Darwin awards? Speed limit for bikes, peds

Our northern Australia correspondent (thanks, Viola) sent us these images of a cycle path in Darwin. There's a clear speed limit at work - for both cyclists and pedestrians.

Even though I don't have a cycle computer any more, following an unfortunate incident with a biplane in the west of Ireland last year, I know when I'm cycling less than 20pkh (a bit over 12mph in proper money), because my legs are moving.


But how do all these dangerous high-speed joggers keep tabs on their speed? And surely 20kph is getting on for world-record pace for long distance running? Are Darwin's residents that super-fit?

I didn't realise they were such a problem, but perhaps we should start a campaign of complaint against the Pedestrian Peril. They don't have insurance, they don't have licence plates, a friend of a friend told me she was NEARLY RUN DOWN by one the other day, they don't pay road tax...

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.