Hard Day in January '22

You might be interested in getting in touch with @london__fixed on Instagram. They've been organising fixed rides and training session in and around London and seem keen for this kind of thing. Most of them on the road rides do ride with brakes, some don't, but from what it seems most people affiliated would be fine using a brake on longer road rides.

Imagine my disappointment when he turned up at Herne Hill for the NYD Madison Cross a few years ago on gears.

I haven't felt this cheated since Lance Armstrong

Unsubscribing

Tbh there is a nagging insurance / organisational liability issue that gives me the mini heebeejeebies

Response to post 168

Insurance

So far as I know legal actions against ride organisers are either very rare or non existent. But this is something I worry about – it certainly is a possibility.

I’m sure it would be possible to get CTC or BC organiser’s insurance for this ride, possibly ‘under the wing’ of some existing club. However, aside from the cost, it would bring problems as insurers tend to insist on precautions - at the very least someone would have to do a risk assessment of the route.

In 2013 I tried to organise the HDiJ as a reliability trial (it didn’t work very well) and in preparation I did get CTC organiser’s insurance. The risk assessment problem did come up, but in the end I didn’t feel completely satisfied that what I’d done was adequate – I thought the advice I had from the CTC was too vague. Possibly this was because there hadn’t been any claims and so no one really knew what would happen if there were a claim.

I’m quite sure that worrying about this risk too much would kill club cycling as we know it. In fact I think it has already gone quite some way to doing this; just look at the mass of rules that time trial organisers have to cope with.

There is one simple tactic that greatly reduces the organiser’s risk – try to make sure that all riders have their own third party insurance. Why? Well surely the greatest danger is that one of the participants in the ride injures a member of the public who is nothing to do with the event. Naturally the first person the injured party thinks of suing is the rider who caused the damage; it will only be after the victim has discovered that the rider has no resources and isn’t worth suing that he will look for someone else to sue. That’s when the organiser (or possibly his organisation) comes under threat. So if all the riders are insured the organiser should be safe.

It should be obvious that if there is something illegal about a bike involved in an accident, brakes not up to scratch being the most likely example, the insurers will be unlikely to pay out. What’s more, the injured party would have a pretty good case when he says (as he will) that the organiser was negligent in allowing participation by riders with defective bikes.

It’s in the nature of things that the people least likely to have insurance are the ones most likely to have defective bikes, also these are probably the people most likely to have trouble (although I exclude the talented Thuekr from this comment). I haven’t been on very large numbers of forum rides, but I’ve seen three people fall off through not having proper brakes: one fixed with no brakes, another fixed with only a back brake and the third with a front brake only and a freewheel. In the third example I don’t think the accident was actually caused by inadequate brakes, but in that case there could easily have been serious injury to an outsider and you can be pretty certain that the police would have turned up and noticed the brake problem.

I can’t tell you how to make sure that everyone has their own insurance and a legal bike, but I think anyone organising any cycling event should do his best to see that this is done.

I’m really sorry if I sound like a depressing wet blanket who is trying to take the fun and spontaneity out of riding, but if all potential organisers are discouraged from organising because of this risk, there will be no events to ride.

I have put up some dates for some shorter autumn rides as kind of warm up / shakedown / fixie-toedip for those interested

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/379747/

Sensational