The live blog will be back on Monday...enjoy your weekend riding! We'll leave you with this...
📢 WHOSE STREETS?
📢 OUR STREETS.We're in #TowerHamlets outside Chisenhale Primary School where this morning young protestors have faced down workmen and diggers coming to rip out their School Street. 1/6 pic.twitter.com/Snjq12rNGl
— London Cycling Campaign (@London_Cycling) October 27, 2022
Despite the unseasonably mild temperatures this week some things never change...
Q. Why don't cyclists use the cycle lanes which "cost millions"?
A. Because they are full of leaves and water.
Hoping @OneTrafford will sweep the whole length of Talbot Rd & Stretford Rd - feel free to add your own leaf strewn stretch pic.twitter.com/3wNYeRc8of— Deborah (@UrmstonDeb) October 27, 2022
You can always count on a British bike lane to become a treacherous ice rink of leaves and standing water come the time we turn our clocks back...
Deborah asked the council to get sweeping, something one reply suggested they had been doing on the other side of the road at another stretch. A bit more of that would be greatly appreciated up and down the country I'm sure...
Anyway, let's have a Friday throwback to another unbeleafable bike lane (also in Manchester)...
"Where do you reckon the boss wants us to sweep these leaves to?"
"Oh, just push 'em into the leaf collection lane..."
A cyclist from Guildford has made the bold claim that Surrey is "the worst place in the world" he has ever ridden. Not because of the rolling climbs or anything else landscape-based, nope, but because of the standard of driving on display.
"I've cycled on-road and off-road and raced all over the world as well. There are good and bad drivers everywhere — but certainly in the south-east the standard of driving falls below a level that any sane person would want to see on the roads," Jon Sharpe told Get Surrey.
"If I'm honest, I think Surrey is the worst place in the world I've ever ridden. That all comes down to the quality of driver and I've ridden in a lot of places you'd think cycling would be a worse experience, but Surrey is by far the worse place to be on the road.
"There are no excuses for putting people's lives in harm's way and you shouldn't be on the road if you're driving like this. We have a duty of care to protect those that are vulnerable, on the road or in wider society, and that message really needs to get out there."
I'm sure there'll be no shortage of suggestions... where is the worst place to ride a bike? I'll go first — indoors.
canalist's, there's a perfectly good canal just up the road but do they use it. no. 🤔 pic.twitter.com/6SKPNFjrvB
— Christopher Lang (@langoo) October 27, 2022
Two more challengers enter the ring...
First up, road.cc Simon's Italian adventure took him to Ferrara, Emilia Romagna, which — while a terrific city for cycling — had this bike rack leaving a fair bit to be desired...
"There was row upon row of these wheel-benders, hundreds upon hundreds of spaces (this was late on a Saturday evening, it was a bit busier come Monday morning). Quite a novel way of locking, too (also bonus team sponsor top right, big old Fassa Bortolo hopper)"
What about this back-alley offering from Brian Haugh? Nothing says you're a valued road user like having to go park your bike out back with the bins and empty bottles...
"This is the bike parking at my office, in theory it's quite good being a courtyard yard with swipe access but our neighbours — the pub/nightclub — seem to feel that it would be a better space for bin storage. You can imagine the broken glass."
The school run, Glasgow-style (with added ghouls) https://t.co/JXvvoH8ZSw
— Danny Williams (@citycyclists) October 28, 2022
Fitting. The Department for Transport is hiring a “Head of Uncertainty” pic.twitter.com/UTq592JGzt
— Josiah Mortimer (@josiahmortimer) October 26, 2022
Required:
- Must know 'Should I Stay or Should I Go' off by heart
- Must have at least five years in a similarly ambiguous, undefined role
- Clear strategy and planning will not be required, we like things uncertain
Benefits:
- Competitive salary (well, it is sometimes, other times not so much)
- 14-25 days paid holiday (maybe)
LTNs are back on the hit list in the Daily Mail today as features writer Louise Perry called for the "ill-conceived schemes" of the "Traffic Taliban" to be scrapped to "undo the anguish" they have caused...
Am I the traffic taliban? pic.twitter.com/o7m2UMNTmc
— Hirra حرا (@hirr4) October 27, 2022
Despite:
- A 2021 study showing road injuries were halved in low-traffic neighbourhoods when compared against areas without the schemes
- Transport for London analysis showing that LTNs in Hackney had not caused a rise in traffic on nearby main roads (and encouraged a quarter of residents to cycle more)
- Ambulance trusts saying the schemes, along with pop-up cycle lanes, did not slow their response times
Perry wrote that LTNs in south London were hitting businesses and residents, and cited Department for Transport figures which "reveal that LTNs have spectacularly backfired, actually increasing the total number of vehicles miles travelled".
What the Department for Transport figures showed is that the total vehicle miles driven in ten inner London boroughs that introduced LTNs or equivalent schemes in 2020 rose by 11.4 per cent (an average of 41 million miles) in 2021 compared to 2020...
The two inner London boroughs that did not implement the schemes saw an average rebound of 29 million miles or 8.9 per cent. But are LTNs the sole reason for a traffic increase? The Department for Transport did not comment, The Times newspaper admitted "the figures do not prove a link between LTNs and more miles being driven".
> 10 of the most hysterical anti-cycling Daily Mail headlines
Anyway, Perry's "Traffic Taliban" column goes on to suggest families in London have to drive, and cycling with children, in a cargo bike for example, would be "nearly impossible" and you would be "lucky" to have a bus going where you want to go...(apparently)...
Commenting on similar schemes in Oxford, Perry writes:
Oxford politics has always been skewed by the presence of its two large universities.
During term time, almost a quarter of Oxford adult residents are full-time students — the overwhelming majority of whom are childless, able-bodied, and not looking after elderly or disabled relatives. Of course these young adults are going to be in favour of the council's war on cars, particularly when it's presented as a woke, eco-friendly endeavour.
They can virtue-signal without any cost to themselves. But across the country, these measures are causing so widespread misery, dividing neighbourhoods and only making traffic worse.
Now that we have proof that they do not achieve their environmental aims, councils across the country must think again. It's time to scrap these ill-conceived schemes — and undo the anguish they have caused to so many.
You've been getting your submissions in for a couple of hours now, so let's take a look...
My personal favourite so far..."The builder refused to change these," nniff told us...
Must be something about apartment buildings trying to do bike storage because this from VanDerBike is an instant classic...
"When stored vertically, can't lock anything other than the wheels. Hence it's used like this..."
Next up, Steve K shared a snap of the 'official' bike parking at Crystal Palace Football Club...superb stuff...
Tom_77 shared the "bike rack outside my local medical centre. Someone screwed a floor-standing bike stand to the wall. Bent wheels and a blocked pavement. Obviously I use the green metal things instead." We can see why...
hirsute offered an Aldi favourite...
Lastly, antigee sent a contender in from Down Under, Melbourne to be precise. Found right at the "far far end of massive car park probably a 1km walk to the numerous shops/eateries it was intended to serve. Presumably the 'no cycling' sign was added to confirm that it was underutilised and so could be removed to add more car parking spaces."
Time for more of these memes... we've had a couple on the live blog already, but get ready for the next batch...
— Gasstationfoodcyclist (@thegsfc) October 24, 2022
I know what I want to be for Halloween #cyclingpic.twitter.com/fiEVASF1XN
— mistress of hellvetica (@sexandtheswiss) October 26, 2022
Even Park Tool got in on the act...
Dress your best this Halloween season. pic.twitter.com/rVSRWD2dp7
— Park Tool (@parktool) October 26, 2022
Quite extraordinarily considering how grim the comments over on Facebook can be sometimes, I'm thinking I should be giving comment of the day to one from there...
Talking about yesterday's N+1 chat, Michael Irwin introduced us to a whole new phenomenon... S-1...
Commenting on the road.cc reader's bike-packed garage... Michael told us "the S-1 formula can save you. Where S is the number of bikes results that in separation. It's where your spouse says, 'If you get one more bike, so help me, I'll...!' Of course finding that threshold can be a little tricky."
Write that one down...
Also from Facebook, Pete Whelan told us: "N+1 peaked at 36 for myself — wife and two children. Three of them were tandems. Now down to more manageable levels now it's just two of us, though two recumbent trikes take up a lot of space."
Lawrence Hallett says he's "managed to get to N+8"...
Ah yes, the Elon Musk blue bird app era... there are seemingly two types of people reacting to this news... those like Adam Hansen and those like Thomas De Gendt...
Instant blocked.
— Thomas De Gendt (@DeGendtThomas) October 28, 2022
Just the 52 Grand Tours between the two, by the way... 46 of those completed!
Anyway, back to Musk. The new Twitter owner (who, in everyone's favourite joke this morning, spent $44billion on a free app...) has popped up on road.cc before, mainly for his Tesla antics...
By antics I mean deciding the best way to solve congestion in big cities is to send traffic...underground in great big tunnels...
Also on Musk's greatest hits... claiming Tesla's Full Self-Driving Beta (FSD) had not been responsible for a single collision since its release... only for a YouTuber to capture footage of his vehicle smashing into a cycle lane bollard weeks later...
Oh, and then there was the 2016 comments about it being "morally reprehensible" to delay the release of autonomous vehicles.
Yesterday we shared a road.cc reader's petition to make bike storage pods a requirement for all new building developments, prompting a few comments of your own — starring more hilariously sad, grim and disappointing bike storage from your two-wheeled travels...
Woldsman got the ball rolling with this classic — a place to park your bike which comes with free foliage...
I'm sensing a Friday game of 'whose seen the worst bike rack?'
"At least they made an effort," Woldsman told us about this next one... now just to work out how to get your bike over the spiky fence... that's a big bunny hop...
And finally, "the unloved and unused wheel benders"... courtesy of Homebase...
Roll up, roll up... anyone for a crap bike rack?