If you depend on motorised road transport and have no wish to start having to get on two flimsy wheels, exposed to all weathers and lots of hard work to travel a short distance, I suggest you stop buying The Times. If you don't want to pay ten pounds a person, a family of four to pay £40 per year, £650 million, for transport that isn't viable for your needs and is highly dangerous, don't buy the Times & don't vote for David Cameron or be a member of the AA either.If you think I'm making all this up, just look at this tweet and play The Times video. What can't speak can't lie
See these fast cyclists passing things too closely. No wonder they're dying. http://t.co/EZycv9VYCC @thetimes @AAPresident @carltonreid
— Drivers Union. (@DriverUnion) March 11, 2015
In it you will see AA's self promoting Edmund King with his pal Chris Boardman, who makes and sells costly 
But what about the video?
What the Times has done is show exactly why so many cyclists get doored and struck and killed. They are riding too fast and too close to things; it's that simple. It also talks in percentages too. So New York had a 250% rise in cycling. 250% of what? Three? Five? 75? What was the actual rise in New York cycling? And has this been maintained?
'Car centric' New York? New York can't be anything else. It couldn't run or exist on cycling and nor can anywhere else either.
The Times video also says that £650 million a year is 4% of the transport budget. Most cycling is pure recreational and the commuters are only a tiny minority too. 4% would need about 12 billion useful cycling miles a year and that would also need to be carrying heavy loads or carrying several people to justify it too. So this £40 per year is to effectively pay for a jolly, that we don't need at all for no return. Is this the best that the great Thunderer can do to justify its case? All of the transport budget comes from driver taxes of about £50 billion a year by the way.
Come on. Show yourself. Who in The Times is the cycling buff? The Times can't even run or exist on cycling. Even in The Times cyclists will be a peculiar tiny minority. So why impose on the rest of us, what you cannot do yourself Thunderer? The same with Parliament. Come on Cameron, refuse all car travel and try to do all your work by pushbike.
The old chestnut about health and cycling creating better health. There's nothing healthy about placing yourself in great danger and being killed or injured by it, so there are far better and safer ways of staying or getting fit.
Why is The Times and Cameron peddling such false promotion? In any case, society didn't expand on manpower road transport and for a very short time in mankind's history, about 50 years, with no other alternative more did cycle. But if cycling was so viable, more would be doing it still. They are not because it simply isn't viable. They will be telling us we must all jog more next.
This is a blatant cycling lobby dishonest presentation so why is Our Prime Minister promoting it too?
But in many ways the video shoots itself and cycling in the foot. It shows cyclists riding fast among and close to things. That is exactly the reason that so many are in collisions and are killed or injured. Here they are, exposed on two flimsy wheels and a slender frame, mixing, mingling and competing with big essential moving machines. Of course it's highly dangerous. But they are not just a hazard to themselves. Drivers who hit one can do serious jail time and whenever transport needs to slow from a safe sixty MPH to 10MPH and then accelerate again, that costs the country money too. Multiply that by many thousands of times a day and imagine the cost to the community.
Since this video was made, incredibly the Select Committee didn't have the witnesses back as we requested, but actually recommended the bike maker's £10 a head from us all. This has since been ratified. Family of four? £40 per year, £650 million and no-one needs cycling at all.
It's not too late to tell Cameron that if he doesn't reverse it he's out at the next elections.
Tou are confusing am annual spend with a weekly spend.
ReplyDeleteYes so I am.
ReplyDeleteBest you retract your tweets about that then and edit your piece!
DeleteAlso,Boardman sold the bike firm to Halfords last uear.
ReplyDeleteStill a major shareholder and they are being sold as his brand.
DeleteI have done both. It reads even better now. Especially the nonsense about the 4% too. The whole campaign is a tissue of lies. Thanks for the heads up though.
ReplyDeleteConversely many car journeys do not require one to carry heavy loads and passengers, therefore a car is not essential. I can say that myself! Some journeys I make by car are through convenience and could be cycled instead.
ReplyDeleteOh and I see you're tweeting about an Australian driver injuring 7 cyclists. I'm sorry but if you're going to cause that much harm you're obviously a shit driver and should not be on the roads. Why are you an apologist for neglectful driving Keith? Surely they'd also be a danger to car drivers too?
ReplyDeleteBut the only way he could've crashed into 7 cyclists is if they were all bunched in the road. I only have 140 characters to get over the message that cycling is a hazard to cyclists and drivers and most of it is pure recreation too. I am trying to get cyclists to understand that what they are doing is, by definition a massive risk. That's exactly what those hazard tweets are all about.
DeleteBut it is also a campaign to show that, when society condones such unnecessary hazards, it can hardly start jailing people for it too. I am also making drivers aware that hitting a cyclist by accident can get them up to 14 years in prison. So why don't cyclists like me pointing all this out? It's in their interests too.
You're blaming the cyclists without knowing any details. It shameful, and you know it.
DeleteI just publish the story without comment. Cyclists are a hazard on the road. It isn't about blame. If someone runs across a live firing range and gets shot is there no culpability on him? What cyclists are doing is by definition very risky. David Cameron said 'Taking their life in their hands' It's about time you & politicians saw the elephant in the room. I am intent on reducing road death and injury by focusing on the reality of it. You simply cannot face the reality. Ok. Just keep cycling. Ignore me. But don't keep following me and bleating about it.
DeleteWe have been all round this many time. 'Essential' as in the community must have cars not referring to specific journeys. I really cannot think of any car journey that was just for a ride. All have a purpose. So you ride bikes, why must everyone else? Most bike riding is recreational and certainly not to transport loads. If I need to get to Lincoln and back within 4 hours, I can only do it by car, even if I am carrying no load or other passengers.
ReplyDeleteBut your comment is typical of the cyclists attitude to driving and the private driver. If cyclists were to just get on with it without making issues about driving, I wouldn't be focusing on their statements and what they do. But I run a driver's group. So I do respond to all issues concerning driving and drivers and find the weakness' and faults in the opposition argument. Being pro driver doesn't mean I'm anti cyclist though.
'Essential' journeys are not defined by type of transport - a doctor going to work on a bike is making every bit as essential a journey as a doctor going by car. Yes, we've been through this before, and as ever you ignore the (basically very simple) refutation of your overly simplistic stance.
DeleteAnd yes, you're anti-cyclist. Its pretty clear really.
But you all fall back on the word 'journey'. I don't say that. All I say is that cars and drivers are essential for our survival now. If your doctor had the choice of dumping his bike or his car, he'd dump the bike. He doesn't depend on pushbikes. How do his medicines get delivered and made? What about his instruments? Do try to address the statements I make instead of introducing a completely different one.
DeleteOh yes. Speaking up for and being fair to drivers is 'anti cyclist'. Oh I see.
DeleteOh really? How is calling road cyclists ,'unnecessary hazards' not anti cyclist?
ReplyDeleteFrom anyone else's, particularly drivers perspective, they are a road hazard. They are unnecessary because society doesn't need them. Just because cyclists don't like the truth doesn't alter a fact or mean that it mustn't be stated. If we are to charge families on average £40, more in fact a year in taxes, 'why must we have road cycling?' is entitled to be asked. We only need drivers and walkers on the road is a fact.
ReplyDeleteI am a cyclist and I will be out on mine again today. I have never ever demanded what the modern self possessed cycling lobby does but to suggest no-one should dare stand up to it or dismantle its self important claims is utter nonsense.
All the cycling doyens do, like Carlton Reid for example, is to block or ridicule any reasonable discussion when faced with reason. That doesn't help the cycling cause.
OTHERING is the process of perceiving or portraying someone or something as fundamentally different or alien. It is a process that identifies those that are thought to be different from oneself or the mainstream, and it can reinforce and reproduce positions of domination and subordination.
ReplyDeleteWe have a startling tendency to come to hate people who we treat badly. If we’re experiencing guilt about our treatment of some person, or group, or class, and having trouble reconciling that guilt with our notion of ourselves as good people, our brains are extremely adept at resolving the situation by othering the people we feel that we’ve wronged. If we dehumanise someone, and distance our empathy with them, then we won’t have to feel bad about the shabby way we’ve treated them.
The otherer sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.
And with that. The unessential hazard to themselves and others, can keep blaming others for their deaths & injury.
ReplyDeleteThe definition of road cycling is self evident. It would be regarded as totally alien to human safety if it were not cycling. The fact is that society must have walkers and drivers on the road and nothing else. So why not start there?
I don't hate anyone including cyclists. There is a serious problem with anyone who sees good common sense and fact as hatred, especially from a tiny minority who actually hate and attack and blame a much larger group yet cannot then accept very valid responses.
Who's fooling who here? I think you are dangerously fooling yourself.