Industrial-Strength Sarcasm

Oh, the lies these people tell. Mind you, you can’t really blame them, can you? Put yourself in their position: You run a multi-billion dollar / euro / pound / yen business, employing thousands. For the last fifty years, governments have pandered to your every need - built infrastructure for your customers to use, gone...
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Big ride today - nearly 80 miles playing in the hills of County Durham, getting as far as Wolsingham & then coming home via Durham and the Angel. I had an incident at a set of lights that made me question the safety of my pedantic attitude to red lights. You see, when I...
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That green area behind the car is the cyclists’ waiting area, reserved for bikes, in front of the advanced stop line, where the car should have stopped? The car has stopped, blocking the pedestrian crossing? The driver made a valiant effort to beat the lights (racing past me in the filter lane), but...
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What is it with British cycle infrastructure? Or are those three words together just an oxymoron? What bugs the hell out of me is the shoddy, start-stop nature of it. If roads for tax paying motorists were like this, they’d end in random location, forcing drivers to push their cars across fields / other hazards...
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Over on IPayRoadTax.com , one of the comments raises an interesting philosophical point to justify why drivers of cars have a greater moral right to use the roads than people riding bikes: "How much extra tax do you think you would have to pay if cars didn’t exist?" This got me thinking, so I did some...
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… or in other words, a snowball’s chance in hell. If we’d held out for a politically acceptable, affordable solution to problems in the past, we’d have probably decided that appeasement of the Third Reich was the way to win votes at home. Actually, it probably was the way to win votes at home, but...
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It never ceases to amaze me the number of people I see riding around town on crazily shoddy mountain bike wannabe BSOs. Or probably even worse, the real deal - £2,000 worth of carbon, knobbly tyres and suspension travel to deal with roads that are for the most part smooth as Liv Tyler’s complexion....
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Yes indeed, driving is hazardous. In a week in which it’s been revealed that more drivers than ever are chatting away on the phone (almost as if they know their chances of getting away with it are virtually assured, because it’s plain that the police don’t give a damn), I’ve seen all sorts of...
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Remember the driver who managed to squeeze through an impossibly tight gap to get past me earlier in the week? The one to whom I should be grateful for not actually hitting me ? At the time, due to the feeble flash on my Blackberry, I couldn’t get a decent photo to record the details...
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… of The Netherlands! No, really. Well, sort of - have a look at this video that came via EcoVelo and Amsterdamize : Compare the main interviewee’s attitude to the typical person where you live: "Perhaps you’ll need a cargo bike yourself one day" "No! Never! No, really. No, no, no. I’ll have two children at most and they...
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