Best of Times, worst of Times: Safety campaign gets silly

The Times’s campaign for safer cycling got rather silly on its third day.

Finger-wagging articles appeared telling us cycling is so incredibly dangerous, we need to take “body armour and helmets... Lycra and face masks”.

A helpful graphic (top right) detailed what we must buy if we are to avoid a slow, painful death under the wheels of a blameless heavy goods vehicle: £160 helmet, £170 leggings, £100 top, £27 gloves, £26 overshoes, £125 backpack – a total cost of over £600.

The Real Cyclist’s response to this is: tosh, balderdash, tummy-rubbish. We reject your London-salary, aggressive-urban-professional nonsense.

I cycle round York in my normal clothes (total cost £30 from Peacock’s). Backpacks are rubbish for everyday cycling; you want panniers. And the helmet, frankly, will make far less difference to your survival chances than cycling assertively and safely.

We should also, the paper instructs us, avoid all roads and only stick to cycle tracks.

Er, right. Ones like this (right), near the Oval.

Don't be silly; most of them are full of broken glass, go the wrong way, and stop to let traffic past every two minutes; see this and other blogs passim.

Times hacks, why don’t you ask someone who actually knows, such as me? Except I’m not very good and will probably be off cycling somewhere anyway. So better, someone like Carlton Reid (who has contributed some lucid comments on the paper's campaign).

In other Times foolishness, rower James Cracknell wrote a piece full of opinion and devoid of any supporting evidence, saying those who do not wear helmets are being ‘selfish to your family and friends’.

That’ll be the entire population of the Netherlands and Denmark, then.

Here’s an idea: I don’t know anything about rowing, so maybe the Times could do an interview piece with me on what you must do to win Olympic medals.

Free breakfast starts Bike Week... early

Bike Week 2010 officially begins tomorrow. As I discuss in my Real Cycling column this month in Cycling Plus magazine, Bike Week is all about something very important to all cyclists: a free breakfast.

There are at least six on offer this year, the first - rather confusingly - being this morning, before the official start of Bike Week, at a sizeable event at St Paul's.

As well as the gratis morning pitstop itself (muffins, croissants, Starbucks coffee, orange juice, banana) there was other entertainment provided by the City Police.


Officers were on hand to give advice on security (right). They gave amusing demonstrations of how a pair of bolt cutters the size of giraffe legs, along with some circus-trick standing and jumping, could shear through a top-rated D-lock in one go.

Alas, the best advice for security seems to remain the underhand trick of locking your bike up next to a much more expensive one, hoping they'll just nick that one instead.


And there was the now-familiar HGV Experience (right). Here, cyclists are invited to go up in the cab of a lorry while police cyclists (in this case, the City's only two women cycle officers) sneak up on the inside so you can clearly see that they're invisible.

So, if those cyclists go on to become HGV drivers, this will definitely help save lives.


Many of the cyclists participating in the role play (where's the Yorkie? the Sun? the England flags?) had been nicked earlier for some traffic offence - busting red lights, pavement riding etc. They were here this morning on the promise of having their fine rescinded if they attended this training session.

Fortunately, I'd done the in-cab visit before (no, not as a consequence of a cycling offence, just out of interest) and had no desire to do it again, so I didn't have to crash a red signal or terrorise an old lady on the footway in order to get a ticket in order to get it rescinded by clambering up the cockpit.

There was a feelgood item there too, in the shape of a chap writing down on a board what people said in response to the question 'I [heart] cycling because'.

As well as the standard, and perfectly valid, reasons (fast, free, hate tube, exercise, predictable journey time, great views) there were few more inventive ones: 'dog ate my oyster card'; 'I get to shout'; 'so I don't sniff someone's armpit on the tube'; and the intriguing 'can do fun stuff that I can't on a bus'.


Those other upcoming free breakfasts in full...

Tue 22 Jun
7.30am-9.30am Narrow St near Grapes pub (Tower Hamlets Wheelers)
7.30am-9.30am Colebrook Row / City Rd (Islington Cycle Action Group, ICAG)

Wed 23 Jun
7am-9am London Fields (Hackney Cyclists)
8am-10am Ossulston St (Camden Cyclists)

Fri 25 Jun
8am-10am 42 Amwell St, Lloyds Dairy (Unpackaged / ICAG)

Elephant soon to be only half as lethal

Work has started remodelling one of the notorious twin roundabouts at the Elephant and Castle, here in south London. By early 2011 the southern roundabout should look like this, reports the SE1 website.

At the moment, the gyratory is a horrible experience for cyclists. It's especially dangerous for those heading south (from the bottom right of the picture to the top right). Buses in the left-hand lane on the approach to the roundabout force you into the middle lane (where the grey car is in the illustration of the future layout). Fast traffic intending to turn left (to the left of the picture) comes up behind you, overtakes you and then cuts across left in front of you, usually hooting, and swearing in some of London's hundred-odd languages in daily use.

There is a so-called Elephant and Castle cycle by-pass, but it's incomplete, slow, narrow and hard to follow. It's quite fun tracing it all the way round if you have an hour to spare one day and want to visit nooks and crannies of south London you've never been to before, though.

Anyway, the new layout should be a massive improvement. Even if a better option was vetoed by TfL because it would have reduced traffic flows. All we need to do now is deal with that lethal northern roundabout...

Jersey's helmet law does my brain in

Oh. Helmets have been made compulsory for under-18s in Jersey, that famously progressive island-peculiar. Jersey likes to style itself a cycling island. This will do nothing for that image. Freewheeler watched the predictably uninformed BBC TV news item on the new law yesterday morning.

The bill was brought in by a politician who had the heartbreaking experience of seeing his son suffer brain injury after falling off his bike. Very sad, but that's not a good reason to make laws.

Still, it gives me an idea. We're always hearing from people with an unprovable anecdote about how a helmet saved their life, so therefore they should be able to tell everyone else what to do. (However, they usually didn't escape as unscathed as they think: their ability to type upper-case letters and write coherent sentences often appears to have been compromised by the trauma.)

Well, my granddad was saved in the Great War when a sniper's bullet was deflected by his cigarette case. So I'm going to campaign for smoking to be made compulsory.


Regular readers will know from previous posts (1, 2) where I stand on helmets. Right on the top of them, to tread them as far into the ground as possible. They're of very questionable effectiveness and largely irrelevant to the Safety Debate, merely drawing attention away from the real issues, such as how we persuade the public and politicians to invest money and willpower into better cycling facilities.

Still, I have a tip for those who believe better personal protection is the way forward rather than better bike lanes, and that it's the victim's responsibility for any accident. Nip up to the excellent Wallace Collection, just north of Oxford St. (It's free, and they have good bike parking now.) In their basement, you can try on a suit of armour (picture).

It's great fun, and you can see how much more you'd enjoy riding round London, and how much safer everyone would be, if only they'd make it compulsory for cyclists.

A road map for, er, better road safety

Interesting blog post I saw today from Dr Ian Walker. He's colour-coded English regions according to road accident severity.

Not your chance of having an accident, then - but your chances of coming out badly if you do have an accident. The darker red the area, the more chance you stand of being seriously injured or killed.

Ian is a traffic and transport psychologist, who proved conclusively in a recent study that wearing a long blonde wig is safer than wearing a helmet. (Obviously that's a bit of a media simplification. It's more complicated than that. Brunette or ginger probably works just as well.)

His dangermap of England only shows general accident figures. There's nothing specific to bikes. On his colour-scheme, North Yorkshire and East Riding, my homeland, are vast scarlet lagoons of Viking carnage; Plymouth on the other hand is a milk-white haven of gentle bumps and mildly bruised shins.


In London, Southwark - my borough - comes off pretty well, in lightly blushing pink. But down in the south-west, the lawless and wild Richmond and Kingston and Hammersmith, it's one mighty middle-class crimson bloodbath.

Like an MP's defence of their expenses claims, all this raises more questions than it answers, as Ian acknowledges. But it does rather raise the question of whether all those bull-barred 4x4s and safety-conscious Volvos down in London's moneyed and well-manured suburbs are actually making the outcomes of accidents worse. Luckily I don't know any rich people, so I never have to cycle down there.

Anyway, I'm off to the food being given away at the Feeding of the 5000 event in Trafalgar Square now. Is there such a thing as a free lunch? I hope so.

Safety first on Friday the 13th

Ooh, blimey. Friday the 13th today. Mind how you go. No cycling under ladders, no cycling on the cracks in the pavement, no cycling out through a different door from the one you came in.

I know they're only old superstitions, but better be safe, just in case, specially today. Perhaps we need a 93-page cycling manual, like the one produced for police bikers and widely ridiculed yesterday.

Instead, here's the Real Cycling round-up of the Top Ten Safety Tips for unlucky days.

• If you can't hear the traffic, it can't hurt you: turn the iPod to full volume
• Helmets prevent accidents, so if you wear one, you don't need to cycle as carefully
• Red lights may indicate areas of prostitution and low personal safety. Best cycle straight past them
• Make eye contact with drivers before changing lanes - it helps them identify the body afterwards
• When making hand signals at night, think from the driver's point of view: with dark gloves on, the number of fingers you're sticking up might not be clear
• Never cycle onto a pavement from the road - the kerb can buckle your wheel. Get onto it via a dropped kerb, or dismount and remount
• Late at night, watch out for drunks and clubbers. They often know where the best parties are
• Cycle lanes are wide, safe, obstruction-free and continuous, so always use them
• Bus and taxi drivers are professionals, so you can rely on them to drive safely
• Pigs make excellent pilots

HGV Awareness, or How to make a policeman disappear

Bike commuters were being stopped by the police this morning on St George's Road, just north of the Elephant and Castle, for a quick HGV Awareness session.

It's interesting stuff. You get the chance (right, see bigger pic) to sit in the cab of a lorry (in this case, a dustcart) while a copper wheels a bike as if a cyclist was coming up on the lorry's inside.

With three cycling deaths in London in the last month - all female, all caught on the inside of passing lorries, the latest being a hit-and-run in Greenwich last week - this sort of initiative is more important then ever.


At first it's fun in the cab, steering the wheel like a kid, pretending to be a set of airbrakes and making tschhhh-tssssss noises, eating an imaginary Yorkie bar, and waving an imaginary Agyness Deyn in an imaginary open-top sports car through in front of you.

But then the copper does his bike-wheeling thing (above and below right, see bigger pic) and, wow! Just as he gets alongside your passenger door, the bike disappears. As invisible as the Invisible Man wearing an Invisibility Cloak, on a day of particularly bad visibility. And this is in a vehicle bristling with more mirrors than an Abba-tribute disco.


Of course we're all assertive and experienced cyclists and we don't go burrowing up the inside of lorries anyway. But, by gosh, it's sobering to see things from the driver's point of view.

There are some fun things at these HGV Awareness events too, though.

Thanks to a Dr Bike in attendance you can get a quick free mechanical check. A sunny Southwark Cyclist was handing out those nifty free TfL maps, free newsletters, and plugging free bike training.

And you can amuse yourself watching hamfisted cycle bloggers struggling to put up canvas signs in the breeze with the finesse of Mr Bean tying his shoelaces on a windy ski-slope just before the ad break.


Anyway, this morning, business was brisk (right, see bigger pic). The vast majority of cyclists seemed quite happy to be stopped by the police. Perhaps it was simply relief when they realised it wasn't to be arrested under Section 44 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, it was just to have some air put in their back tyre and be plied with a free map.

Only the one chap got shirty, and ranted pompously about how he couldn't stop because he was in a hurry. For ten minutes. I finished my Yorkie, made my excuses and left.

More 20mph zones, demands NAO report

A report from the National Audit Office today on pedestrian and cyclist road safety contains the disturbing stat that cyclist deaths are on the rise. Despite cycling levels remaining constant between 2004 and 2007, deaths rose by 11 per cent.

Among its recommendations are more 20mph zones and more consciousness-raising on the danger posed by lorries turning left, the cause of several recent well-publicised cyclist deaths in London.