Cycling UK Forum

The constant glow of screens doesn't have to be badly set up... Mine automatically adjusts with ambient lighting, and I've never once felt that it's been a distraction.

Of course the same can't be said of other vehicle headlights, either following or oncoming - headlights are far too bright nowadays.

"Bings and bongs are absolutely not always a warning that the driver is doing something "wrong" - it's the car's complex set of systems deciding something is wrong, all too frequently they come to the wrong conclusion. I've been in cars which have mistaken the speed limit stickers on the back of trucks and other vehicles for the road limit, which have read the speed limit on a side road, and so on."
I've not had a vehicle read the speed limit on a truck, though occasionally it does get the limit wrong, but that's all of a lever flick away from being corrected. The bongs for going overspeed are pretty minor anyway.
The one that is most "distracting" is the forward collision warning, which is absolutely correct, but not taking into account the imminent steering adjustment I'm about to make. That could do with "ramping" on, rather than just engaging an alarm, but it's not distracting - It's quite rightly warning me that without action there will be a collision.

djnotts wrote: ↑7 Feb 2025, 8:22am Does the man actually THINK this?

Do you need the word this?

He's trying to make far right ideology sound "centrist" so that it becomes acceptable to talk about, which would also make genuinely centrist or even mildly left wing policies look extreme.

"sweetest sounding power plant and the fewest distractions."

So only distractions you like...

"beset with dangerously distracting bings, bongs"
Those are warning you that you're doing something wrong... Reminded me about my seatbelt last week - I'd checked, but I'd actually felt the strap of my shoulder bag

The reason that cars get downgraded is that testing regimes are updated every couple of years - and yes, active safety features are important.

Oh, I agree with you in principle - but the law is, in this instance more than most, an ass.

cycle tramp wrote: ↑6 Feb 2025, 2:37pm The context has to be a defence, if only to protect those forums which include, battle re-actment groups, historical, sci-fi or fantasy tap top wargamming or scale model forums, and any forum about cinema...
These forums will mention weapons and/or acts of violence, as part of the wider conversation of those forums.

Why do you think that means context would be a defence?

If it's not there in the legislation then it's not intended to to be acceptable. Case law is very expensive, almost certainly not worth the time, effort, or risk involved.

pjclinch wrote: ↑23 Jan 2025, 7:48am

MelW wrote: ↑22 Jan 2025, 9:17pm There are always those screaming and whining about infringement of civil liberties etc being forced to wear a helmet against their choice etc, but if they do get hit by a car and hit their head, they are the ones who are going to end up dead without wearing a helmet if it could have saved their life.

I've been looking at "the helmet debate" in considerable detail for over 20 years, and while I have come across some folk worried about civil liberties they're quite rare. Almost as rare as the genuinely "anti helmet" types who want to actively discourage or ban their use.

Most of the people having problems with helmet promotion/requirement come from the angle of it not actually having a proven track record of making people any safer (notwithstanding the numerous "it saved my life!" anecdotes), it arguably having put a lot of people off cycling to the detriment of public health and distracting folk from measures that actually make a tangible, useful difference to cycling safety.

Pete.

If helmets were appropriately marketed, with an emphasis on their design limitations... then we might be able to have a straight debate...
But the helmet proponents have a tendency to overstate the capability of the devices, and to assert that it's always better to have something than nothing. Given the massive degree of overstatement of the capability of the devices, the second sort of follows, but it's just not the case.

The other common argument is "something must be done, this is something, so we must do this" - and it rather seems like this is what has driven laws in various places.

Easy to use - once you've been shown.

Like most things really... discoverability has taken a serious hit in UI design over the years, but it hasn't always been good.

Then there are the anti-wordle variants, which make you wonder how you can ever fail a wordle.

mattheus wrote: ↑3 Feb 2025, 4:16pm

[XAP]Bob wrote: ↑3 Feb 2025, 3:53pm

Bmblbzzz wrote: ↑3 Feb 2025, 1:10pm The other thing that stands out on that graph is the increase in casualties as we "returned to normal" after covid.

What surprised me was how small those "corrections" were.

If you drop 50% due to "one off" event.
To get back to where you where you need to grow by 100% the next year.

[The casualties were only down 28%! But i think you know that ... ]

Yes, it is a little surprising. I think a lot of people don't realise how slowly UK traffic levels have recovered. Presumably this is mainly down to increased WFH, but i'm just speculating.
it's like our brains don't remember 2019 accurately, we just note that this year is more than last year, etc etc .. And we only really notice exceptionally busy days/weeks - we notice the quiet days less.

A quick google gives:

Main points. Road traffic volume in Wales in 2023 increased by 2.1% compared to 2022, to 29.8 billion vehicle kilometers (bvk) but remained around 2.9% below pre-pandemic levels (30.7bvk in 2019).
29 Aug 2024

n.b. that's only for 2023.

I was using easy numbers for illustration - not suggesting they were on the chart.

My memory of 2020 is not positive, though it probably should be, I didn't die.

Traffic levels did drop, for obvious reasons, and whilst 20/12 also had similar restrictions to travel.... But the major drop really didn't get "corrected" at all.
So that's a 22% drop for covid, then another 8% the year after, followed by just 6% and 5% (that's only back to 80% of 2018/9).
Maybe that's just picking up the longer term trend... the growth in intermediate years is actually just an artefact of the collapse in covid.

Then we get another 28% drop takes us to 58% of the 2018/9 level.
That's massive.... properly massive.

Bmblbzzz wrote: ↑3 Feb 2025, 1:10pm The other thing that stands out on that graph is the increase in casualties as we "returned to normal" after covid.

What surprised me was how small those "corrections" were.

If you drop 50% due to "one off" event.
To get back to where you where you need to grow by 100% the next year.

Paulatic wrote: ↑31 Jan 2025, 2:31pm

axel_knutt wrote: ↑31 Jan 2025, 1:35pm The disadvantage of a slot is that the gate will drop sooner because there's nothing to support the latch end when people climb it.

A now friend moved into the area about 25 years ago. Out on his mountain bike I caught him climbing a gate at the latch end. I must have given him such a bollicking he has never forgot it.
I bet he’s climbed every gate at the hinge end since that education. What was particularly irksome that day it was one of the easiest gates on his route to open. A ‘Northumbrian Latch’ but he’d moved up from the south and never seen one before.

That rather implies that they aren't easy to use... at least not until you're shown them.
And having just looked them up online - I agree, they look nice and simple, but also look like they'd put people off even trying.

Are those year on year changes or all compared with the same baseline?

axel_knutt wrote: ↑31 Jan 2025, 6:49pm

[XAP]Bob wrote: ↑24 Jan 2025, 4:43pm That's what's meant by closer - time, not distance.

You can measure the gap with bathroom scales if you like, it still doesn't alter the fact that if people drive too close for the speed they're travelling at, as they invariably do, then flow instability will break out spontaneously, and that can be prevented by slowing down.

That "too close" is always measured in time, you can't measure it with scales, and you can't usefully measure it with a tape measure (unless you take lots of measurements at different speeds, and guess what you're actually measuring?)
The issue is that you have to get those gaps past a lane, so you're limited to having ~1800 vehicles an hour in a lane of traffic.

[XAP]Bob wrote: ↑24 Jan 2025, 4:43pmIf you can reduce reaction time to zero (which you effectively can with an automated convoy) then the vehicles can follow with a half second gap. They can communicate the current, and max, braking that is in action on the convoy basically instantly along it's entire length.

An automated system will operate faster than humans, but it's still capable of going unstable if you push it too far because the loop still has time delays in it.

What loop?
The front vehicle in the convoy detects an issue which requires it to slow down by x mph over the next y metres.
It therefore calculates the deceleration and simultaneously tells all the vehicles in the convoy to execute that change in speed.

It's a completely different concept to "next driver sees (binary) brakes lights, and guesses how much to brake" - and the milliseconds which might be required to transmit a signal along thousands of vehicles in a convoy are not going to cause a loop, because there is no loop, all the vehicles are controlled by the lead vehicle.

Even without full on convoy comms, an autonomous vehicle can do distance and speed detection to match the vehicle in front rather more consistently than a typical motorist - because the sensors available are better than the Mk1 Protoplasmic Scanner.

Various studies seem to suggest that reacting to brake lights by actually getting your foot on the pedal takes over a second.
That's a hell of a long time compared with electronic systems - ABS will do complete "release the brakes, monitor the wheels until they stop skidding, then apply the brakes, monitor the wheels until they start sliding" cycles over 40 times a second, and that's mostly time waiting for the wheel to start/stop sliding.

Can always drop a block of wood into the channel as a support, and that can easily be moved later if you need to

mjr wrote: ↑31 Jan 2025, 12:27pm

[XAP]Bob wrote: ↑31 Jan 2025, 10:49am Year ending Sept '24 there were just shy of 100k Asylum *applications*.
About 52% of those who had a decision were granted asylum, so ~50k asylum seekers.

How many of those applications were actually decided and how many were thrown into Sunak's backlogs? It may be reasonable to assume the undecided would split the same, but it may not.

It's the best number we have - it's well noted that deportations are well up at the moment, as we start to chip away at the backlog.

It's not an unreasonable approximation, and even if we accepted 100% of asylum claims, it would still be a tiny proportion of immigration.