Sunday Express fall for 'mind-boggling' numbers.

 

                                                              

In this Sunday Express article,
 based on CTC charity funded propaganda produced by keen university cyclists commissioned to produce what CTC wanted, there are extraordinary claims being made about what gains we could have from road cycling. So extraordinary that even the author calls them 'mind boggling'  So 'mindboggling' are the figures in fact we can forget all about fracking and alternative power. How can any objective authority pay heed to anything CTC say? Here they are asking for more driver jail.

Don't our editors care about facts and truth? Are the greens running our papers as well as our politicians now? 

It's not just the Express but The Times is working hard against the interests of 99% of the population, so I imagine 99% of its readership too. See here. So why?

Don't tell me the Great & The Good are trying to reduce lower mortals to standards that they would not wish on themselves and in doing so, will leave themselves with more of the cake? 'Get em back on bikes and make em know their place in the scheme of things' It's very difficult to find any rational reason for media, politicians, and celebrities to be keen to impose such discomfort and suffering on lesser mortals by taking us back sixty years or so isn't it?   What next? Driverless cars for the aristocrats whilst the Proles go back to dark ages of walking and cycling? See Driverless cars not for all of us. 

I have written to The Sunday Express as follows: Hi Express,

We need the truth on our roads:

I find it very worrying that you have published as a fact the conclusions of a report commissioned by a pro cycling group and written by keen cyclists, which include incredible claims based totally on specious research and selective imagination. Do see this item on the subject http://bit.ly/1wnMP8X

Are they serious? Getting people to cycle will net £248,000,000,000 by 2050? Didn't any alarm bells ring at your paper before this was published? When you study this report, apart from the imaginative and selective accident savings, it is based on bicycling making up 25% of UK journeys. That would amount to an incredible 75 billion miles a year. In fact the report claims that cyclists are doing 6,000,000,000 miles a year already.

Nearly all rural cycling isn't essential but simply fun hobby riding, whilst only in our university cities and commuting cities are cyclists riding to actually be somewhere. Just drive around the country to see how cycle-less we actually are. The same can be said about Europe too.

Over 99% of the UK's population don't cycle, have no wish to cycle and none depend on anyone cycling either. Our society isn't run on push bikes. That is because, cycling as a transport mode, simply isn't viable, is uncomfortable, hard work and often wet and cold too. One needs to be healthy and fit to do it and it really is silly to reverse that truth to where one would be fitter and healthier by doing it instead; you have to be fit and healthy to start doing it. This addresses the biggest flaw in the projected fiscal savings and benefits to the community by more people cycling. There are much better and safer ways to stay fit, whilst our current obesity problems don't stem from travel mode, cars have been around much longer than our obesity era, and is more to do with computers, the Internet, game machines, fast food and lack of outside sporting facilities. So the projected savings by getting people to cycle are based on a selective untruth too.

In the call for more walking and cycling I am not clear of the connection between the two.

Without walkers we would all die and without cyclists no-one would notice very much. To deny that would be unrealistic.

Walkers have more in common with drivers since both depend on each other but no-one depends on cycling. In any case I can think of nothing more that walkers require other than their dedicated footways and pedestrian precincts so this appears to be nothing more than a claim for massive funding for cycling, a group that nobody needs.

Ref: UK cycling death. 2015 http://bit.ly/1Da3Pou

        Top Cyclists Prove It. http://bit.ly/1e900Cq

We challenge BMA http://bit.ly/1h5nZrN

Euro cycling myth http://bit.ly/1lPzpnh

Wishes