No. What costs lives Richard is amateurs and profiteers!

I must confess that Richard Madeley has never impressed me much but I have always been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt until now. The Jury is back. Having exposed himself to the corrupt speed awareness course system of dubious legality - if you are reading this Richard See here & Here - He now is an expert driver and the font of all knowledge of road safety. And in road safety a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In fact when someone like Richard uses his column to parrot false and selective statements people will die. Why? Because the Speeding Industry deflects from real accident causes and in so doing, actually kills more people.

Richard you're a journalist who happens to have been brainwashed by a profitable industry that told you fibs and didn't tell you the truth. As in religion, it is always the converts who are the worst, so it is with Richard Madeley but unlike religion this is about life and death. 

You have now used your column to bamboozle your whole readership on an issue for which you have no CV at all and based on what exactly? A sales pitch whereby two firms providing these courses in Wales alone, are managing to get through 6000 a month of them, earning them £300,000 a month? No vested interest to brainwash you there then Richard? Part of your instructor's CV is 'I'm in it for the money' and another part is 'If I told the truth, I would be out of a job'. I bet he or she wasn't even an expert driver either.

Do you really think these profiteers want 'speeding' to stop so that they can fold up their firms, all look for other jobs to do? Of course not. So we now have a system that must have 'speeders' to continue. So there's no incentive to correct high volume enticement sites then.  
Richard confirms what we all know. 'I suppose I hadn't seen the signs but that's no excuse' Yes it is Richard. But you won't know about speed enticement sites. http://bit.ly/17sNVdX & Why speeding happens 

Did you enquire how many other accidental speeders were caught there? When a site generates lots of speeders without attending accidents Richard, it implies a site fault, possibly an inappropriate speed limit.

If these were accidents, would the police just keep snapping them or find out why it's happening and correct it? So why is your prosecution and that of many others, just allowed to continue if it's not just about the money? 

Clearly such sites are a failure if the object is to slow drivers down anyway isn't it? I assume you were driving safely Richard? If so then you prove my point. 

You are a smart bloke aren't you Richard so why are you not like me asking pertinent questions about all this? You see for this to be justified, all speeding must be considered deliberate disobedience. Was yours? If not, then it is definitely a site issue then. 

You then regurgitate the ministry of guesswork numbers fed to you as if a fact. 'Hit a pedestrian at 20 MPH yada yada Hit one at 30MPH yada yada.....' This is all theory and modelling and not fact. There would have had to have been many collisions at exactly 20 & exactly 30 to be able to say that, and measuring isn't that precise; so they're made up numbers Richard and you have cited them as fact. 

Of course the slower everything goes the less damage is done, the classic 6th former's simplistic rhetoric, but when you over-slow major infrastructure many die from the knock on economic effect of about £3 billion per each one mile per hour too slow. Using this argument let's bring out the man with the red flag again. Or better yet have zero speed so all of us die from lack of basics Richard!  

So now, given that your offence was just 'speeding', what didn't the course tell you about it?

• Speeding cannot cause anything to happen? See Understand speed  

• Even the law-there's no such thing as causing death by 'speeding' Richard-acknowledges that 'speeding' causes nothing?

• Accidents, as in the ones you cited, if not caused by other reasons were caused by driving too fast, at any speed and are mostly below the limits. This 'parade of horrors' as you call them had certainly not been caused by 'speeding'? Don't believe me? Check them out.  

• The camera, that got you onto this money making scam, cannot see one single accident cause?

• Who set the speed limit that got you there and how do you know it is appropriate? Had you asked your instructor that question he couldn't tell you. So they point their camera but don't know why? Here Richard there's loads more on speed limits  you weren't told too. 

So are you a man to confess to your readers that you really didn't know your subject and were simply parroting the words of profiteers? Well you were you know. 

We depend on people like you to expose and condemn corruption and unfair profiteering not applaud and commend it.

What cost's lives is well meaning amateurs parroting profiteers Richard.

Now we have another journalist,

Julie Cush of BBC Newcastle doing it. See it here. And most of the flannel spoken by this vested interest wage earner had not a thing to do with not complying to an arbitrary number on a pole did it Julie? We depend on journalists to spot these things and challenge them. 

Video Vigilantes must put their money where their mouth is.

Study this head cam vigilante video From the Walthamstow Guardian. The cyclist correctly acknowledges that there is a major fault at the Whipps Cross roundabout.

Now yes the motorist was wrong. He or she should've given way to all traffic from the right. But drivers are human and make mistakes. Added to which, there is also this known effect on drivers' eyes and brain known to top gun flyers. See what an RAF pilot can teach us. 

However, like drivers who gesticulate, blow horns and flash their lights, this cyclist shows that by not stopping when he looked at the danger but instead cycled on, blowing his horn, shouting and gesticulating he never was in any real danger.

He has acknowledged the dangers of this one way system to the press and yet, his right to still expose himself to it, is paramount to his own personal safety it seems.

Now I am totally against this type of vigilantism being processed by our hard worked police and so I have written to them to point out the weaknesses in this case, already spoiled by the cyclist making them public via the Press and his own reported comments. See previous posts on this.

In fairness to the driver, I have asked that my observations are passed on to them.

But if the police are to process every piece of video grievance on the road, don't let's be selective and only proceed with cyclist's submissions, let's process all types of video. Then we would have even less police available for other matters.

So these vigilantes must be told to instigate their own summonses and not use our police to wage their nasty little war on drivers.

If anyone knows this driver, please do pass this onto them.

Since posting this, the police are now proceeding against the driver. See here. I write to the Walthamstow Guardian:

20/2/15 Hi, 

I wrote to the Met Police regarding the video cyclist evidence with a view to my comments as an ex police class 1 driver being passed to the driver of the car. They denied knowledge of this incident. Your report now indicates that the driver is to be coerced into an expensive course. I have no doubt that my observations would assist her decision See http://bit.ly/1BzKNoY

Why were they not passed on? 

Wishes

Accidents: Missing the wood for the trees.

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

Birmingham MP needs Birmingham drivers to vote him out.

Drivers see Richard Burden's nonsense here.

The old stunt. Use walkers to justify expense on road cycling. 

I have written to him thus: 

Dear Mr Burden,

In your 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 not cycling.

Since mankind took to the horse, camel, and bullock, society grew and expanded. We moved on via chariots, wagons, coaches, traps, carts, and carriages to the present day successors the motor vehicle in all its forms. Society wasn't  built on man powered transport at all. Now for all purposes and certainly since the fifties, horses and bicycles on roads are obsolete.

Roads, like railways and runways are essential infrastructure yet we don't allow the unnecessary mingling and mixing of humans and animals on railways and runways do we?

The definition of road cycling is, for a human on two skinny wheels and a slender frame, to mix, mingle, obstruct and compete with large essential fast moving machines, operated by complete strangers of varying ability and mental capacity. Do you accept that is an accurate definition? If so then you will realise that, if it were not cycling, such risk wouldn't be tolerated. Just take UK's 2015's fatal figures - already 13 at 24th January- then countless injuries too.

And the fact is that, unlike drivers and walkers, society doesn't need cycling at all; it's merely the choice of a minority who all depend on motor transport 

 One could argue that because of driven transport, life expectancy has gone up and not down, it's hardly evidence of it being 'unhealthy'. Whereas these cycling deaths and injuries tend to show that cycling is very unhealthy indeed.

Are you an MP who thinks that we must force our population to walk and cycle more if they don't want to or simply don't have the time to? If cycling was fit for purpose and a viable transport mode perhaps more of the 99% of sixty million who don't do it would have been doing it already. The fact is that it is uncomfortable, hard work made worse by cold, wind and rain so there are far better safer ways to get exercise than from road cycling. Can you really explain why all these people must support and pay for an activity they do not do or do not need?

I am pretty certain that those who want to walk, more than they already do, can do so without any extra dedicated paths so this really isn't about walking at all but cycling isn't it?

I note that you are a member of the All Party Justice on Our Roads Group. In that case, perhaps you may demand a much fairer burden of evidence to jail drivers for long periods at least to the same standards of evidence required against criminals like robbers, assailants and murderers. 

In the meantime, I will keep drivers informed of your priorities for their work in keeping the UK in business.

Wishes

See anti driver politicians: Here

Cyclists to sue over tramlines.

Can you believe it? See Cyclists to sue council over tramlines.

Croydon to review layout after cyclist's death

Has anyone else noticed yet that all the experts cited in such reports are keen cyclists? They certainly were in this CTC sponsored report.

Ignoring the irony that trams are all part of the anti driver Sustrans greeny mix but why do we have to have road cyclists at all? 

Surely a major contributing factor to a cyclist crashing on tramlines is riding on two flimsy wheels with a high centre of gravity. No one is forced to do that..

A simple and cheap solution for the council is to advise cyclists to avoid tram routes altogether and erect signs to warn them of the danger too. 'Cycle along tram lines at your own risk'

Ratepayers need councils to stand up to cyclist's and fight these claims on the basis of what is a self imposed risk.

Another piece of profiteering road safety kit

Read aboutJaguar's new and expensive gadget.

How many times must I point out that after 300 billion driver miles a year, there's less death on the road from all causes than from accidents in the home? Or, so far as cyclists are concerned, the obvious query, why must we have them if there is such a big problem with them? A fair question given the millions of pounds of taxpayer's money being spent on it and given that already 13  have died in 2015 on our roads too.

So this gadget. How much will it cost us? How soon before it's made compulsory? And dare I ask, if Jaguar are so public spirited, why not fit it free of charge or at least at cost?

Don't give up your day job, but more importantly don't just allow another piece of road safety profiteering be forced on drivers either.