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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
Robert Burns...as he is known to the pigeons of Dumfries
Since we’re celebrating 250 years of the Bard…this is what I like to think of as his musings on the future lot of bicyclists.
I’m now arrived – thanks to the gods!
Thro’ pathways rough and muddy,
A certain sign that makin roads
Is no this people’s study:
Altho’ I’m not wi’ Scripture cram’d,
I’m sure the Bible says
That heedless sinners shall be damn’d,
Unless they mend their ways.
Robert Burns,
Epigram On Rough Roads, 1786
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
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
Remeber RAMP? Well, it only took six weeks but the men from the Council finally fixed the road. This is actually an interim shot and they’ve now covered it in a fine top coat which makes it a lot smoother. Nice job, chaps!
However, the red and white signs proclaiming “RAMP” remain and prompted me to wonder if this wasn’t perhaps the name of a new, and as yet uninhabited, micro-hamlet and we’d simply missed the planning notice in the local paper. Don’t laugh, it could happen!
Imagine…a terrible homage to the “new town” where the full folly of Le Courbusier arrives at its (il)logical conclusion. All road…and no people! Welcome to Ramp (population: zero…but aren’t the streets clean?)
Then I pulled myself together and remembered that I wanted to repost this old composite snap of happier times on the nicer bits of road around here…
R:B
Ramp!
Alas, our wonderful late summer weather has washed out part of the road that connects us to everything eastward. To alert the unwary traveller, those fine fellows from the Council have seen fit to place a sign either side of the problem; a single-syllable warning that does nothing to diminish the impending catastrophe…
Ramp?
Given that this is a branch of the Kingdom Cycle Route, perhaps the words DISMOUNT, BRIDGE OUT! or simply AAAAAAAAAAARGH! would have been more pertinent…
R:B
Took a good walk today…to meet our firstborn from the bus. It also gave me an opportunity to take some shots of the road that connects us to the rest of the world.
