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How was your cycle commute?

I hope I don't come off like that, cos that's not an attitude I carry (and you won't find me using terms like BSO, I just know what it means and refers to and yeah it's a properly snobbish term, "what I ride is a bicycle. I don't know what it is that you are riding, but it's not a bike" ffs).

I think that people do need to understand that the cheapest bikes are built to that price, and that it'll cost you more in the long run (HP or no HP) because of components breaking so quickly, or deteriorating to the point where the bike is so poor to ride, people stop riding it. Then think that is what all bikes are like and never get another one.

I think there are good reasons why, and it's not like the £1k+ bike stuff because the reasons why are different - my £300 bike is never going to cost me as much as a £600 let alone £1,200 bike. But a £150 bike will probably cost me more than a £300 in a few years. For £60-£80 I can buy a good secondhand bike (I appreciate they are likely to cost more in London, but I've not a clue of prices there), which will never cost me as much as the £150 bike, let alone the £600 bike.

It's fucking shit that (afaik anyway) you can't go to a secondhand bike shop on any of the cycle to work schemes, all the second hand places I know are independent so don't offer finance, I wonder if any secondhand bike seller does?. Any idea how much the deposit would be on an HP scheme for a £100 bike? I'm just wondering how much of a secondhand bike that would buy you, you might be better off buying a not so great secondhand bike for that price rather than a new bike, I don't know.
 
Orang Utan said:
People ride around on shitty bikes cos that's all they can afford. No need to sneer at them and give them nicknames. Unity is required. TLAs don't help either
Click to expand...

I just had to google TLA :D

And yeah gg, you were being a bit of a tit there. Ooooh, someone's got a shit bike - Let's jeer at them.
 
The issue is not with your videos
Though 5000 YouTube vids seems a little over the top for such a purposeless venture
 
Anyway ...

This morning my new "winter" gloves proved as ineffectual as my old ones, so I'm thinking I really ought to heat a pair or two - but only the thumbs - which I need for gear-changing and which hopefully won't take too much power from my lighting battery - just need to work out how to get the power into the thumbs without trailing wires.

It's just dawned on me why I stuck with gripshifters for so long...
 
Onket said:
If he's on a bike, he's a cyclist.
Click to expand...
Well, I suppose an idiot cyclist is more excusable than a c*nt cyclist cutting up slower riders and pedestrians - still a liability though.
I suppose more the equivalent of the idiot driver peering out of a tiny de-iced portion of their windscreen.
 
Driver nearly took me out this morning along Kennington Road - he's crawling along on approach to lights by the IWM, I'm overtaking him - he pulls across to the RH lane without looking or indicating. Beeps horn, shouting, waving hands in 'wanker' fashion, so i take the opp to discuss

He says it's my fault for cycling "aggressively". Discuss; quite reasonably to start with, which surprised me - turns out that by "aggressively" he meant "going faster than me"
I lost it a bit when he said something along the lines of 'you deserve to be one of these in the newspapers riding like that, I cycle a lot and i don't ride like that' and gave him a bit of abuse.
 
How could he not see you being on the driver's side ?
Sounds like he was deliberately trying to barge you out of the way with his vehicle and then trying to rationalise it - I wonder when and where he cycles - if it's in the gutter he needs re-training.
A shame you didn't get it on camera so you could Roadsafe him - he sounds in need of a wakeup call.
 
It wasn't deliberate 'barging', he simply didn't look, nor expect anyone to be on his offside.

A few words about why he needs to check mirrors and shouldercheck will be way more effective (and quicker) than not saying anything, filming everything and putting it on the internet.
 
plurker said:
A few words about why he needs to check mirrors and shouldercheck will be way more effective (and quicker) than not saying anything, filming everything and putting it on the internet.
Click to expand...
Sounds like you parted company with him still believing himself to be in the right and consolidating that belief when he goes for a bike ride on a Sunday riding in the gutter.
 
I've been really enjoying cycling to work recently. The ride home is much better in the dark, maybe because I feel more vulnerable I'm not in so much of a rush and I really like this cold dry weather.

On the downside I do feel like I tend to be a bit of a scruff when I have to carry my work clothes in a bag on my back.
 
gentlegreen said:
For about 5 years I rode a bike I bought secondhand for £25 - steel-framed 10 speed.
It'd be all the rage these days.
Click to expand...

I have five bikes, none of them cost more than that (though I've spent as much as forty quid on a part for one of them, so probably doesn't count). Cheap or free functional bikes are abundant, easy to fix yourself and you never have the stress of someone wanting to rob them. My lodger's nice aluminium Trek bike is probably several kilos lighter than my regular bike, but then he has to carry two massive heavy D-locks around with him in a rucksack all the time.

It's more of a buzz when you shoot past someone on a Boardman or whatever too :)
 
Research Says Cyclists Can’t Prevent Dangerous Overtakes

Tuesday 26th November, 2013

New research published by the University of Bath has said that no matter what a cyclist wears, 1-2% of drivers will still pass dangerously when overtaking.


The study suggests that there is very little a rider can actually do to make their ride safer, including altering their outfit or wearing a high-visibility jacked to make drivers more aware of their close presence.

The research instead concludes that if cycling is to be made safer, it’s the roads and drivers which need to change.

The study set out to ask whether drivers passing a cyclist responded differently to how experienced the cyclist looked. It was expected that drivers would give more space to a rider who seemed inexperienced and less space to a rider who looked highly skilled.

One of the research team, Dr Ian Garrard from Brunel University, used an ultrasonic distance sensor to record how close each vehicle passed during his daily commute in Berkshire and outer London. Each day, he chose one of seven outfits at random, ranging from tight lycra racing cyclist clothes (signalling high experience) to a hi-viz vest with “novice cyclist” printed on the back (signalling low experience).

He sometimes also wore a vest that said he was video-recording his journey, or a vest modelled on a police jacket but with “POLITE” printed on the back. The same bicycle was used every day, and was always ridden in the same way. Over several months, data were collected from 5690 passing vehicles.

The researchers found that, while the vest that mentioned video-recording showed a small increase in the average amount of space drivers left, there was no difference between the outfits in the most dangerous overtakes, where motorists passed within 50 cm of the rider. Whatever was worn, around 1-2% of motorists overtook within this extremely close zone.

Dr Ian Walker from the University of Bath’s Department of Psychology, who led the project and analysed the data, said: “Many people have theories to say that cyclists can make themselves safer if they wear this or that. Our study suggests that, no matter what you wear, it will do nothing to prevent a small minority of people from getting dangerously close when they overtake you.

“This means the solution to stopping cyclists being hurt by overtaking vehicles has to lie outside the cyclist. We can’t make cycling safer by telling cyclists what they should wear. Rather, we should be creating safer spaces for cycling – perhaps by building high-quality separate cycle paths, by encouraging gentler roads with less stop-start traffic, or by making drivers more aware of how it feels to cycle on our roads and the consequences of impatient overtaking.”

Ian Walker previously used similar equipment to show that men and women are treated differently by passing motorists – a finding since confirmed by researchers in the USA and Taiwan – and that long vehicles such as buses and trucks get closer than cars when overtaking cyclists.

Whilst this study also found that hi-visibility vests and jackets made no difference to the space left by overtaking drivers, it did not try to look at whether these devices made cyclists more visible at intersections or at night.

However, the researchers do note in their paper – soon to be published in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention – that there is surprisingly little evidence that high-visibility clothing for cyclists and motorcyclists offers any safety benefits in daytime. This would further support the idea that there is no easy fix for riders’ safety from asking them to wear bright clothing.
Click to expand...

http://www.nowbath.co.uk/news/research-says-cyclists-cant-prevent-dangerous-overtakes-53548/
 
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