16 September 2009

Bike Monopoly 7: Chance 1 of 3

Most Chance cards seem to be there to chivvy you round the board - advancing to Pall Mall, Trafalgar Square, Marylebone Station, Mayfair or Go, or going back three spaces. It's another of those itineraries you can only do conveniently by bike.

For our first of three Chance squares in this trip round the board, though, we've chosen Speeding Fine £15. The point being, of course, that you can't be done for speeding on a bike, any more than you can on a horse or a skateboard. There is no such offence. Not that it stopped police at Weymouth recently trying to book cyclists for 'speeding' on the seafront, or police in Bournemouth setting up traps to catch 'speeding' cyclists.

You could be had under other laws - 'pedalling furiously', for instance. There's a neat roundup of the law as it applies to cyclists at the trusty Carlton Reid's bikeforall.net website.

But if you're not being furious, you can set off as many speed-camera flashes as you can, and they can't touch you. The fastest I've ever been on a bike was a rather scary 48mph on a 30mph (long, straight, downhill, clear) road in the Peak District. The fastest reported speed I've ever heard was a friend-of-a-friend who reckoned he did 71mph as a courier down some underpass in London.

Yeah, yeah. You know those people who immediately top anything you say? You've got a black dog, they've got one blacker. In fact, their dog is so black, no X-rays can escape its surface. Not even Hawking Radiation.

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