HUBBERS DOT COM BLOG

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.

My mate Cameron is running the London marathon to raise money for a prostate cancer charity and has asked me to post his donations email on my blog. Here goes …

As some of you may be aware already I am running the London Marathon on the 13th of April in aid of The Prostate Cancer Charity.

The Prostate Cancer Charity was set up in 1996. In its relatively short life, the Charity has played a key role in raising both public awareness of the disease and political debate about services and support. Over recent years they have invested nearly £5 million in vital medical research and supported thousands of men and their families.

Prostate Cancer is the most prominent cancer among men and the UK survival rate is only 44.3%. Every year in the UK nearly 35,000 cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed.

On April 11th 1998 my Grandad passed away after a long battle with Prostate Cancer. It is almost 10 years to the day that I will run the Flora London Marathon.

On January 21st 2008 my Uncle passed away in Bristol after suffering from Prostate Cancer as well.

It is in memory of both of them that I am running the London Marathon. Hopefully, with your help I can raise some much needed funds for research and at the same time raise awareness for a disease that most men just don’t want to talk about.

I have made a pledge to The Prostate Cancer Charity to raise £2000 to help them out. In return for this they have awarded me a Golden Bond place in the London Marathon. I will be running 26 miles/42 km on Sunday 13th April 2008.

It does not matter how much you donate, just that you do because every pound will be put to good use.

http://www.justgiving.com/cameronpadfieldsrunningthemarathon

Donating through this site is simple, fast and totally secure. It is also the most efficient way to sponsor me: The Prostate Cancer Charity will receive your money faster and, if you are a UK taxpayer, an extra 28% in tax will be added to your gift at no cost to you.

So please sponsor me now.

Please feel free to forward this on to anyone you want to! The more that know about this the better.

Thank you so much for your support, it really does mean a lot to me.

Cam is hard working, honest and funny as f*ck so he will do almost anything for a donation to this worthy cause. Feel free to let your evil side run amok and really test his commitment.

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.

Went up to Wembley Stadium to see Live Earth. I cannot think of to many things more inappropriate to bring attention to the state of the planet than an alcohol and rock fueled orgy of consumption.

The bands ranged from good to great but the highlights for me was seeing Wembley Stadium itself. It was awesome. It’s just a pity they don’t play rugby there.

My humour highlight was Thandie Newton’s small piece to air. She started by saying:

“Someone once said -”

At this stage I was thinking I bet she was too lazy to even bother to find out and credit the author of the quote she is stealing. She finished:

“- with power comes responsibility.”

Then I didn’t know when to laugh or cry. Not only did she steal someone else’s quote but she also butchered it. Everyone knows that the line “With great power comes great responsibility” is by Spiderman’s uncle Ben. So I started yelling “Uncle Ben said it! Uncle Ben said it!” But it was still early in the day and people hadn’t drunk very much so everyone just edged away from me and looked nervous.

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.

It’s been 9 years since I last went to Tiger Tiger in Leicester Square. Sixteen hours before I was due to make a return visit for a friend’s birthday some evil bastard parked a car packed with explosives and nails outside it.

Luckily the bombers are once again as skilful as they are sane and the bomb never went off. Thankfully in the UK there seems to be a high correlation between being a sadistic terrorist murderer and being a bumbling incompetent.

When will the bombers learn? Horrifically killing innocent people doesn’t get you paradise and virgins. It gets you a little concrete cube to spend the rest of your life in with a guy called bubba who makes you wear lipstick.