Cycling UK Forum

Wise.

Do their gravel bikes have two rings at the front?

There seem to me to be a fair few gaps in knowledge/understanding betrayed in the various papers cited in this thread, sets of numbers that correlate, but aren’t shown to be causally related, conclusions that include the dreaded word “may”, which can always be replaced with the two words “may not”, that sort of thing.

In short, it looks to me as if the best studies available so far don’t give truly definitive guidance as to whether, in the round, I should or shouldn’t wear a bike helmet.

What to do then?

Carry on as before, which in my case means:

- don’t wear a helmet when using my dead slow shopping bike to go to the shop or accompany daughter to school, because both are on dedicated cycle paths, and travel is at walking/running pace, so a crash is ‘low probability’, and would be ‘low energy’, unlikely to involve the head, and the sort of thing that our skulls have evolved to deal with if it did; but,

- do wear a helmet on all other rides, which are at a quicker pace and about 50/50 on/off road, because it’s pretty clear that if I fall off, hit something, or something hits me, my chances of catastrophic brain injury in these is far lower if wearing a helmet than if not, and any crash could be ‘high energy’, and involve getting flung about in a way that makes banging the head foreseeable.

The stuff around the possibility that wearing a helmet may increase my chances of having a crash of some sort in the first place, and that if I do that it might increase my chances of injury to the rest of my body, seems to me to be in the realms of the “not clearly proven”. Some of those things might be correlations, but not causally linked, and there are are so many possible confounding factors that it is impossible to draw clear conclusions, so I await further studies.

“ Perhaps it's not gullibility that some advertisers prey on, but rather any possible sense of inadequacy that certain people carry.”

Marketing types have a gimlet-eye for any psychological weakness that will give them access to the contents of our wallets, they’re up there alongside propagandists as the people on the planet with the deepest understanding of our falibilities and, just to get really cheerful about it, both the marketers and propagandists (sometimes one and the same, of course) have now loaded all their evil genius into a vast army of bots to do their jobs for them.

It’s odd that there is now worry about “influencers”, human beings covertly plugging things, when the real influencers are invisible lines of code.

Apologies; I’m in a slightly dystopian mood at the moment.

If your % time off tarmac is going to be that low, then 32mm will probably be fine.

My forecast, though, is that you will find the off-tarmac bits such fun that the % will creep up over time, until you only use roads to get to the next good bit!

If value for money is important to you, have a look at the Boardman ADV 8.9, which comes in bright orangey red.

To me, it looks like very good value.

Not carbon, of course, but I really do wonder how much difference that would make in practice, based on the fact that I use a now 7 years old Boardman CX Team, aluminium with carbon forks, and my neighbour a proper carbon gravel bike”, and having tried one another’s bikes we decided that the most significant difference was than mine cost £800 in a sale, and his cost c£2000.

The thing to get really right, IMO, is tyres, and having gone down to 32mm for 50/50 surfaced/unsurfaced riding and found that too narrow, I have gone back up to 37mm or 40mm. Degree of knobliness, puncture-proofness etc all come into it too, and no one tyre is ideal for everything …… I hate those “flat in the middle, knobs at the sides” tyres, so have ended-up using quite heavy touring tyres, which admittedly get beaten by deep sand, very slimey mud, and wet grass on steep slopes, but better that than soft compound and oodles of punctures, or riding on knobbles over firm surfaces, which is awful.

“ I think a better solution is to dead-end the majority of these routes, preferably with bus gates or something that can be opened by emergency services, used by the bin lorry and bus drivers, and, of course, allow cyclists through.”

This is the sort of thing I’m driving(!) at when suggesting that thinking in detail using local knowledge might be the best way to increase cycling in rural areas.

In some areas, the minor road network forms a grid, so there are several possible routes from each A to each B. In areas with road networks like that, designating some of the roads as primarily for motor traffic between villages, and some as ‘no through roads’ except for cyclists, walkers, and horse-riders, gated with release for essential services and for residents and farmers along the road.

Not a solution for all localities, but then neither I suspect would any other single option be.

Off at a slight angle: the area that I’ve cycled through that has the most dangerous/unpleasant minor rural roads isn’t a “properly rural” area, although a lot of it is rural, and that is Surrey. The issue is population density, and hence traffic density, long traffic jams at some times of day on what are in all essentials country lanes, and the congestion seems to get everyone ‘hot under the collar’. So in Parts of Surrey, my observation is that traffic density, as much or more than speed, is the challenge.

Having stirred-up the “What evidence?” strand, and accepting the point that accidents aren’t the whole story, I will pick away at it a bit more, by re-phrasing it:

What evidence is there to suggest that a blanket speed limit on unclassified rural roads would increase cycling?

My gut tells me that it probably would, in some places, at some times/seasons, but my gut isn’t evidence.

The other point to bear in mind is that pretty much everything in this world comes down to weighing the positives of a course of action, in this case the cited positive being increased cycling, against the negatives. So what might they be, because you can be certain that there will be some?

TBH, the thing my gut is telling me loudest is that if the objective is to increase use of bikes as a means of transport in rural areas, the way to do it will probably be to get very local, understand the journeys that people could feasibly swap from car to bike, and look in detail at how best to facilitate that case-by-case …… a law requiring every council to do that, and to achieve a 5% year-in-year modal shift for trips of less than say 10 miles, might be a better way to skin the cat than would wrapping it in a blanket.

I get it.

You’re right, I had cities in mind, but you’ve made me think about other places too, including one I went into to buy tobacco (this was a long time ago), where the cafe turned out to be a counter and three stools at the very back of a tractor showroom. On the stools were three guys having snifters of what was probably calvados.

Re-reading it, it does look as if the remit is narrower than I thought, but it’s hard to see how it can avoid the “two masters” business, and that then leads straight on to the huge scope of the job, and whether any human being can ever be expected to do it. Might lead to a “further consideration should be given to” type recommendation.

So, all those cafes (note etymology) all over Europe, where people sit drinking coffee, watching the world go by, at all hours of the day and night, how do they fit into the “only after a meal” scheme of things?

And, what about a bowl of cafe au lait and a croissant for breakfast, rather than after it?

The tension between The Home Secretary and The Mayor over who “owns” The Met goes right back to the introduction of the London Mayoralty. Things have got scratchy at times even when both HS and M have been from the same party, and when they are from opposing parties things regularly get super-scratchy.

There is a genuine dilemma, in that The Met has several national roles, rather than simply being the police force for London, so one option Tom Windsor will doubtless look at (again?) is a separation to create a local police force for London, and a National Specialist Unit, covering things like anti-terrorism, royal protection etc.

As well as spreading the commissioner too thinly, the present arrangement gives her/him two masters/mistresses, which cannot be much fun. If either of them publicly express “no confidence” it becomes more or less impossible for the commissioner to do his/her job ……. and it’s one heck of a ruddy difficult job as it is.

Long view is that The Met “goes sour” about once every twenty or thirty years, significant parts becoming incompetent, corrupt, racist, out of touch with public sentiment, that sort of thing, then has to be given a damned good shaking to sort it out and set it on a good course for a while.

Sir Robert Mark was Commissioner in the early 70s, brought in to sort out a corrupt CID, and he famously said something like “a good police force is one that catches more criminals than it employs”.

Do I trust The Met right now? No, on several front I don’t. I think it’s going through one of its bad patches and that things will get worse before they get better, because the very necessary shake-up will damage morale among the good as well as the bad, and cause distraction for a period.

I don’t know about “other people”, but I will freely confess to sometimes finding it difficult to muster self-discipline when presented with a tempting array of “hobby goodies”.

Although I am a member of a club, I barely ever go on group rides, so I can’t be the recipient of subtle marketing through peer-advocacy, and I don’t buy cycling magazines, so I probably get entrapped mostly on-line, and it’s mostly getting trapped into replacing ‘stuff’ (bags, bells, lights, tyres, jackets etc) with ‘better stuff’, when if I didn’t know there was better stuff to have, I’d cobble along with the stuff I’ve already got.

The biggest danger is The Search For The Ultimate Bike, which must be the marketing person’s favourite psychological weakness. In my case “ultimate” isn’t about lightness or speed, because I’m into “path riding” ranging from ex-railway trails down to “green dashed lines on a map”, but it’s still all too easy to keep looking out for new models and/or new components that might inch things towards some mythical Ultimate Bike.

“ This is factually incorrect in that the case and various items of supporting evidence have been given over the years this forum has been going.”

Nope. It’s factually spot-on.

I was very clearly talking about this thread and none other.

As it happens, I only joined this forum in the past week, so I haven’t read all the other threads.

What I was trying to do was smoke out some actual evidence, or at least logic-based argument, in favour of the OP’s proposal, because this thread had, up to that point, contained none.

I wasn’t even alive in the mid 50s, but there were a lot of similarities in the mid 70s when I got into cycling first time round, and I got the griff on the recent history from family members.

This photo I really love: my Dad on a club run to The seaside in 1957. Note the fancy gear he was using - ordinary casual clothes, plimsolls, and an old gas-mask bag! The bike was doubtless deeply secondhand.