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The religious wars continue…
The Daily Volk has been whingeing about bicycles a lot recently but their latest moan is about speed bumps to slow down bicyclists on a back alley in Islington. Apparently local pedestrians have complained about the danger posed by “speeding cyclists rampaging” down the street. Apparently.
from The Daily Mail, 25th Sept 2009
Hells teeth…! Just look at them, would you? Pedestrians and cyclists battling for space on a thronging suburban thoroughfare… LOOK! Look at those “rampaging” cyclists!
Can “throng” be used as a verb?
r:B
r:B
And another thing…
Today the BBC reported – as news – the views of motorists’ organisations to the possibility that cars may be fitted with speed limiting technology. This technology has existed for the past decade or more in one guise or another but has presumably now become economically accessible to the mass market.
I’m not suggesting this is the solution to any of the transportation problems we face today but it has highlighted yet another problem – the willingness of the BBC to give free air to motoring apologists like SafeSpeed.
These self-appointed “experts” appear to claim, among other things, that we’re all terribly mistaken and it’s actually speed cameras, not cars/motorists, that kill people. They even seem to take pride in assisting booked motorists evade prosecution on legal technicalities. The name sits rather incongruously because they seem to believe it’s safe to speed…
(photo by MonkeyBoy69)
SafeSpeed claim that speed limits “must never be set for ideological reasons” – but should presumably be scrapped for their ideological reasons…? They – SS as they like to call themselves – oppose GPS-assisted automatic speed limitation for cars and yet claim in their “manifesto” that 20mph limits in residential areas are a bad idea because “it simply takes too much driver attention to maintain 20mph”! But surely that’s the point of…oh, never mind!
I do agree with SS on one matter. Speed cameras do not improve road safety per se. They do a good job, however, of reducing the speed of traffic which, in turn, has been proven to reduce fatalities should collisions with other road users occur.
Other SpeedSafe utterances may sound arguably sane at first but, on examination, are all based on their ideology of motorist supremacy, the right of the motorist above all other road users. They even propose that compulsory road safety training of children from five years old should replace the enforcement of speed limits and “technical” traffic offences. Yeah…let’s put the onus on the kids!
Oh…and bicycles? Apparently we’re partly responsible for road deaths caused by drivers who might be traumatised by “roads narrowed in a misguided attempt to slow traffic – sometimes by the provision of unused cycle lanes“. At least that’s the implication…
And they call this “Intelligent Road Safety”. That sounds credible… something like Intelligent Design, eh?
I’m not going to waste valuable minutes of my life reading my way through their entire web site – “over 350,000 words” apparently (although I imagine a lot of them are repeated), nice claim if you’re selling a dictionary but pretty vague otherwise. Please feel free to send in any howlers you find should you venture to browse it further.
To return to my point – the BBC allowed an SS spokesperson to make unsupported claims about the safety implications of speed limiting devices in cars. Similar concerns over safety were voiced, unchallenged, by a representative of the Motor Industry Research Association. This despite ongoing joint research – in which the spokesperson is an apparent collaborator – between MIRA and the University of Leeds which, in 1998, suggested that introduction of a more rudimentary system of dynamic EVSC (External Vehicle Speed Control) could result in a 35% reduction in road traffic accidents (PDF and more detailed PDF).
This was also the experience of researchers at the University of Lund, Sweden (Varhelyi, Hyden et al, 2002 [MS Word .DOC]) whose trials of a similar system in the 1990s were very positive, arriving at the unsurprising conclusion that “those who need it most are the most negatively inclined to the idea”.
This, in turn, might explain why researchers in Finland recorded that a minority of drivers reacted negatively (MS Word .DOC), finding their ISA (Intelligent Speed Adaptation) system “very irritating and even dangerous”, expressing concern over potential “situations when there would be a need to get out of the way”. These respondents also felt “other car drivers drive very close thus likely to cause more rear-end collisions” but this – and I freely admit to speculation – may simply be an unaccustomed reaction to aggressive driving behaviour of motorists in unrestricted vehicles. There is no reason an ISA system might not also include proximity-sensing technology to prevent such “tailgating“.
More information on ISA research in Sweden is available from the Swedish Road Administration.
Have I made my point yet? I usually champion the BBC as the excellent world-beating broadcaster it surely is. So I can’t abide this kind of lazy journalism where opinion is presented as news and claims are accepted as findings.
R:B
Many thanks to Transform Scotland for expressing enthusiasm in this blog and linking to it from their important and informative site!
Also thanks to a very old friend in Embro for dropping a link. Glad to see you’re causing as much trouble as ever..! :c)
Just - ahem! - don’t mention the trams…
R:B
The bicycle was defined as a “carriage” in an English court-room in 1879 – an attitude subsequently fossilised in a parliamentary Act of 1888 – at a time when the only competition for the road were pedestrians, horses and horse-drawn traffic; the bicycle was quite literally the fastest thing on wheels. This rationale would have seen the term extend also to prams and wheelchairs.
Indeed, until the change in local government legislation (1994?), I can attest that a local bylaw in Dundee made it illegal to “push a perambulator” or “move on roller skates” across the City Square – although I believe you could drive a herd of sheep down the main thoroughfare opposite the square on market days! Current UK legislation does, however, identify the potential for classifying push-along scooters, skateboards and roller-skates as vehicles despite acknowledging the obvious practical problems of enforcement.
As I’ve touched on briefly in an earlier post, any time the opportunity arose in the first half of the twentieth century to create a codified bicycling policy which would have made provision for cycle paths similar to those now envied in north-western continental Europe, it was rejected by cycling organisations representing the narrow interests of the (un)sporting minority. Thanks to these elitists, we now have the privilege of conveying our bicycles – and potentially skateboards and roller-skates – through the dirt and madness of today’s traffic as the alleged equals of cars, trucks and buses. This is clearly nuts!
In the past I’ve ridden – with no real concern – in traffic conditions that would simply terrify me today and I honestly find it increasingly difficult to advocate anyone take up vehicular city cycling. Some people may enjoy pretending to be a “vehicle”, not me…I just want to ride my bicycle.
Messrs Obree, Beaumont and Hoy aside, Scotland has another, lesser-known, bicycle-riding hero. Now, I’m not suggesting this is how to ride around the streets of Edinburgh, but Danny Macaskill is an excellent – if eccentric – example of why the notion of the vehicular bicycle is a nonsense. Let’s see you do this in a “carriage”…
R:B
“Some regulations of bicycle traffic seem to be most urgently needed. Cyclists are rapidly becoming a grave danger to both foot passengers and vehicles.
“…every cycle should have a tinkling bell continuously sounding. This might be musical, like the sleigh bells. The present spring bell is most alarming when sounded behind a foot passenger. One is just as apt to go right in front of the wheels as to move out of the way. “
from a letter from J. B. to The Scotsman,
Monday 24th September, 1894
The extract above presents an interesting approach to the bicycle bell. I’ve never seen a bicycle with sleigh bells although the idea does have its own peculiar charm, particularly at this time of year.
I recall something that I saw some years ago in Germany which almost fits the bill, a rotary-operated bell which fits to the front fork in the same manner as a bottle dynamo and is switched into contact with the tyre by a trigger mounted on the handlebars.
It is a relatively safe assumption, however, that any bicycle accessory has been around the block at least once before and this is no exception. The following advertisement from an early 20th century Sears Roebuck catalogue offers much the same performance but at a price I imagine would be multiplied at least twentyfold today.
R:B
Transform Scotland yesterday released a report which suggests the Scottish economy would benefit by as much as £4bn if cycling could account for 27% of all journeys currently undertaken by car.
This report should be welcomed as an important step in the case for an effective, modern cycling infrastructure in Scotland. The only real obstacle to this in the past has been lack of political will and this, in turn, is generally something that can be bent by judicious and repeated application of a suitably-large financial incentive. This report provides the fiducial clout.
This is a longer post than usual…but please read on.
There is a widespread misconception that the “white patch” on the rear mudguard of British roadster-type bicycles was introduced during the Second World War. In fact it has its origin in earlier traffic regulations and is therefore only of limited accuracy in dating bicycles of this period.
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| From 1947 Rudge |
