Do The Right Thing

There’s something going on, y’know.

It seems that this thing where women cyclists in That London are at more risk than men are just refuses to go away. According to this report by the BBC , women account for only 27% of the capital’s bike journeys. Yet of the eight cyclists killed by drivers of lorries, seven have been women. The article is worth a read, though I’m sceptical of the diagram showing how to get past a lorry that’s stopped at a junction:

• The lorry shown in the right hand image (the "this is how you should do it" one) seems to have stopped just short of the junction. Heck, it almost looks as though the driver knows what an ASL is for!
• When you think of it, WHY would you even try to get past a lorry at most junctions? My advice would be to just let them go - in a fight between squishy, 72kg me, and not-squishy, 40,000kg lorry there would only be one possible outcome.

Where these tragedies occur, it’s now almost common to see a ghost bike appear a few days later.

Anyway. I was flicking through Evans Cycles ‘ site this evening when I came across this - the Specialized Globe Vienna 1 . Maybe I’m being a bit cynical here, or maybe just plain sick. Or maybe I’m just getting a severe dose of gallows humour about this whole road safety thing.

But does it look to you like Specialized have come up with a bike that’s aimed at women, and that’s as close as possible in it’s paint job to being a ghost bike?

Has someone in their marketing department got the gallows giggles too? Or have they just noticed a large number of white bikes chained up around cities, and thought that it’s too good a piece of subliminal advertising to pass up on?

Filed under: Assassination Attempts, Bike Culture, Bummer, Industrial-Strength Sarcasm, News, Photographs, Road Safety, Where I Shop