Cycling UK Forum

Ron wrote:

IanMSpencer wrote: what do you do to change attitudes, whether you change the law or not?

Drivers would soon learn that changed laws would land them in the dock for offences against vulnerable road users. I would not be concerned about "attitudes".

The reality is that road users commit offences all the time and rarely get taken to court. It is clear that many drivers, for example, feel that they can use mobile phones without being caught, legislation does not work; and the drivers themselves do not seem to believe that they themselves are a problem when using them. I don't think we want to turn into a nation of camera cyclists to get enforcement.

If you have to rely on the law, then it is already too late - in this context it is likely that the police would be prosecuting for a serious injury accident. Better to change attitudes so that motorists are more inclined to register cyclists as vulnerable road users in the same group of fragility as pedestrians. My attendance at a Speed Awareness course changed my attitude to speeding - no legislation has changed to change my driving style.

Ron wrote:Just bring UK road traffic law into line with our Euro neighbours which will give more vulnerable road users greater protection.

The law tends not to fix broken bodies though. I'd suggest that most motorists that do not pass with enough space do not see that they are doing anything wrong - they are using the same skill that they (normally) miss parked car wing mirrors with, and the vast majority of road infractions don't attract a penalty.

So what do you do to change attitudes, whether you change the law or not? I suspect a change in law without good educational support would just increase the unthinking motorists' sense of injustice that cyclists are given privileges on the road that they "haven't paid for".

hexhome wrote:Sorry but I am concerned by this. I believe that 'autopilot' driving is evidence of distraction. It can only occur when not driving to the 'system' ie. consciously driving to a standard. We are all affected by it to a greater or lesser degree, but it needs watching. I don't think that it should be dismissed. It should be possible to recall at least some detail of every mile of a journey unless we are concentrating on something else!

There has been a lot of work done recently concerning sleep apnoea in lorry drivers. Many of us are overweight and more likely to suffer from this deadly disorder. One of the symptoms drivers are told to look out for is the inability to recall sections of a journey.

I tend to agree. In driving, it is noticeable that a supposedly legal thing like changing the radio can draw you into thinking about the wrong thing - my RDS didn't hold a station and I was really conscious of getting drawn into fiddling with the radio than driving. I don't believe in hands-free for that reason - in an in-car conversation, your passenger will often be aware that you are thinking about driving and will co-operate with lapses in conversation during eventful moments, it is far harder to do this on the phone, espcially when you are also contending with poor sound quality, drop-outs and so on. I think you have X amount of processing available, and some people can prioritise properly and if the going gets tough will drop the (phone) conversation, others will lapse on their driving.

I think though that there is a difference between a distraction, where you can normally identify what was drawing your conscious thought away from other tasks, and fatigue, where you really can't think of what it was that was distracting you. In the former, you can normally play back and work out what was going on.

A couple of thoughts: the Garmin can be powered by anything that can charge a USB socket. There are some phone charging devices, some easy to fit ones for around £30 which are chain driven and available on eBay plus normal dynamo type ones. Not sure how good they are and whether a derailleur is a problem, but there are a variety of these around. (It also means you can run a phone, camera or other devices that would otherwise have battery issues).

Having done 24 hour things myself, one thing to be wary of is mental tiredness, so be very cautious about anything that requires you to be on the road interacting with traffic. Staying awake 24 hours is not normally a big deal, but you will hit a point where you really are tired before your body gives up and realises that sleep is not going to happen. Try and avoid excessive caffeine unless you like feeling hung over and headachy.

JohnW wrote:

IanMSpencer wrote:.................To put this in perspective, the vast majority of freewheels (blocks) that are screw-on are Shimano compatible and are removed with the splined freewheel removal tool pictured above. A bike shop will remove for a nominal charge if presented with a wheel, the LBS round here charged £2 for the removal.

They probably are now, but the original poster said that it was a two-pronged block, which isn't splined, obviously.

It's a long time since I bought a freewheel block that wasn't a Shimano, but in the days of two pronged removers, they weren't all the same, and I have two different Shimano splined block removers - and an early Dura-Ace remover (30years old-ish) which was different from anything else.

Yes, but when I see posts about jamming things in, there is a danger that it might be misconstrued as being the normal way to do things. Your LBS will normally have a collection of tools for odd blocks sitting around pining for the day when they might once again be needed - the £2 fix was for a French block of a mate of mine, a 20+ year old two pronged thing, which the bike shop simply went "Yes, I can".

gaz wrote:

IanMSpencer wrote:There are places where someone has painted a cycle lane of considerable width overlaid on the main carriageway. At Ambleside there is a stretch of about 200 metres which is barely wide enough for two way traffic, yet they have painted a wide cycle lane, highlighted with green paint. That leaves the car with an apparent lane of about two feet. Therefore if there is a cycle in the cycle lane, the driver is under no illusion that he has right of way, it makes it clear that the cyclist has priority. However, if the rules of the road were applied, there should be no difference in driver behaviour as a driver could not pass safely anyhow.

I think you mean something like the one here. It's an advisory cycle lane, absolutely no obligation on a motorist not to drive in it. Impossible not to drive in it unless you cross the solid white lane.

Of course the solid white line should mean that motor vehicles will not attempt to overtake cycles* after the end of the cycle lame**. The same solid white line extends throughout the whole of the cycle lame and should mean that they will not attempt to overtake cycles there either.

So why did someone feel it was necessary to paint in a cycle lane? The solid white line continues to the crest of the hill, why not continue the cycle lane to the same point rather than further encouraging a very dodgy overtake?

*cycles travelling at 10mph or above.
** cycle lame: a sub-class of cycle farcility.

That's my point really. Advisory cycle lanes are really the only thing that can fit on much of the UK infrastructure so they don't really help - and when they end what message do they send? How does a motorist interpret the lane in your picture - "At this point the cyclist will vanish into thin air"? How is a cyclist supposed to react when pedalling over that end of lane marker with a car queued behind them faced with oncoming traffic? Is that road helped by the arbitrary division or is safety actually made worse? In some circumstances, an advisory cycle lane (which is aimed at motorists, not cyclists) might encourage a motorist to think - if only "Hmm, this would not look good on a claim form", but when it goes away or there is not one present in the first place, does their existence elsewhere send the wrong message on the majority of other roads - that cyclists should Know Their Place and Not Be Elsewhere.

So, in keeping with current thinking on minimising signage, how do you change the attitude of a driver who is inclined to feel that a bike in front is a bike that shouldn't be there?* There needs to be a change in mindset where motorists are encouraged to think bike, the same way people's attitudes to seat belts have been changed.

Sharrows

Very much the point - using markings that have no law enforcement value (so are not threatening to motorists) but encourage both cyclists and motorists to understand that the area is shared and it is encouraged for the cyclist to be assertive.


*Why? a) Modern roads are too difficult to cope with so cyclists should not make my driving life so difficult. b) Cyclists slow me down and make me sad and I've paid good money for my Audi. c) I worry about their vulnerability and don't want to accidentally kill them so feel inclined to give them helpful instructions and hoot them for their own safety so they ride in the gutter in future so I can safely squeeze past them. d) They bring out homicidal urges in me, but as they are cyclists this is allowed.

If just 1 in 100 drivers has a bad attitude to cyclists, and that may be an underestimate, it means that you are most likely going to meet one most days.

I think it is helpful that IAM has transferred its road-using enthusiasm into the bike world as it gives cyclists an ally "on the other side". Generally, the advanced road user is encouraged to plan for other people's mistakes. I think the other bit of perspective that cyclists forget is that drivers spend all day squeezing past other cars, parked cars, narrow gaps so it requires a completely different mindset to pass a cyclist - remembering that many drivers will take significant risks with other cars, which do not always end well either.

One of the major problems I see is that the advice given to cyclists, such as in current jargon "taking primary", or riding a metre out into the lane rather than in the gutter - is not being also passed on to the motorists, so there is a growing disconnect between the behaviour of the good cyclist from the cyclist perspective and the behaviour as seen by a motorist. As a simple example, take the "taking primary". A cyclist is being told by IAM and other training organisations that they should command the lane at pinch points. This is just as likely to be interpreted as being deliberately obstructive - a motorist does not react well to a car in front that they perceive as deliberately delaying them (As a driver I have been threatened by a motorcyclist for the sin of following the lane markings on a local road at the speed limit - I fail to understand his train of thought!). Where is the education campaign to bring motorists up to date with the behaviour that our urban cyclists are being encouraged to adopt?

As for cycling in groups - for the driver, is it easier to cope with a single string of 12 cyclists or 6 when riding in a large group on a reasonable road? Many roads are not wide enough to pass on with oncoming traffic when riding single file, so in principle two abreast, even in urban roads, is a sensible way of owning the lane, but it will not be perceived as that. Similarly filtering will raise hackles as it will be perceived as an obstruction overtaking them to be coped with again, even if the end result is speeding to the next queue.

JohnW wrote:If you have the block-remover specifically for the block, you should be able to remove the block from the hub without having to disassemble the block.

The nail-punch method was fairly common in the old days when all block removers were two pronged and quite often you'd strip the prongs off in trying to remove the block by the approved method.

This was particularly so in the days of cheap steel hubs, when the chrome was less than perfect, threads hadn't been greased properly, and the block was rust-welded to the hub.

You know - the good old days.

To put this in perspective, the vast majority of freewheels (blocks) that are screw-on are Shimano compatible and are removed with the splined freewheel removal tool pictured above. A bike shop will remove for a nominal charge if presented with a wheel, the LBS round here charged £2 for the removal.

thirdcrank wrote:I'd agree that whatever the intention or the legal position, cycle lanes have the effect of restricting cyclists to part of the carriageway.

IanMSpencer wrote: ... some nice examples of cycle priority lanes (e.g. Ambleside where there is a two metre wide lane on a very narrow road)

I'm unclear what you mean by a "cycle priority lane."

There are places where someone has painted a cycle lane of considerable width overlaid on the main carriageway. At Ambleside there is a stretch of about 200 metres which is barely wide enough for two way traffic, yet they have painted a wide cycle lane, highlighted with green paint. That leaves the car with an apparent lane of about two feet. Therefore if there is a cycle in the cycle lane, the driver is under no illusion that he has right of way, it makes it clear that the cyclist has priority. However, if the rules of the road were applied, there should be no difference in driver behaviour as a driver could not pass safely anyhow.

Elsewhere, I have seen very wide cycle lanes marked where it is clear that there is insufficient width for the car on the same side of the road. The effect is again that the driver is made conscious that the cyclist has to be accounted for. The problem comes when the driver who begrudgingly is made to concede the road then comes across a cyclist on an unmarked road may consider that without the markings he is somehow allowed to treat the cyclist differently. Hence me suggestion that the fundamental mindset that needs to be got across is that a lane is shared with cyclists, and that cyclists are not simply at best tolerated and at worst treated as inanimate objects of no worth.

stewartpratt wrote:Cycle lanes are lanes that aren't for cars, though.

How about "This is an everyone lane"?

There is a problem about the ambiguous term cycle lane (remember that cycle lanes do not necessarily exclude cars, it depends on marking) but there is a need to educate the minority of drivers that cyclists are not excluded from any lane on a road aside from by designation... and common sense! Simple messages

Nothing like a good chain wear debate.

I think the critical aspect of chain elongation is that as the chain gets slacker, it will tend to put load more and more onto one tooth of sprockets and chainring. When you pedal hard, imagine how the load is placed though the drive chain, and your entire effort bearing onto essentially a single tooth on a worn chain.

Wear of the teeth will go up significantly as the load is less distributed - think of it as the lorry vs car wearing on the road - you can have a thousand cars run over a road and do the same amount of wear as one heavily loaded lorry.

Also, considering the rear sprockets, the load spread across 11 teeth simply is going to wear more than the same load spread across say 32 teeth.

The other effect is how well people use their gears. Roadies will tend to maintain a cadence and therefore will tend to change gears. I see lots of problems on hybrids and mountain bikes where less experienced cyclists use fewer gears. Mountain bikes used on roads tend to be undergeared and cyclists are prone to spending a lot of time in the high gears, so I often find that it is these sprockets that are prone to skipping, whereas roadies tend to be over-geared if anything (due to bike manufacturers selling bikes for enthusiasts to novices).

If you let a chain get over-worn, then you can guarantee that a new chain will skip. However, a bike ridden without an understanding of good gear usage may still have problems.

I've been pondering how to square the circle locally that the roads around where I live, like most of the UK, are not suitable to be modified for cycle lanes or segregation.

I've been exploring what other councils do, and have seen some nice examples of cycle priority lanes (e.g. Ambleside where there is a two metre wide lane on a very narrow road) and then looking at how it could be applied to my roads locally. However, the main problem I see is that requires paint and maintenance and does not resolve the problem that the more you make some areas bike priority it sends the message that other areas are not for bikes.

There is also an educational issue where the IAM and other organisations are telling cyclists to take the lane, but this is perceived by some motorists as obstruction as they are not being engaged with and not being given this information.

So that's the waffly introduction. It occurred to me that we are missing a trick: every road already has a cycle lane - it is the road itself. So I wondered what people thought of a campaign along these lines:

- an advertising campaign showing a variety of ordinary roads with no road markings other than the striped line in the middle with the title "This is a cycle lane."

- On select local roads, having some roadside advertising/signage "This is a cycle lane" along with "Think Bike!" and "Give cyclists space"

- On conflict roads, getting councils to paint a big cycle sign on the road with the two-fold aim of pointing out to cyclists that they have the lane to play with, not just the gutter and to point out to motorists that the cyclist has a right to the lane.

I know that some councils already mark lanes like this, but I think it needs the support of an information campaign to encourage drivers to be aware of what cyclists are being taught.

Thoughts?