarshalled is daft. It holds a lot of cyclists up and can lead to cyclists having to squeeze their way past.

There, fixed that for you in terms of my commute.

Since the start.

a doctor not know to have doped at the time

He was named in Joe Parkin’s book as the doctor who’d doped riders on his team. That was 2008.

Anyway, it’s smoke, I’m not saying it proves anything, but people were asking for examples of smoke.

The cyclist killed at Holborn was in the right hand lane, for all you “it’s the cyclists’ faults for riding up the inside” merchants

what smoke

Leinders

Viewranger. Download OS maps, plan routes on phone or website, use it to navigate the routes too

they have already told me that the front tyres are 2mm off the legal limit.

Hahaha, this is why I don’t go near main dealers

If I’d done one of these before I knackered my knee, rather than after, I’d probably have the correct amount of meniscus. Money very well spent, subsequently.

Bit of a minefield, but it depends on your line of business and the expectations about data.

e.g. Some data shouldn’t cross borders. E.g. you could end up in hot water if there are laws about storing the data in the same country, and it ends up hosted in other regions. We come across this in some European countries. Also means you lose sight of where the data is being accessed and stored… e.g. if someone opens it on their tablet, then loses the tablet, what’s your plan?