The Blog of Hubbers

The participants were myself, Bundy, Laura and Grant on team Kiwi. Rachel was team Wallaby, Masha team Anti-Democracy and Karim and Alexia were team Baguette.

Respect to the people who did it with little or no preparation. Masha didn’t get her bike until the day before the ride and Karim and Alexia were “not told” that the ride would be 40 miles long and very hilly. As Alexia put it “Amongst our French friends we are considered the fit ones. But when we go out with you Kiwis …”

Twice a day I ride past the Chinese embassy in London. It isn’t well marked so you would never know it was there if it weren’t for the permanent peaceful protest by supporters of Falun Gong. They are ticked off that their government imprisons them and sells their internal organs before they have finished using them. The other give away is the cop with a machine gun across the road.

Tonight the usual one or two man protest was slightly larger as about a hundred people turned up to protest the deaths of a number of protesters in Tibet. Naturally there was a much larger number of police with automatic weapons. The good news is that we live in a democracy where civil rights are protected by the law and the police don’t gun people down in the street who disagree with the government.

While on the TFL website I also noticed that they have a tube map that shows you where you can take your bike on the tube. The short answer is “not many places”.  London isn’t like cities like Copenhagen where trains are spacious and come with bike racks inside them.

They did have this link to bikeability who can general teach riding skills and how do avoid door ambush.

When I ride through the city I give parked cars a wide berth because you never know when someone will open a door or someone will walk out. This morning I saw a stark reminder of why caution is the best policy.

While I was riding to work around Regents Park I saw a cyclist on the other side of the side of the road passing a parked car when the driver of the parked car opened the door without looking and knock the cyclist off his bike. From where I was it looked like the rider hit the door with his thigh and not his hand/handle bars. Luckily he wasn’t riding too fast but it still looked very painful.

I also found out today that the Transport for London website suggests that cyclists should look out for car doors being opened into your path. They should also suggest that cyclist should have reflexes of a cobra and the ability to read minds of other road users who don’t think looking is important.

• Black cabs swerving to the kerb to pick up/drop off passengers
• Pedestrians stepping out into the road without looking (and most of us do it on occasion)
• Passengers hopping off or on Routemaster buses without looking
• Vehicles turning left across you - even more serious if it is a bus or truck
• Car doors being opened into your path
• Vehicle creepage at junctions
• Delivery vehicles parked in cycle lanes
• Drivers failing to indicate properly leaving everyone guessing
• Vehicles doing impromptu U-turns.

Today I watched large tourist crossing the road nearly get knocked over by another cyclist. After the near miss he stopped for a chat and we had a laugh about how often cyclists nearly hit pedestrians. Anyway to make a long story short he was from Alaska. Bloody friendly people those Alaskans (not sure of the correct collective noun).

My regular route to work is being dug up again and it made me realise that it has been roadwork free for a number of months now. This got me wondering if more roadworks are done in the summer when it is warn and nice to work outdoors. Maybe roadworkers are harder to find in the winter.

If this is the case then it is a real bummer because it is likely that more roadworks will be done in the summer when there are more cyclist on the road creating dangerous situations like the one in this photo.

This made me think of my great new idea for cycle safety. What if roadworkers were only allowed to dig up cycle lanes in the winter when they are significantly less busy? And during the summer they can dig up the regular roads. This way there would be less intrusion during the busy cycle months and therefore statistically the roads should be safer for cycles.

They (you know the they people who control everything) already do other common sense things (no seriously) like fix the tube at night when no one is using it. Why not only dig up cycle lanes in the winter when all the softer riders bikes are collecting dust?

The socialist who run the unions that work on the London underground went on a 72 hour strike this week. In the end the union called off the strike slightly early after accepting the EXACT package that the Tube bosses offered them in the first place.

Why did they strike then? I have no idea. Maybe just to flex their socialist muscles.

One crazy spin off of the tube strike is that London’s buses and roads became way more congested. One Tuesday and Wednesday on my rides to work I saw some crazy stuff. The significant increase in traffic caused loads of extra pressure and I saw several vehicles do crazy things that you would normally never see. The worst of which was a car that cut across in front of an oncoming car when they both got green lights to go straight ahead. Crazy.

There were also loads of extra cyclists who were riding for two days. All those people who bought bikes and have rarely or never used them were able to dust them off and ride to work. The finniest part was that a lot of the “strike riders” rode in ways that regular riders wouldn’t, like all over the footpath.

There were reports in the news that the queues for the buses were so bad that fights broke out.

I wonder how many people got hurt or ended up in hospital so the unions could flew their socialist muscle.

I have been having a few moans on my blog about the state of cycle lanes and cycling in general recently. Usually when I see something dangerous I take a photo and send the link to that photo to my local councilors, the Mayor of London, Local MP, Transport for London and other people who might have an interest in my moaning.

Last time I had an even better idea and I have decided to harness the powers of Web 2.0 to fight the good fight against the morons who put cyclists at risk in London.

This is a link to my flickr group about cycle safety that anyone can post photos to. Within a week I have already found ten other people who have also been taking photos of anti-cycle-idiocy.

That is the power of the internet my friends, it enables ticked off loonies to find each other and bug elected officials together. Well one of the powers anyway.

These are all from the Evening Standard which seems to be the only newspaper to carry regular articles on cycling and cycle safety in London. My guess would be that one of the editrors at the ES rides to work.

• 372 cyclist were killed or seriously injured on London roads last year
• 19 cyclists were killed in collisions - nine of which involved a goods vehicle
• In 2005 21 cyclists were killed, nine involved lorries
• The was a 30 per cent rise in cycle deaths between 2003 and 2005
• The number of cycle journeys has risen by more than 80 per cent over five years
• There has been a 23 per cent increase in the number of cyclists using London’s main roads, compared to the same time last year
• 64 per cent of drivers never cycle on roads as they are afraid of having an accident

No surprises about that last one.

Earlier this year I wrote to a long list of local councillors about a stretch of cycle lane on the way to work that was blocked in several places by road works. In some places the road was genuinely dug up but in several other the cycle lane was blocked to provide storage space for road signs, equipment and … a portable toilet. I even took some photos (click on the image below to see more).I got a couple of responses about looking at danger areas etc a few weeks later but not much else.

Yesterday on the same stretch of road I took the photo below of a toilet blocking a cycle lane. In the couple of minutes it took me to take these photos I saw two cyclists ride into oncoming traffic on the wrong side of the road to avoid the toilet blocking the cycle lane. While I admit this is an incredibly stupid thing for cyclists to do the fact that a high percentage of cyclists will do this makes the placement of the portable toilet here, dangerous in the extreme.

My proposed solution is that the local councils should outlaw using cycle lanes for storage by road workers.