Road Safety

I never could ride a skateboard. First of all, during the first skateboarding explosion in the UK in the mid-70’s, my parents wouldn’t let me have one because they were “too dangerous”. They may have had a point though - I next tried skateboarding in 1990, landing cripplingly well on my left hip. Not...
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This is a totally shameless plug for someone who’s just left a comment here. David Hembrow’s got some great writing on cycle culture & safety, and is also a maker of beautiful traditional English willow baskets for bikes. These really look the bee’s knees - so much so that now I’m wondering about having...
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I’m ashamed to admit that I drove into Whitley Bay today on an errand. That’s about 0.8 miles each way. Sorry. My excuse was that it was absolutely p!$hing down, and I’d just had enough of getting soaked - soaked last night on the Tandem, soaked this morning when I ran to the shop to...
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This thing about cyclists not stopping for red lights seems to go on an on and on. When you’re sitting inside your air-conditioned SUV / open-topped sports car / beaten-up 1987 Volvo, and you get to a red light, you have to stop. Everyone knows that - apart from minicab drivers. But then you...
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This via UltraRob on Twitter. One of New York’s ‘finest’ assaulting a cyclist during a Critical Mass thing: Full story on the New York Times’ City Room blog. Cyclists are a minority group (less than 5% of the population), and in other circumstances similar to this, the result’s been rioting. Maybe it’s a good job that...
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Cycling in to my client’s office this morning, I had two near misses - both situations that I could have almost certainly avoided by riding more assertively, and holding my line. In the first, I was approaching roundabout, where the lane nearest the kerb splits into two - the left (3 in the picture) is...
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I’ve slowly become addicted to getting a daily dose of the comic strip, Yehuda Moon and The Kickstand Cyclery. It’s the story of two guys running a bike shop - each one of them representing opposite sides of cycledom. Joe, who seems to wear Lycra & ride head-down with a helmet perched on his...
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On Saturday morning, I got up early (OK - early-ish), put the bike in the back of the car and drove down to Catterick to have a look around the Cleveland Steelman’s bike course. I’d programmed it into the satnav on my phone as an ‘itinerary’, with various waypoints setup to guide me round....
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So here’s an alternative way to deal with drivers who cut you up, shout at you, throw things out of the window, or otherwise act like you really shouldn’t be on their road. Be polite. I found the original article by Bill Strickland via Tomorrow Morning’s Weather. His basic approach is to catch the offending...
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Yesterday the weather was forecast to be mostly good, and I had a meeting scheduled with a client that my SatNav said was only 36 miles away by bike. Hmmm . . . with fuel prices now at £1.30 a litre (that’s $9.60 for a US gallon) (So all you in the USA...
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