Cycling UK Forum

Someone asked whether bike prices have risen in real terms, accounting for inflation, so I thought I’d have a look at the long run.

The really popular bike with club riders in the 1950s, when club cycling was mega popular, was the Raleigh Lenton (also sold under other Raleigh group brand names), which came in a few different gearing variants, and in the mid-1950s cost c£17 to £19, which inflates to somewhere around £500 to £600 today, and Hire Purchase was a common way to buy them.

It’s hard to know exactly what to compare with because we now have a zillion flavours of bikes, but I guess “mainstream” these days is whatever most members of a club B-level ride are on, so maybe things that cost £1000 (Boardman) upwards.

If my comparison is valid, “enthusiast” bikes have increased in cost in real terms, and my gut feel is that has happened particularly in the past c20 years as the amount of disposable income that people have has markedly polarised.

In the 1950s, club cycling was a a real “every person” hobby, anyone could afford to get into it, but virtually nobody could afford really flash foreign (French or Italian) bikes. People also used the same bike for club runs as for daily commutes.

Now, a significant portion of the population would really struggle to scrape together £1000** for a bike and probably £250+ for shoes, helmet, lights, clothing etc, while another significant portion of the population can happily fling £3000+ of bike and gear at one club ride a week, and people are lapping-up expensive e-bikes too.

Post-Thatcher, full-on consumerist cycling. Some people can’t afford it at all, and some can afford it to excess.

**You can, of course, get a decent hybrid bike, plus basic “gear” for maybe £600, and if you scour gumtree you can get a good secondhand hybrid bike for £150, but those things aren’t the province of enthusiasts, and it’s the cost of club/enthusiast cycling over time that I’m trying to analyse.

Maybe.

Whatever form it takes, something evidence, or even simply logic, based would need to be put forward to make the OP’s case to apply a blanket speed limit, and so far in this discussion nothing of that kind has been highlighted.

I’m not saying that no evidence or logic based argument could ever be made, TBH I don’t know whether one could or could not, simply that none has been tabled here yet.

The thing that isn’t very clear to me is the extent to which the current version is less severe because it is less severe by nature, as compared to the outcomes being less severe because of widespread vaccination.

Would be interesting to see a comparison of outcomes for non-vaccinated adults affected by each variant.

There’s also the rather macabre point that the earlier variants already killed rather a lot of very vulnerable people, leaving fewer very vulnerable people for this variant to afflict, so any comparison would need to factor that out (or, do I mean in).

It’s the point I made back up-thread: failure to control the in-tester variables.

You probably make exactly the same coffee each time, or as near as makes no difference, but it tastes different because you are different each time.

Variations in what you’ve eaten, how well you slept, whether you had a bad day at work yesterday, how much water you drank an hour ago, what the weather is making you feel like, all that sort of stuff.

Is there any coincidence between these rare moments of wonderful coffee and, say, it being the morning after you had very good sex, maybe?

If so, the solution to your coffee making troubles is in your own hands. If you see what I mean.

You don’t need to curse the natural system with a consciousness that it doesn’t have in order to know that we are walking very close the edge, it’s basic systems theory: disturb the dynamic equilibrium too much, and the system is likely to flip (or flop, I suppose) to a different state of dynamic equilibrium, in this case one that doesn’t involve us being part of it.

Loose change rattling in your back pocket?

I would strongly suggest that anyone advocating a very isolationist/protectionist policy in respect of U.K. trade should take a big step back and think carefully about what resources we do and don’t have in the U.K.

Do we have the available land from which to feed ourselves (we ate all the sea fish already, so I won’t mention them)?

Sources of fuel to keep ourselves warm, lighted, and mobile? Sources of mineral raw materials? Climate to grow all vegetable raw materials (even when Lancashire was full of cotton mills, cotton growing there was rare)? Etc.

Then there is the question of skills and knowledge.

And, manufacturing plant and machinery, or the capability to design, build and set it to work?

What this quickly brings home is that we are mega-reliant on sources all over the world, and haven’t been self-sufficient from within these shores for centuries …… even our boom period during the industrial revolution was built on home grown technical innovation, locally sourced coal and iron, but massive quantities of imported cotton, timber, frozen meat, wheat, etc etc.

So, go carefully. If we make it painful to trade with us, we might be cutting off our nose to spite our face.

If I was to do any one thing to improve our lot, it would be to improve our education, especially for >18yo, to equip us to do better in future - much, much more and better technical and scientific education, management education etc.

Unions, do they have a place? Of course they do, and they always will unless or until the interests of all employers and all employees are perfectly aligned, which won’t be any time soon. While there are misalignments between interests, employees need to act collectively to represent their interests.

Does the bike have mudguards? Or, a chain guard? Or, a prop stand?

If it has any of those, check all clearances between those and moving parts first.

Scraping and clanking is a classic sign of a chain rubbing on a chain guard, if there is one, for instance.

Where I find that I almost accidentally spend more money than seems reasonable isn’t on whole bikes (although the fact that I have more than one suggests a lack of focus there), it’s on components and accessories, especially because the old widespread interchangeability of parts seems to have crumbled at some point over the past twenty five years.

I was a pretty keen cyclist for c15 years up to c1990, then simply kept one bike for commuting and odd family/leisure rides for c25 years, then ‘came back to the hobby’, and was really baffled by some of the changes. I’d never heard of “a group-set” for instance …… the idea that one should buy a whole heap of stuff as a matched set, which then wasn’t compatible with the bits made by other companies, was a new one on me.

That has allowed price-hiking, and caused price rises even without hiking - no LBS can now stock all the parts their customers need, let alone stock an OEM and cheaper-generic of each, and the wild proliferation of things like tyres adds further to costs.

We can now get a super-optimised dangle-furgler for every conceivable niche function, which is sort-of wonderful, but we do pay for that super-optimisation, and it’s doubtful whether most of us actually exploit the capabilities of the dangle-furglers.

Mind you, fishing is ten times worse! What used to occupy 4ft of racking in Woolworths in 1975 has ballooned into a wild cornucopia of totally unnecessary stuff that fills a warehouse the size of twenty squash courts.

All this consumerism is killing us.

Unclassified roads could be a “last frontier” for autonomous vehicles though, because they are so incredibly difficult to “read”.

Whatever sensing technology, and whatever interpretation algorithms are used will find such roads hard going, for the same reasons that we humans do - often no very clearly defined edge to the carriageway (think about the frontages of some farmyards), high banks and hedges, sometimes deep ambiguity at turnouts about which is the public road, and which is actually the private road leading into a farm or estate, ‘instant’ appearance of agricultural vehicles from gateways etc etc.

What I suspect we humans do, and locals especially, is factor-in a lot of stuff about the probability of other vehicles being on the road, based on time of day, season, weather, what traffic has been like so far on the trip, etc, much of it subconsciously. Hence locals ‘driving like maniacs’, because they’ve done the trip a thousand times before, and barely seen another car. And, hence horrible accidents when, for the first time in twenty years, expectations are confounded.

Autonomous vehicles will probably drive really slowly on these roads, treating every blind bend like a potential death trap. Unless we programme them to take the calculated risks we do.

Another thought that has occurred to me (this is the danger of loafing around trying to shake-off covid):

Might appointment of the head of state by accident of birth be a violation of the human rights of the baby concerned, child abuse in effect?

It does seem a form of cruelty to randomly select the odd newborn and dump on it the huge future-responsibility of being HoS, thereby blighting its entire childhood with a looming shadow, depriving it of life-choices, and possibly choking-off some huge talent unrelated to state-heading that it’s genes might have bestowed upon it, condemning it to a life of inexpressible frustration.

I’ll try to stop thinking for a while now.

Another thing to ponder is the “design speed” of roads, the speed at which they are designed to be usable safely by the generality of road users.

Most (not all) of the M and A road network has been either built from new, or modified to have a clear “design speed”, and is speed-limited accordingly. There are still bits where the infrastructure and the posted speed limit seem a bit at odds, but not many/much these days.

Once you get onto B roads, and even more so onto whatever the really nice ones are called (unclassified?), that relationship between design speed and speed limit gradually crumbles, and to my mind that is where the trouble rests.

The logical (if time consuming and expensive) thing to do would be to assess the actual design/safe speed of each length of road (accepting that in many cases the original designers lived hundreds of years ago and had horses and carts in mind), and speed limit accordingly.

I’m not a road designer or assessor, but I’d guess that one prime factor is sight-line, and on that alone I can think of stretches of B and unclassified road near where I live that probably ought to be limited to speeds of anything between about 5mph and 60mph. There is the odd long straight where you can see clearly for a mile or two, so sighting time is measured in minutes, and one seriously dodgy ‘snake hill’ with high hedges on banks either side, where even a large truck is invisible thirty yards ahead, and a car driver can come upon a slower moving cyclist with effectively zero sighting time (I cycle three mile diversion to avoid said hill, and prefer not to drive on it either). A blanket 30mph wouldn’t really cut the mustard for either circumstance.

With modern tech, measuring sighting distance and effective road width from a moving vehicle, and automatically calculating safe speed limit, then feeding the results on to satnavs (and later using it for auto-limiting) wouldn’t be massively difficult. It might even be possible to train software to read Google street view as the basic data.

Yep.

Despite my half-hearted acceptance that appointment of the HoS by accident of birth has the odd advantage, I agree with all that.

It does feel as if it’s high time to amend the constitution to make the government (PM and Ministers of State) more effectively accountable to parliament …… I rate the Standing Committee system, with MPs of all parties on each, as being one of the better things about our system and would love to see the Government held properly accountable through it, rather than able to wave two fingers.

Likewise, the duty of the HoS to protect the constitution, notably to protect the sovereignty of parliament, needs to be beefed-up …… the slight ambiguity over the scope/extent of parliamentary sovereignty really rests is a loophole through which proto-autocrats can sneak.

Maybe the way to resolve the conflict between the natural want to use bikes as vehicles for one-upmanship and our desperate need to get a great deal more sustainable would be to promote “one-upmanship through up-cycling”, by which I mean promoting competition between people about how good they can make their bikes by using and reconfiguring secondhand things.

We need to learn to boast about how incredibly cheaply we’ve made our bikes, rather than how incredibly expensively.

Gumtree, eBay, local dumps etc are a massive resource of cheap bikes that can be upcycled, the only slight pity is that nearly all the cheapies these days have aluminium frames - it is increasingly hard to find cheap, and near-indestructible steel-framed bikes in the way that used to be possible in the 70s when upcyling was the only way that I as a teenager could afford any bikes at all.

You can imagine the brand somehow sub-dividing into a premium, very trad, leather, canvas and hand-stitching range, hopefully still made in Nelson, and a slightly more mainstream, higher-volume, more modern materials range, with less handicraft, and maybe made elsewhere.

There is already diversification into the bike-packing gear of more US-influenced shape, using different materials.

Do they have significant export trade? If not, that must be an opening too, because there is nothing large parts of the world like more than a very trad, English, hand-made product.

(The stitcher’s name is still inside each bag now)