He went on: “I’m very alarmed about cyclists wearing headphones. I would not be against a prohibition or ban on cyclists wearing headphones.”
“Call me illiberal but it makes me absolutely terrified to see them bowling along unable to hear the traffic.”
You are typical of the nasty illiberal bastard who goes into politics to boss us all about. If cyclists choose to wear headphones, then that is their risk to take. It is not your place to ban them. You illiberal cunt.
Bravo! 😆
But then, it is not YOUR insurance that has to pay when one of these imbiciles rides under your front wheels because he did not hear you coming, is it?
Personally I think push-bike riders should be declared as “Open season”. It should be a SPORT to run the bastards over.
But, until that point, it is MY fucking insurance that goes through the roof every time I hit a bastard. The LEAST they can do is hear me coming.
As a general rule, it is best to avoid hitting other road users. The insurance premiums tend to reflect one’s ability to do so…
A trite comment, having been a L.G.V. driver for many years driving ever heavier and more powerful 38,40 and 44 tonne articulated Lorries and a member of the I.A.M. believe me there are situations where the ego/idiocy of certain cyclists make it virtually impossible not to hit them, in the two cases where they have been in collision with me, they were both committing an offense, one by cycling in the wrong direction along a one way street in central London and the other by taking a short cut by cycling around a traffic island again in London, it was only that I was aware of the likely hood of such stupidity that I was driving ‘with eyes in the back of my head’ in which I assumed the culprits would do the most stupid thing possible, thankfully I perceived what they did not and managed to slow to such a speed that neither were seriously hurt; in twenty years of near weekly incidents with cyclists I don’t think that is a bad record and I won’t even mention some of the near misses……
My comment may have appeared trite, but should be taken in the context of the one I was replying to.
If the bicycle had been invented today I can’t believe that the even the stupidest MP would be in favour of allowing these contraptions on the road.
So why is it that the mantra is that cycling should be encouraged, that we waste money on fifty-foot long ‘cycle lanes’, contra-flow signs etc. and pass the prime responsibility for safety onto everyone else, pedestrian or driver?
surely the common law duty of care approach is appropriate – all of us whatever we are using have a duty of care not to injure our neighbour. Cycle lanes should be separated, frankly.
The bicycle came some time after motorised (and horse-drawn) vehicles, so there is some truth to the notion that cycling should have been segregated from day one. It’s not as if a “cyclists-only” road would take up much space.
It has often been argued that motor vehicles should have been segregated from day one as well, but I can imagine why our ancestors balked at the expense. But this attitude convenient overlooks the fact that the horse and cart was *the* main user of roads throughout most of recorded history; most people simply didn’t have time to go for long walks, with most walking to and from work and no further. The rise in foot travel over the last 200-ish years is mainly due to the changes wrought by the industrial revolution and the extra mobility provided by rail.
So there’s a better argument to be made that it is *pedestrians* who should be segregated from road vehicles, not vice-versa.
Cycle and pedestrian paths *could* be done better in London, but it requires a lot of political and public will to achieve segregation on the same scale as Copenhagen or Amsterdam. And there’s no sign of it on either side.
What we have now is a the standard British compromise. The best thing to do, then, is to spend money on *educating* people to ensure they can’t claim ignorance as an excuse. Specifically, many pedestrians and cyclists need to be reminded that “The Highway Code” is for *all* road users, not just for those with a driving license.
What ‘motorised’ transport was around in 1879, when the bicycle first used chain drive and was essentially the ‘same’ as the bicycle we have today?
Before that there were all sorts of contraptions, including the penny farthing, which are recognisably bicycles, so their birth goes some half century back from that.
It was not until 1886 before the Benz Motorwagen was patented (and that is a long way from the automobile of today). The first ‘mass-produced’ car (the Model T) was 1908.
I think you’ll find the bicycle preceded motorised vehicles by a long way. Cyclists also pushed for the roads to be surfaced as they were in a shabby state after the railways had killed off the coaching traffic in the 1840’s. Before the turn of the century cycling lobby groups in Europe and the US were pushing for road repairs 30 years before motoring organisations even existed. It is really only since the 1950’s and mass car ownership that cycling has become a marginalised method of transport.
The rail locomotive was just one of many uses for steam locomotion. Steam traction engines became popular by the 1850s, which is long before the bicycle became popular enough for any politician to care a damn about the cyclist’s votes. (Bicycles were also bloody expensive. Most people couldn’t afford one for most of the 19th century!)
However… Thomas Telford was rebuilding Britain’s roads (and building canals) in the 1700s. That’s decades before even the steam locomotive was a viable technology, let alone mass-production of affordable bicycles. He was rebuilding – even realigning – roads for the new breed of horse-drawn coaches.
Cyclists demanded *smoother surfaces*. Most streets were still cobbled, which was fine for most other road users, but not much fun for a cyclist. Cobblestones are actually a more hard-wearing surface than tarmac, so we’ve been plagued by potholes and ruts ever since, thanks primarily to the efforts of cyclists.
Cyclists’ demands for smoother road surfaces also led, indirectly, to the rapid demise of street-running trams in the UK, as cyclists didn’t like those embedded rails. (Car owners didn’t mind them: there weren’t enough cars by the 1950s for trams to be a serious cause of congestion, while the tramlines acted as a poor-man’s cats’ eyes at night and during bad weather.) Granted, other elements also contributed to the decline of street-running trams in the UK during the 1950s, but the group most in favour of getting rid of them were the cyclists.
In most medieval cities, like London, the biggest problem today is *congestion*, not fumes. The “Clean Air” Act in the 1950s mostly put paid to the latter, and internal combustion engines have become a lot more efficient since then.
A typical double-decker bus can carry about 87 passengers, but you cannot physically fit anything close to 87 cyclists into the same space that bus takes up, so cyclists are actually worse for congestion than just walking to your nearest bus stop and catching a bus.
Therefore, cyclists really don’t get to play the “eco-friendly” card.
By all means claim you’re doing it to keep fit, or because you prefer it to walking, but please don’t claim that cycling actually solves any of London’s myriad transport problems; cycling is very much part of the problem, not the solution.
The group most in favour of getting rid of trams may have been cyclists, any evidence ? But that really wasn’t a large or even important factor in their demise. They were already starting to go in the late twenties and the reasons were entirely those of cost and flexibility, most tramways would have gone by the forties if it hadn’t been for the war. The same thing happened to the trolleybuses which replaced many of those trams and for the same reasons, the effective lifespan of these systems was roughly the same. There were certainly some tramways that should have been kept and where they have been brought back I’m not aware of any conflict with cycling.
Both cycling and motoring became popular at much the same time, the early years of the twentieth century and it was due both to new technology and affordability – the mass cycle market didn’t develop until a large number of second hand machines became available and HP schemes were offered. Cycling was a utilitarian means of transport but also a leisure activity, motoring was at that stage almost entirely a leisure pursuit and both were a reflection of an increased desire for travel and new experiences, a consumer boom in other words. The motor bus was being developed at the same time and for the same reasons, as was the urban electric tramway, The idea that any of these transport modes has a prior claim to road use is both silly and unhistorical you are reading back modern prejudices into past events.
Your comment about cobblestones is just bizarre, do you really imagine that they wouldn’t have been replaced by smooth asphalt surfaces if it hadn’t been for the bike ?
I live in a village outside Hull. Our area is served quite well with shared cycle and pedestrian ways and also disused railway lines. The quality of the surfaces are a bit varied so I use an off road style bike. The pedestrians and other cyclists that I encounter are mostly sensible and courteous to one another and I don’t witness much idiocy with regard to dealing with traffic. My commute includes single track country lanes, suburban roads cycle lanes and shared cycle and footpaths. I don’t cycle on the footpaths unless they are designated for cycle use, which most on my route are. Are deathwish cyclists just a London problem or do other major cities have them too?
As LR suggests if everyone showed due care and attention and consideration for other road users there wouldn’t be much of a problem. The fact that they don’t is indicative of the zero sum game approach to road use that can’t be solved by segregation, even if that were really possible, or by prioritising one road user over another. No one has any proprietary right to the Queen’s Highway and I dislike the attitude that so many people have towards this subject which is very similar to the sort of identity trumps games that get played out elsewhere. We have, as usual, created a whole series of conflicting positive rights to road access and then wonder at the result.
The way to go is towards removing all suggestion of priority for one type of vehicle or indeed pedestrian, over another and return to the concept of shared space. At the moment SS schemes are isolated and only applied to certain situations, if it was more or less universal, apart from special cases like Motorways, it would be the new norm that everyone would come to accept and wonder why we ever tried anything different