Cycling UK Forum

I once nearly got hit by a wheel. It bounced off a kerb and went clean over the car before bouncing off a house opposite and finishing up in their garden.

Sadly it was one of my own front wheels...

This whole "cyclists listening to iPods are a menace" thing is a piece of propaganda that's being pushed by the Automobile Association. Here's a piece I wrote on it a couple of years ago. I'm sorry to see it still going strong, especially on a forum like this.

Gareth.. it's not propaganda if we have seen it with our own eyes, the risk, the accidents.... i have no axe to grind and am no liar..... reality bites!!!!! Cyclists wearing ipods are a menace only to cyclists...
Kwackers ... as usual a differant approach...lol.
Wait until HUD sunglasses arrive and cyclists are watching dvd's while they cycle .... and still it will not be their fault when they have an accident ?.... possibly not!!!!

I have seen a few (not many though) cycle accidents and one of the many things that they all had in common is that the cyclists involved were not wearing headphones.
I on the other hand normally was!
38,000 miles normally with headphones on and still nothing.
Possibly Y Diawl looks after his own.

One of the ways in which propaganda works is that it supplies ready-made narratives with which to interpret events.

You see a cyclist fall off a bike. What factors spring to your mind when explaining the accident and why? There are lots of factors that could have explanatory value: the design and condition of the road, the behaviour of other road users, the weather, the design and mechanical condition of the bike, the skill and experience of the rider, their state of health, their eyesight, their alertness, their attitude to risk, and no doubt many others. What propaganda does is to emphasize particular factors which then become relatively easier for you to include in your narrative of events: was the rider wearing a helmet? were they breaking the law? were they listening to an iPod?

This is not a conscious process. For example, when I broke my wrist a couple of years ago, the first thing the doctor asked me was whether I was wearing a helmet. Why did he ask this question, given that it was my wrist that was hurt? If he had thought consciously about it, he would have realised that the question was irrelevant. But years of propaganda have created an implicit association between bicycle accidents and helmets, so "bicycle accident" goes in and "helmet?" comes out, without conscious thought needing to be involved.

Gareth - I agree with you entirely. I really don't see the problem with wearing headphones will cycling. It's a matter of personal choice. You can still hear the background noises. I just think it' ssomething the anti-cycling brigade use as propaganda.

Looked at your piece about bus driver running you down. Stagecoach are b*****ds. I once saw a Stagecoach coach going through a 50mph roadworks on the M1 driving very aggressively right up close behind a car. It was so dangerous.I reoprted it but as usual nothing happened.

Some of the local bus drivers around North London are ignorant. My Mum is in her 80s and has to use them and they drive very erratically and without courtesy to their older passengers. And they get cross about having to stop at unscheduled stops - even though they are supposed to under the hail and ride scheme.

patpalloon; "Stagecoach are b*****ds." so all staff, employees, managers are 'B*****ds'.
..... i'm lost for words....... All of them are 'B*****ds' .. all of them..i'm amazed...... so my son's one of these 'B*****ds' .. i never realised...Si and the rest of the moderators , do you have any comment on this ..... charitable status just in time to be bankrupted for libel .....

I'm not the only one who doesn't like them. Here's a reivew of Stagecoach:

http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews68065.html

'discourteous drivers' , 'unreliable', 'dirty'

im not keen on then either but it's a bit of a broad brush....... i assume from your signature that in the event of an accident you will refuse any assistance from a 4 wheeled ambulance

Dountless they vary, but over the past few years I have found Stagecoach drivers friendly and courteous to passengers and other road users. I had to travel on the buses a fair bit last year. Only one bus went AWOL, and the rest were never more than 10 minutes late.

To the OP: I've never used ipod or similar because I've never wanted to.

patpalloon wrote:Stagecoach are b*****ds. I once saw a Stagecoach coach going through a 50mph roadworks on the M1 driving very aggressively right up close behind a car. It was so dangerous.I reoprted it but as usual nothing happened.

Some of the local bus drivers around North London are ignorant. My Mum is in her 80s and has to use them and they drive very erratically and without courtesy to their older passengers. And they get cross about having to stop at unscheduled stops - even though they are supposed to under the hail and ride scheme.

Surely this is exactly the kind of sweeping generalisation that gets our backs up when it's applied to cyclists? Personally, I've found the majority of bus drivers in North London (working for Stagecoach or any other operator) to be no problem at all - either to me as a bus passenger or a cyclist.

To the OP: I do sometimes use my iPod when I'm cycling. So far, it hasn't casued me any grief.

Maybe this is the solution - advertised in this month's Cycling Plus:

http://www.airdrives.com/default.asp?contentID=9

These headphones sit outside your ear, so you can listen to tunes and still hea ambient noise.

From a safety point of view no difference between not being able to hear traffic because of headphones or because of poor/non existent hearing.
So what many in this thread are implying is that someone who is deaf or hard of hearing can't safely ride a bicycle which is utter nonsense.

pete75 wrote:From a safety point of view no difference between not being able to hear traffic because of headphones or because of poor/non existent hearing.

That's not quite true, since one could (and some here do) argue that the music/speech/etc supplied by the headphones detracts from the listener's ability to concentrate on other things.

pete75 wrote:So what many in this thread are implying is that someone who is deaf or hard of hearing can't safely ride a bicycle which is utter nonsense.

You could argue that one person (Landsurfer74) is implying that. I can't see anyone else implying it. Can you?

Unless by "many" you meant "one person, perhaps," in which case I'm with you all the way

stewartpratt wrote:

pete75 wrote:From a safety point of view no difference between not being able to hear traffic because of headphones or because of poor/non existent hearing.

That's not quite true, since one could (and some here do) argue that the music/speech/etc supplied by the headphones detracts from the listener's ability to concentrate on other things.

My statement was merely about the inability to hear traffic. You brought not concentrating into it - which can be caused by many things and I'd guess the most common are daydreaming, worrying about life's problems and such like .

stewartpratt wrote:

pete75 wrote:So what many in this thread are implying is that someone who is deaf or hard of hearing can't safely ride a bicycle which is utter nonsense.

You could argue that one person (Landsurfer74) is implying that. I can't see anyone else implying it. Can you?

Unless by "many" you meant "one person, perhaps," in which case I'm with you all the way

Actually the impression I got from a goodly proportion of posts was that people think cycling with an ipod is unsafe because one cannot hear the traffic. And yes anyone who says that is implying that it is unsafe for anyone who can't hear the traffic.

I've no real vested interest in this. I'm not deaf and I don't own an ipod