London cyclists know better than to park their bikes on railings near the Houses of Parliament. They'll be carted away by the police because they could be that favourite terrorist device, a pipe bomb.
(These railings down the end of Whitehall were festooned with bikes during last year's Skyride, when the road was briefly shut off to traffic, and gives you an idea of JUST HOW LETHAL things could be.)
Which raises the question: how many bike-bombs have there been in the history of terrorism?
Note that we're not talking suicide bombers on a bike, or bicycles used to carry a bomb in a basket or strapped to the frame. We're talking pipe bombs: explosives hidden down inside the tube and left in an apparently innocently parked machine for later detonation.
Well, the answer - according to the researches of John Adams in his blog this year - is, yes, you guessed, zero.
Though there was Alfred Herrhausen, then chairman of Deutsche Bank, killed by Bader Meinhoff with a bomb hidden in a bicycle in 1989. But current information seems to be that it was merely hidden in the saddlebag.
ReplyDeleteI think the real reason they're so anti-parked bikes is just because of the belief that they "clutter" the place up. Just look at how rankled MPs were with the presence of protester Brian Haw - they went so far as to pass a law that was aimed directly at him (though it missed!)
But I for one would rather see more bikes than all those lorries, buses, taxis and cars passing by.
I refer m'learned friend to photos http://www.cyclestreets.net/location/21386/ , 21387, 21388 & 16842,
ReplyDeleteRead 'The Quiet American', for a fictionalised account but i'm fairly sure the Viet Minh did exactly this
ReplyDeleteThe IRA left a bomb in panniers in Bognor in 1994, and I think Brighton around the same time. So perhaps we could allow bikes to be left but without panniers? But that's quite hard to enforce so a complete bike ban is the answer. The bike racks aren't that far away (down Millbank) anyway.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous - nah, the Millbank bike racks are miles away. What's the problem with pannier-free parking? Just remove the bikes that have panniers attached, leave the ones that don't. Anyway, there's plenty enough coppers on permanent duty to monitor bikes as they get parked, and to tell people trying to leave Ortliebs packed with Semtex to jolly well take it with them.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that anti-Iraq bloke that camps out in Parliament Square could set himself up as a left luggage place for cyclists. He could make a mint that way.
"Pannier-free parking" is what they have at King's Cross Station, where there is cycle parking on the platform. Signs tell you not to leave luggage attached to parked bikes for "security reasons" (though the racks are so close together and overloaded that you couldn't fit in a bike with panniers anyway).
ReplyDeleteDo they ban cars from parking too? Bet they don't.
ReplyDeleteI believe it was a car that exploded in the Houses of Parliament car park....
ReplyDelete9 people were injured on the 29th August 1985 when the IRA his a bomb in a bicycle frame and put it in the guard's van of a Dublin-Belfast train at Dundalk. The bomb exploded when it got to Belfast.
ReplyDelete