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^ Finds body parts in deserted underpass. Hangs around to take pictures on phone.

Got the train this morning. Walking over London Bridge I saw a motorcyclist pull up to chat to a police officer, then officer gestures for a bus to pull in and has a word. Appeared to be a "this is a wing mirror, use it" type convo, by the gesturing I saw. Keep fighting the good fight traffic cops.

For what it's worth, my daily experience of segregated paths is this sort of shite which looks half decent from the road but is actually poorly surfaced, covered in glass and dog shit, and gives way to every side road. As a way of keeping people alive (and out of the way of traffic) it does its job though, which I suspect was the priority all along. Hopefully newer developments won't be taking this "bare minimum" approach.

I just looked at your proposed route and completely agree, especially alongside the park, it's a total no-brainer. I wonder if planners just see side road interaction and "cyclist killed by left-turning lorry" headlines flash before their eyes. By that measure (rather than a measure of usability) a long section of totally segregated motorway hugging is the holy grail.

I used to live in Putney and recently moved out to the sticks in Sutton. I used the police.uk website to compare crime rates, as I wasn't very familiar with areas we were looking at. One thing that really struck me is that Putney had a significantly higher crime rate than any of the areas we looked at. However, once you filter out shoplifting and bar fights on the high street there is not much else left.

tl;dr - Not all crime leads to a "dodgy area" vibe.

I think the tendency to follow arterial roads might be to do with the practicalities of physically segregating the lane. If you put a segregated lane down a street with a lot of side roads you either have to block them off, or the segregation effectively disappears every 10 meters just when you need it the most.

IANA town planner etc...

Does anyone know if this scheme has protected funding? I'm sure I remember Boris promising £1bn of cycling investment over the next decade. I hope this isn't going to use up 90% of it.

Generally though a good news story. We can argue over the details in the future, but the big picture is positive.

"It would be a mistake to think London is clogged up with selfish drivers in their cars," he (RAC nobber) said.

"Much of the traffic is essential freight and commercial movements, not to mention buses and taxis, and if you cut capacity then business costs will rise and deliveries put at risk."

Yeah, I'm sure it's essential that lorries drive past the houses of fucking parliament.

Also, aren't we spending a shitload of money on an east/west railway tunnel right now? I've heard trains are rather good at carrying freight.

Essentially bike must have two "brakes"(unlesss it's a penny farthing). Pedal resistance counts as one brake, so fixed and front brake is fine. Bikes with only a coaster brake are also illegal.

Regarding the blind people cycle terror, can anyone find a link to the results of the survey? I can't tell if the results are time bound - i.e. 1 in 4 blind people report a collision with a cyclist in the last year - or not.

The BBC article now has this correction:

Correction: An earlier version of this story said a quarter of guide dogs working in London had been hit by a bike. The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association has since said the information it provided was incorrect.

So it appears the results are not so much time bound as completely made up.

The whole phenomenon is a bit strange. If the rise was due to higher numbers of cyclists riding on the pavement in general you'd expect them to be hitting everyone, not just blind people. After all, the cyclist is motivated to avoid a collision if only by self-interest, so collisions are generally due to them blundering into people coming around corners or out of doorways.

It does raise the dark comedic image (not for the blind person obvs) of a fuckwit pavement cyclist playing chicken with a blind person unaware that they can't see them coming.

I do wonder if perhaps quite a few of these incidents are gutter -riding cyclists hitting guide dogs as they step out. The collision being due to the fact that the blind person can't hear the cyclist coming.

All chin stroking aside, it has to be said that blind people with guide dogs are pretty fucking obvious and anyone who doesn't notice them waiting to cross is probably not paying attention to where they're going.

Christ on a bike! does every single calling out of bad cycling have to descend into a collective responsibility wank-off?

The man is essentially "head of really sensible cyclists". Is it that much of a leap that his responsibility as a figurehead might extend to behaving respectfully whilst cycling in a public place?

Yeah, I was wondering what the need for camo was. I can't help but think dressing up your armed response unit like the actual army is going to attract the sort of recruits that time themselves disassembling and reassembling their guns on a regular basis.

That light has great comic timing

Again and again journos are guilty of this victim blaming crap,

(Would they also report a rape in that manner -A woman, who not wearing a baggy onesie, was raped)

This is the Mail we're talking about, so yes, probably.

^ Always makes me think of Shami Chakrabarti. Shorts with a good human rights record?

The real shit is then turning right into Battersea Park. For some reason, taxis love parking on the left hand side of the road directly opposite the park gate. This means that, while you're stationary on the centre line of the road with your arm out, traffic coming from behind is squeezing between you and the taxi to your left. Plus your facing a stream of fairly heavy traffic (in both senses) coming the other way. Not nice.

I abandoned an attempt to route my old commute through the park for exactly that reason and chose the (equally stressful, but quicker) Queen's Circus roundabout and Prince of Wales Drive route instead.

If you want to experience the full joy of London cycling infrastructure you can go past the turn for the park and turn left onto the pavement to wait for the Toucan crossing onto the right hand side. I think the remaining few meters to the park is a cycle path. You might want to take a book to read whilst you wait though.

I'd echo Greenbank's point about cost too. Just try on everything you can get your hands on and don't upgrade for the sake of "features". The only thing you can't tell in advance is durability, but we're talking about lycra here, so a £100 pair of shorts is unlikely to last five times longer than a £20 pair.

Generally more expensive shorts will have more panels (or some sort of variable weave equivalent to extra panels) which should theoretically give a better fit. You get a decent idea of fit by trying them on over your pants, but unfortunately finding a chamois you like is a bit more hit and miss.

The attraction of bibshorts is that they don't rely on elastication at the waist to hold them up, so tend to stay positioned better and pinch less at the waist. I am a bibshort convert for this reason. Despite being on the skinny side I used to find that shorts really pinched at the waist or worked themselves down as I rode.

Guy in a Festina jersey who got into a barney with a young, female, black driver this morning. Calling her a monkey once you were well out of earshot was really brave. Did you think I was going to back you up cos we're both white?

If you don't want to get called out on you fucking disgusting racist opinions then keep them to yourself you human turd. Judging by the way you rode afterwards I suspect you caused the incident in the first place anyway.

^ I believe that's the standard method for Sun readers.

http://this-is-not-jewish.tumblr.com/post/34344324495/how-to-criticize-israel-without-being-anti-semitic

I came here to post this. It's worth bearing in mind when discussing the issue with Jews that any perceived tetchiness or defensiveness does not come out of thin air. They have to put up with this kind of ignorant shit, short of full-blown anti-Semitism, but still ignorant, all the time.

It's the equivalent of colleagues constantly making blanket statements about red-light jumping cyclists or attributing blame to cyclists crushed by lorries. Except, you know, there's never been a huge murderous political campaign that nearly succeeded in wiping all cyclists from the face of the earth.

^ Article was proceeding well until... "It can be operated either voluntary or if you take it to the extreme then the speed of the vehicle can be set like cruise control and overridden only in case of emergency. There’s no decision on this yet but we will probably go for the voluntary system to allow the driver to retain full control of the vehicle."

WTF is the point in a voluntary limit for crying out loud?! Is there some kind of internal rule that compels TFL to half-arse every good thing they do?

Your homework for this evening is to try and understand the difference between an 80kg person on a bike filtering past a slow moving car, and 1,500+ kg of steel, glass and plastic travelling at 20 to 40 mph past a vulnerable road user.

For added credit, and with reference to your homework assignment, you can then explain why your post is so fundamentally flawed. To do this, you may like to consider rewording your post. For example "Because cyclists pass within 1 foot of a car, it is fine for a car driver to pass within 1 foot of a cyclist", or "car drivers have no responsibility leave a safe distance between them and vulnerable road users, because vulnerable road users are able to filter in slow moving traffic".

I just had to re-quote TW2 in an attempt to get some perspective here. This isn't BBC Breakfast - we don't have to try to find a kernel of truth in every person's opinion, just for "balance". The definition of close is obviously subjective and varies with speed. The anti-social aspect of a close pass depends on the consequences for the person you are passing. The consequences for drivers are virtually zero, so they can shut the fuck up and deal with it. Not to mention that the whole argument is founded on a "get your own house in order" logical fallacy in the first place.

Sorry, I took the train this morning and I'm cranky.

Actually, I think the Met have missed the opportunity for moneyspinner here. £30 for a speeding ticket. £40 to have it mounted in a tasteful frame to go on your mantelpiece.