Cycling UK Forum

Glad you liked it jb.

Note for Mike6: Oh no they don't!

Sure there has to be a compromise: so why do ALL of the public footpaths appear on BOTH Landranger and Explorer maps, whilst most of the cycle paths are depicted by NEITHER? That's not a compromise, that's pandering to every demand of one user group whilst paying only lip service to the other.

Some other countries manage to map ALL the information a cyclist needs on a scale of 1:100 thousand. I don't think it's expecting too much of OS to do likewise given FOUR TIMES as much paper at 1:50 thousand. And if footpaths have to go in order to make the map less cluttered: the walkers have got their Explorer maps.

I have seen, twice, neither time recently, on television, a duo of black male street performers calling themselves "Father and Son". Each has one leg. I can't remember if it's one left each, one right each, or one of each. Each has a conventional-looking sit-up-and-beg bike and they do balletic acrobatic street performances using the bikes as props. Does anyone else know anything about these admirable guys? If only to confirm that I didn't dream it.

What annoys me about these large SUVs
(which, incidentally, are neither sporty or useful) is not the 4 wheel drive but their sheer stupid size. Why do people have to occupy so much road space and use so much fuel when as often as not they are transporting one person. Why do men, in particular, feel that their self-esteem demands a big vehicle ? It is tantamount to a personality disorder. The most severe cases drive round London in a Hummer.

A final point: in no way can a mountain bike be compared with one of these vehicles. They have no more environmental impact than any other sort of bike.

If he is now reluctant to pay anything more than the tacxi fare home then he is not convinced that you were anything more than stunned, and that there was nothing wrong with the bike.
It is too small a claim to go to a solicitor but the
minor threat of doing so and clocking up more costs to the perpetrator of the accident (by his own admission) has to be in the back of your mind.
He had the courtesy to call to see if you were all right but did not realise the cost of repairing a bike.
Evidently damage to the person matters to him but not damage to property;

If you have got his address send him a copy of the estimate from the bike shop requesting payment of this bill and requiring politely a reply within 7 days, payment within 28 days.

Keep copies of absolutely everything you have and povide him with copies if he needs them.

If you do not have any rsponse write to him to tell him that you are issuing a summons in the county court for the estimate and taxi fare that you have paid out.

If he asks you to be reasonable and get a second estimate.... get one... and if required at a cycle shop of his choice if required..... and so on and so forth.

You have got to haggle. He has agreed to £35.
Your starting postion is £170, including taxi fare.
Ask him what he is prepared to pay.
Try to reach agreement without going to law.

Perhaps if you have got his address and he was polite, and thoughtful, you could call on him at the door, and hammer it out in a few minutes.
Show him the damage to the machine.
and the estimate with it. Then you both know where you are

Nobody wins when lawyers are involved, and to my own bitter experience neither the lawyer!

Did 200 miles Salisbury-Cheddar George-Wellington-Dorchester-Salisbury in 16 hours on my own 3 weeks ago and Salisbury-Chepstow-Ross on Wye-Gloucester-Salisbury in 16.5 hours the next week (also 200 miles.) No puntures and neither are certified audax rides. Weather also favourable but pretty hilly. The joys of being an insane 19 year old!

Up to 3mm difference can be accommodated - just - but you need to be absolutely precise with your calculations in order to be sure of picking the best compromise length. And choose a good brand of spokes and nipples, since it's likely that half of the spokes will not extend fully into the nipple head, which may accordingly snap off if the nipples are of poor qaulity.

Fewer crossings is not merely permissible but recommended on larger flanges. Otherwise the spoke enters the rim at a shallower angle than the nipple can tilt to accommodate, so the nipple becomes harder to tighten and there's a bend in the spoke where it enters the nipple. Neither of these are terminal problems, but everything goes together a bit easier if you avoid them.

Too few crossings, on the other hand, increases the outward force on the hub flange around each spoke hole. Some hubs are designed to take it, some aren't. Hubs with extra-large flanges usually are, and you should be okay with cross 2 on this one.

Fewer crossings also increase the stress on spokes due to hub torque - from pedalling or a hub-mounted brake. Cross 2 should be enough though.

I was going to let this rest, but hey, someone rattled the cage marked CJ – so pardon me if I have another growl!

Neither have I measured relative deflection. One of the skills of an engineer is to spot when he needs to do that – and when not. Just look at it this way. There's a stack of five things between the rider's bum and the road: a tyre, a wheel, a frame, a seatpost and a saddle. All that matters to the rider's bum is how much the whole stack squashes, in total, when a bump in the road gives it a vertical kick. For one of the things in that stack to be relevant in terms of comfort, it has to be one of the more squishy things in the stack.

The bottom thing is an air-filled sausage, the whole point of which is to be squishy. And even if it’s a hard tyre, pumped up hard, you can see its sides get visibly wider when you run over a bump. Pretty squishy then.

Next up we have something a bit like a suspension bridge, an aluminium box beam on steel wires: maybe a bit squishy and so it merits a bit of measurement (or calculation) to check. Fortunately for us Mick Burrows has done it, finding that even when those wires are deliberately made less rigid (by making them kinky), wheels deflect a small fraction of a millimetre compared to several whole millimetres for tyres.

Passing over the frame for now, we come to a not-quite vertical tubular metal column. How squishy is that? Not very! Not unless it's designed to squish, i.e. when it IS a suspension seatpost, any shortening of the column will be tiny and the most you can expect is another fraction of a millimetre – almost entirely due to bending. On top of that, we finally have a plastic or leather hammock suspended over a couple of thin springy rods. Another thing deliberately designed to be squishy then, that deflects visibly when you prod it and by whole millimetres.

Now let us consider the middle bit, our bone of contention, a well-braced almost perfectly triangulated structure of metal tubes. Another bridge-like thing then, but a girder bridge rather than a suspension bridge. Which do think is more bouncy? I'm not even going to bother doing the calculations since the burden of proof clearly lies with those who would suggest, against all common-sense and the obviously much more compliant construction of tyres and saddles, that the frame of a bicycle makes any significant difference to its shock-absorbing properties – unless, of course, it's a suspension frame.

I've a Trek 1400 and this happened to me on Saturday descending the 'Crimea Pass' in North Wales. It started at 83 kph and stopped when I'd somehow reduced the speed to 42. If it happens again I'll certainly try the leg against crossbar trick, but hope it'll never be needed.

I've two bikes with carbon forks and neither handles very well in a crosswind. I can't help feeling that this had something to do with starting it off.

It is also verifiable by simple classical mechanics that the human frame is also a vehicle...
and this is clearer to the disabled than the able....
for the conveyance of the person him/her self.

Merely becoz the mechanics described observes
"motion in a straight line" that of putting one foot in front of the other and that of the wheel "motion in a circle" is neither here nor there.

The one is a precondition of the other.

Motion in a straight line is merely a PART of motion in a circle.

In 1838 or so nothing was known of the mechanical laws of motion.
In 1900 few people knew about it.
In2005 it is possible that even the Lords of Appeal are familiar or would be able to understand that infinite straight lines form
a circle.

Thus a pedestrian taking however few or many paces to walk a particular path is a vehicle
for himself.

QED

The French are not inhibited by ignoirance in the way that the British are with regard to their cycling laws.

Try me on it Bournemouth Promenade

Gar

Thanks for that Gerry.
Yet in France they are just that, or at least not legislated against as per 1898 nor defined as vehicles.

The rest of your comment is rather like a surgeon who has found "pink lung" on autopsy in rural areas
after town training. It just so happens that town smog makes a hell of a mess of the lungs and pink lungs are as they should be, healthy!

I hope you see the analogy with your hypothetical contention re velocity or impact.

You might say 1:60 for cyclists against cars
and 1:3 for pedestrians to cyclists.

On thse two the impact is 61 and 4 respectively,
if they are going in opposite directions.

Take two pedestrians 1: 10 one is jogging fast
10 knocks over 1 ==== damage.

I am on a recumbent disabled trike,which is also a wheel chair by definition, going at 30mph on the sidewalk (which is road)

I knock somebody over.
Am I a pedestrian or a vehicle? Or both or neither?

Or I am on the said trike and pedestrian knocks ME out of the seat becoz I am in a vehicle. Or as happened to me in B'motuh promenade last week somebody (a member of the public with your opinon about cyclists on sidewalks) put spikes in the pedestrian road to unseat a cyclist.
It causes me to have an accident .
Is mine a vehicle or am I a pedestrian the same as anybody else? Is the memebr of public comitting a lesser crime or a greater one through deliberately injuring a disabled person?

The Law is the proverbial Ass... which is why it has to be taken seriously, and why people make big money out of it, possibly even coppers intent on finding crime where in reality none exists,
other than by footling law!

What say you?!

Regards.
Gar

Wild camping is all well and good, but I like a shower! (Keeps the saddle sores at bay!)

There are numerous campsites. In Lochcarron, the Wee Campsite, as already mentioned. In Applecross there's the site at the bottom of the Ba which has the excellent polytunnel cafe. In Torridon there's the rough site near to the YH but next to the public loos which has a shower.

The caravan site at Kinlochewe does take the odd tent, but it is unrelieble, I've been turned away from there before now.

I believe there's a site at Sheildaig, but I've never user used it. Going South there are sites at Breakish (Broadford) on Skye and Balmacarra on the mainland, neither of which I have used. Slightly further afield is the site at Sligachan which is conveniently next to the Hotel and a very good tester for your tent should it get stormy!

I'll let you know if there are any problems after my trip in a couple of weeks. (Assuming I make it that far, of course!)

A few have had favourably things to say about subsidising some types of transport. But why should any mode of transport be subsidised? One could argue that cars are receiving by far the largest subsidy, public transport the least and if governments subsidised neither the latter and cycling would look much more attractive. At present car drivers pay little towards (help me out):

Health costs related to road trauma
Pollution (visual , noise, air, water, fuel transport 'accidents', soil)
Externalities of the manufacturing process
Costs of proper disposal and recycling of vehicles.
Cost of danger presented to other road users
Cost of inconvenience to other road users.
Opportunity cost of land use for driving and car storage (real estate value)
Global warmings effect on other countries
Travel delays to other vehicles including spoiled goods (currently borne by consumers of the good)
Costs of paying for obesity and sedentery lifestyle related illness

If car drivers were paying something like the true cost of these externalities (I admit their values are debateable) there would not be so much driving, it would cost too much. I suspect the cost of public transport would rise too but not by as much as that of driving. Then maybe we would not be living miles away from our shops and places of work, the true cost of all the unneccessary travel we do would be revealed.

Road pricing would be the best method as different roads would have different costs. Driving past the Houses of parliament in the rush hour would be bloody expensive compared to driving the highlands at midnight. Fuel taxes are a blunt and inaccurate indicator of the costs involved and politically unacceptable. Road pricing could work.

I've seen references on various websites to people cycling on the Parrett trail but I had a look at the the site dedicated to this trail and it looks like it's more suited to walking and there are no references to cycling.
I'm looking for somewhere that is 'child friendly' ie. neither of my kids have had much road riding experience but they both enjoy riding.
Any suggestions ? thanks.

I have been a keen cyclist for ten years and I have always worn a cycling helmet. I have never had an accident but with the level of traffic on the roads in this day and age it would BE COMPLETE MADNESS IF I WENT OUT WITHOUT MY HELMET ON.

And what you should remeber before you reply to this is that I am only SEVENTEEN.

This whole debate is totally stupid.

I have never been required to test the strength of my helmet and neither would I like to, but it is completely stupid.

It is common sense that everyone should wear a cycling helmet. IT JUST MAKES SENSE.

IM ONLY SEVENTEEN!

Oliver.