Headphones - Parents speak out

[rualexander]

Whenever I'm obliged to drive one of those steel boxes, In order not to feel totally cut off from the real world, I open every available window and the sunroof whatever the time of year - might as well make use of all that waste heat from the engine.

I cringe when I see people choosing to drive with the windows shut - even in the summer.

Not quite so gentle and green then are you? Fuel consumption is significantly increased if you drive with the windows open.

[gentlegreen]

Whenever I'm obliged to drive one of those steel boxes, In order not to feel totally cut off from the real world, I open every available window and the sunroof whatever the time of year - might as well make use of all that waste heat from the engine.

I cringe when I see people choosing to drive with the windows shut - even in the summer.

Not quite so gentle and green then are you? Fuel consumption is significantly increased if you drive with the windows open.

My general approach is to hardly drive them at all - and I haven't in 18 months.

When I do drive them, not killing other people is my priority.

At an absolute maximum speed of 27mph I doubt the extra drag makes much difference anyway (my OP implied this was in situations where I might actually encounter the uncaged).

[sam]

How loud do you have your iPod?

Taken as a survey question: Loud enough to block out traffic noise but not to induce tinnitus (knock wood. Sorry, was that somebody knocking?) I often cycle in London, and see no need to subject myself to the soundtrack of cars and buses. "Hearing is useful - but it's not echo location", as somebody wrote in a comments section to yet another article about 'iPod zombies' last year.

Music enhances the experience of cycling for me, and helps me to concentrate on the road and everything happening on it. I find that I'm scanning constantly when I'm plugged in - perhaps a natural side effect of blocking one of my senses, but

At the end of the day ears are optional but eyes are a necessity.

sums it up nicely. Though I remember reading about a blind cyclist who managed to get around pretty well. Maybe he was part bat.

[gentlegreen]

My style of on-bike entertainment has shifted over the years.

When I started cycling to work - 23 years ago on an old 10-speed, aged 27 (after 10 years on motorcycles - where I only tried headphones on one solitary occasion - I couldn't ride safely with music, but a mad mate of mine used to do 100 MPH with Nirvana at full blast) ...

.. I had a cassette walkman and it was either album-oriented rock music (doubtless on occasions I would have been actually singing along to Jethro Tull or Kate Bush ).. or alternatively Radio 3 on FM - which gave me plenty of insight into what following cars were doing via the ignition interference ... thinking back, surely I might well have been distracted by that sort of music - but the suburban roads were less busy back then.

Then in my mid-30s I discovered rave music, and there were occasions when I would charge home from work with pounding Goa trance on the cans - clearly fully reliant on my eyes. But the other side of "electronica" is the likes of Aphex twin - via Brian Eno - who took his cue in pioneering the ambient genre from Erik Satie - who fully expected the ambient sounds of the restaurant to form part of the performance...

My obsessive road-biking little brother who's mostly into the likes of Sibelius, once exclaimed in a condescending way that music would surely upset his (perfect) cadence - not being perfectly matched, beat for pedal stroke ....

Hundreds of hours of dancing to remarkably diverse "repetitive beats" (wearing earplugs) has left me able to syncopate - I can find any rhythm I feel like in any music - but then I'm just a fat, middle-aged bloke on a mountain bike and not an elite, clipped-in athlete on a carbon fibre bike with a 50 tooth front cog and a heart-rate monitor..

It's mostly laid-back "Deep House" mixes at the moment and I've been repeating the same mixes so much that it has almost become ambient music ...

[CJ]

Never mind the headphones... I'd like to know why it is expected that she should have stopped for the truck, given that she was riding along a main road and it was turning into a minor side road.

It is reported that she was "pedalling along the cycle lane running along Northam Road in St Denys" (which is in Southampton), and "failed to stop at the junction and slammed into the rear of a Volvo truck trailer that was turning into Prince’s Street". She is also reported to have lived in Bitterne and be on her way to work at the St Mary's fire station, so she will have been travelling south, with a bit of gravity-assisted momentum from having just come over the bridge.

I'm not that familiar with Southampton so I looked this up on Google maps and streetview. This shows no cycle lane, as such, on Northam Road, so I guess what they really mean is a cycle path or track on the footway, although neither can I see any bike-shaped white paint on the footways on either side of Northam Road nor any blue signs above them. But maybe this "cycling facility" is more recent than the Google Streetview car's visit? Anyone here with better local knowledge of Southampton?

Assuming she was on the usual footway-cum-cyclepath, that would explain why she was expected to give way, since that's how we design these things in Britain: so as to deprive cyclists following the main road of their right of way and make them stop at all the side roads. In the early days of cyclepaths in Holland and Germany, they were sometimes made like that on the continent too, until they found that cyclists were so reluctant to lose their hard-won momemtum and stop at all the side roads, that fewer got killed if the side road traffic was instead required to stop for them!

IMHO this accident has nothing to do with headphones and is all about losing the right of way. But most people don't cycle, so they won't understand why this woman took a chance on maintaining her momentum and did not give way.

[gentlegreen]

Two slightly conflicting reports :-

Witness looked on in horror as Amber Mattingley, 29, who appeared to be listening to music, rode straight into the side of an articulated lorry trailer without slowing down, an inquest heard.

But she failed to stop at the junction and slammed into the rear of a Volvo truck trailer that was turning into Prince’s Street.

Northam road appears to become a bus lane in places further on.

So perhaps it was another case of a cyclist not realising that an articulated trailer would be need to be turning left from a lane to her right ?



They may indeed have upgraded the facility since Google :-



http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source ... qA&cad=rja

Perhaps it lulled her into a false sense of security ..

[downfader]

CJ. Northam Bridge has a "cycle facility" with small cycle signs on the pavement. My understanding from the original article that reported the fatality is that the lorry had begun the turn before she'd arrived and she ended up under a trailer wheel.

The picture Gentlegreen has kindly linked shows the road layout pretty well. The left turn lane is frequented by cars, lorries and HGVs tend to straddle the middle of the left and middle lane's line area or else they wont make the turn. Those railings have been damaged a few times iirc from similar turns-gone-wrong. The middle lane indeed merges with the right lane after the lights due to a buslane.

Ofcourse we as road users are advised to give way to pedestrians crossing at places like this when we turn on to roads, I agree it would be nice for similar discretion when cycling. However I never see drivers etc stop in this situation and I doubt they would for a cyclist.

Northam road can be a bit hairy at times, thats why the council have tried to remove cyclists from the road there, despite the 2 lanes on the bridge and a 30 limit. Drivers frequently ignore this limit if the traffic is able to flow. One guy in the paper last year got banned when caught doing 90mph on his motorbike. The Gatsos on the bridge do nothing as drivers hammer it upto the line, do a skidding brake and then floor it past the "safe point".

[Cunobelin]

Don't take this personally!!!!!

"We" have fallen into a trap here.

Mostly the discussion is of the naughty use of Ipods, whereas this is a small point.

There is so much more to this accident that could and should be in the open discussion forum, HGVs and cyclists, poor road design, and all the rest. Instead the public perception is that it is all the victim's fault because of an Ipod!