You are reading a single comment by @snottyotter and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
snottyotter
Sure, but 1 pint is still under the limit for most people and many people do drive on that basis. There's also the time factor. If I have a pint at 7pm can I drive at 9pm? If I have 6 pints starting at 7pm can I drive at 7am? Yet somehow we can have a concept of "units" and such for drink driving to give people an idea. Much as you may not like it many people teeter around the edge of the drink drive limits purely because the limits are so high (they're half or lower in other bits of Europe) and the risk of getting caught is so low.
And people know when someone is too pissed to drive, but somehow people aren't capable of knowing whether they're going faster than 20mph on a bicycle? Really?
I'd suggest that a good number of people who regularly go over 20mph already have a speedometer in the form of a GPS, and if not, a significant percentage of people capable of going over 20mph on the flat will know quite well that they're going over 20mph.
It's all pissing in the wind as it doesn't have a hope in hell of coming into force, but the argument that you need to have a speedo is just a shit one - as the drink driving limits show.
In Richmond Park (where they were often enforcing the 20mph speed limit) the approach by the police seemed quite simple: