HUBBERS DOT COM BLOG

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.

The Evening Standard have a thoroughly praiseworthy 12-point charter for improving cycle safety in London. I am struggling to find more information about it online except on one other blog so I thought I would promote it here:

1. A real cycle network across London
2. Better cycle lanes with proper segregation
3. Enforcement of special advanced stop lines for cyclists
4. HGVs to be fitted with special cyclist safety mirrors
5. Compulsory cyclist awareness training for all bus drivers and new HGV drivers
6. Make safe the Thames bridges: some of the most dangerous places for cyclists
7. Cycle-friendly streets: fewer one-way systems which funnel cyclists into the middle of traffic
8. More cycle parking across London
9. A police crackdown on bike theft
10. Campaign to urge the selfemployed to claim a 20p a mile cycling allowance against tax
11. Better cycle-bus-rail coordination: adequate parking at all railway stations
12. Cycle training for all schoolchildren and any adult who wants it

Every day when I ride to work I see people step out onto the road without looking. I guess they have forgotten the advice of their parents and are not looking “right then left then right again”. And while ears might be useful for hearing cars and trucks they aren’t so useful for spotting cycles. This often results in the unobservant pedestrians getting a bing from a bell or a toot of a horn and usually a little scare.

Some of these sharp eared walkers have taken offence to cyclists binging them and the local police have been called into action to sort out the silly cyclists. A group of them now regularly patrol the intersection next to Holborn police station issuing tickets to any cyclist who stupidly runs a red light while they are there.

My point is that I don’t think that a lot of pedestrians are getting hurt. But London roads are putting at least four thousand cyclists in hospital each year.

Now if I were in charge of the police (and why not?) I might target my limited resources at minimising death and injury on the roads. Or I might be looking into why thousands of bikes are stolen in London each year. Quite possibly I might send an office down to Brick Lane where rumour has it you can choose from several cut price stolen bikes any day of the week.

That’s just me though. I have crazy ideas for common sense use of limited police resources.

It’s good to know that in this fast paced techy time that I can still have the occasional idea that is ahead of the big players.

My idea to put all the cycle accidents in London isn’t possible on Google Maps … yet. Hopefully they will set it up so that any logged in user can add a flag to a map soon.

This morning I was riding down the cycle lane on Avenue Road on my way to work and a people carrier turned left in front of me without indicating. Naturally I did what any sane cyclist would do and I slammed into his rear vision mirror and was catapulted through the air.

I landed a few meters further down the road. I think my right hand hit first. Luckily I was wearing glove to no damage there. My right elbow followed and was very lightly grazed. Next my right hip landed and took the brunt of the impact. No graze but I think I will have a hell of a bruise. The last to hit the asphalt was the right side of my helmet. It hit with such force that I remember thinking at the time that if I wasn’t wearing it there was no way my skull could have taken the hit and stayed in one piece. All in all I got off extremely lightly.

The driver stopped and was really nice except he was touching me far to much and wanted to tell my what to do all the time. Like lie here and don’t move or let me see you walk to the tree and back. I think he was more shaken up than I was. But then I knew I was going to be okay and he was probably shitting himself that I might have internal injuries or shock or a really nasty lawyer (oxymoron?).

Massive Lucky Break

My apple and banana were both in the left hand side of my pack and escaped the carnage entirely unscathed!

Cycle Crash Map

I knew this street was a bad spot because I have had a few close calls and last year I saw a woman with her bike in the back of an ambulance at the same place. And London is full of places where cyclists regularly get cained.

So I have come up with this idea. I have created a Google map that shows where my accident was and encourages other people to plot their accidents or accidents they have seen on it. Once enough data is gathered the map could be used to get local councils to make dangerous intersections safer.

This is the link to my Cycle Crash Map. If you could link to this on your blog (if you have one) or tell people about it that would be great.

Additional weirdness

While I was dazed and confused by the side of the road the driver kept asking me to move away from a smoking white van that three geezers were trying to start. It was only a little smoke so I didn’t see what the fuss was until the geezers started carrying fists full of dirt to white van. At this stage the guy who hit me moved me to the other side of the road and the white van turned into an inferno. I have never seen a live car on fire before and would have completely missed that if I hadn’t been hit.

Got back to work to find that despite my best efforts before I left the IT departments have erased all proof of my existance. It will take days to sort out.

Today they had the heaviest snow fall in 10 years in London. As usual despite loads of warnings the transport system fell to pieces.

To celebrate New Zealand’s national day, Waitangi Day we did the Circle Line Pub Crawl along with several thousand Kiwis living in London.

These days most Kiwis start at Paddington and head anti clockwise for eight stops until Westminster where there is a mass Haka on Parliament Square across the road from the houses of parliament. Interestingly in police state Britain it is now a criminal offence to protest in Parliament Square without a permit from the local cops. Luckily the cops are pretty good natured about the whole thing and they let us behave like twats without ruining everything.

Having completed the CLPC over ten times we consider ourselves experienced campaigners and we decided to do it old school starting from Baker Street (to avoid the crowds) and going clockwise stopping for a beer at every single one of the 27 tube stops. My memory failed me some time after Westminster but I have been reliably informed that we successfully completed the entire crawl, again. Legends.

The day started badly with me jumping on a tube heading in the wrong direction at the second stop. Other than that the only mishap was Russell who took a running jump down a dozen stairs and is now on crutches.

I don’t know art, but I know what I like. And I definitely like five story high stainless steal tube slides masquerading as art!

The good news is that in the next two months I am going to York, New York (which used to be called New Amsterdam) and Amsterdam. If only Amsterdam was once called New Kiev and Kiev was once called New Ohio all my travel would be linked by their names.

The bad news is that I am moving out of my flash South London flat as our lease is up and my flatmates want to find somewhere cheaper. So if anyone knows of a really sheltered bridge somewhere near a cardboard box factory please drop me a line.