Best way to travel 5 miles to a train station?

But I feel strangely drawn to start to resent it.

 

For most regular cyclists, money spent on cycling farcilities is totally
wasted. We don't want them whatever the well meaning man in the Council
who knows better may think. We'd much rather take our place as part of
the regular road traffic thank you.

Tony

 

That really is the biggest load of bollocks I've ever heard. It's been
pointed out elsewhere that cyclists do pay - and most of them pay
exactly the same as a car (or a motorcyclist!) pays.

Trollboy's starting to sound like a stuck record - with no evidence to
refute the facts he resorts to repetition after repetition.

 

Ben

All a bit wanky though, isn't it?

 

You didn't say anything about where, when, numbers or times of journeys, you
just came up with a figure of 300 which does not correspond to even the
limited data I have to hand, namely that there are around 5 million
childrens bicycles in the UK, so unless there has been a massive xplosion in
the number of cars in the last few weeks your "estimate" of 300 is clearly
wrong.

You'd be in a car, then - we all know car drivers can't see cyclists ;-)

Which is not what you said. The fatality rate for bike / ped crashes is
around one tenth that for cars, mileage adjusted, and when you factor in the
fact that a lot of car mileage is done on motorways (no pedestrians, very
low crash rates) while most bike mileage is done in areas with pedestrians,
the risk from bikes could easily be a couple of orders of magnitude lower
than that from cars.

As a guide, car crashes cause one tenth of all child injury hospital
admissions but one half of all child injury deaths; cars are uniquely
dangerous to non-motorised road users.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington
University

 

Should have added the footnote..


[1]
They are shared with motor vehicles and typically called roads.

 

There is undoubtedly a difference between "scum on pushbikes" and cyclists.
Most, if not all, the cyclists I know are undoubtedly not scum.

Ah, so it's a "pyramid of hate" thing. I hope your ulcers don't give you
too much gyp.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington
University

 

Number of bikes is irellevent, number of bike miles is more relevent.

Your ignorance doesn't surprise me.

Fatality rate isn't relevent. Many fatalities in pedestrian areas are the
typical kid running in front of car after ball. Naturally a bike hitting
the kid will cause injuries, but not fatalities.

If you define "danger" as being death, then that's true, but who has said
that? We're talking about being hit, and most pedestrian-bike collisions
are unreported.

 

When did I claim this? I trust you are not deliberatly slandering me, that
is a criminal offence you realise ;p

Please remind me of my argument, I seem to have gotton muddled

 

More bollocks. I have £5 million of third-party liability insurance on my
bikes, plus theft and accidental damage cover. Costs a lot less than for my
car, too

The figures come from the Government.

Mine, too. I hardly ever travel outside Reading, Didcot, London, St Albans,
North Wales, the New Forest, Bracknell and Birmingham. But then, most
cagers never experience much outside their commuting range either, and those
bikers who do tend to add on mainly the local gene pool protection roads.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington
University

 

39 miles Haywards Heath to Parliament Square according to the RAC. That
I could believe - just. Think he needs a new speedo fitting ;-)

Tony

 

That would be me, then, through high rate taxation and VED on a car left on
the drive.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington
University

 

It's theft, thats what. Tax is inherrently evil. For every hour of overtime I
do I pay more tax %age wise then Beckhams overtime. The rich get away with
it as they can fiddle their expenses and use swiss bank accounts. Everyone
else though suffers.

I dont use the NHS, there are no police arround here, the only council
services I use is garbage collection, yet somehow over 1/3 of my salary
goes to Tony Blair.

But we're getting off topic.

 

I don't. I pay through general taxation and council tax for the maintenance
of the roads. If the council chooses to waste money painting pictures of
bikes on pavements, or putting down green kleptonite psychlepaths, then
that's their business - I never asked for it. Although, to be fair, a lot
of cycle tracks are paid for by Sustrans, which is a charity.

Naturally the roads are built to a much higher specification than I require
on my bike, which is one reason the taxpayer had to foot the bill for their
contruction.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington
University

 

No, thanks.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington
University

 

Oh, so you don't use the services of your council's roads department,
then?

A

 

Why is it stupid and why is segregation the only answer? Riding on the
roads has been routinely shown around the world to be much safer than
riding in segregated facilities - the Milton Keynes Redways and
Stevenage are classic case studies of this.

It would seem to come down to the rationale behind the German cycleways
- built by the Nazis so that their motorists weren't held up by cyclists
- which, even now, are demonstrably less safe than riding on German roads.

Perhaps the answer is to confine motor vehicles to their segregated
motorway ghettos and leave the rest of the roads to cyclists, public
transport and pedestrians ;-^)

Tony

 

Oops! Wrong again. We are covered by a set of Construction and Use regs
and the Road Traffic Acts, so we are indeed required to demonstrate that a
bike is roadworthy. As to insurance, the rsk is so low that most major
cycling organisations can afford to include it in the price of membership,
and as previously pointed out pedestrians have no requirement to insure
either. The main reason motor drivers are required to carry insurance is
because of the damage they cause to other people's precious motors.

We already do.

No, you could always continue posting Complete Bollocks[tm] and looking like
a tit. Entirely your choice.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington
University

 

Steve Bullimore wrote:

Thank goodness someone can rise above all this silly sniping
and post a rational and enthusiastic description of why they
do what they do.

Hopefully some of the more open-minded motorbike fans can see
that all of the above can also be true of cycling, and there are
people who commute by bicycle who are just as passionate about
it as Steve.

FWIW I don't ride a motorbike, so I've got much better defined
calf muscles than you lot <g, d, r>

 

One of the many reasons I take into account transport considerations when
choosing a job. It is 25 miles home from the office, and if I did work late
and miss the last train the firm would pay for a taxi, but I can ride it in
about an hour and a quarter anyway. That's my preferred way of getting
home.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington
University