When a right wing paper that has been a staunch champion of the hard pressed driver in the past dedicates considerable column inches to cyclist safety it may be the start of a real war on the motorist. You can see the details of this campaign here and gasp at the call for money specifically to be spent on the tax dodgers and fear at the impact to motorists. Even worse – they are actually explaining that there is no such thing as road tax and that cyclistshave every right to be on the road.
Clearly we had to stop this madness and so wrote to our local MP – Charlotte Leslie for Bristol North West, asking if she was going to support this campaign and attend the MP debate. Reassuringly she is on the side of the motorist and chose to respond to our letter with a standard cut and paste conservative response. We are happy to assume that she has no intention of adding fuel to this socialist fire and will go on ignoring the Bristol Cycling City project as if it had never happened.
The militant cyclists are saying "It's not our fault that HGVs kill us -they shouldn't be there", and now they even have the Times on their side
We, and our sponsors, Tesco, say "HGVs are needed in our city to deliver an optimised supply chain, if anyone gets run over by one it is their own fault for being on the inside of the vehicle"
This is why a lot of cycle safety training in London is dedicated to
make it clear to people on bikes that they are invisible from a cab of
an HGV, so should never go up alongside them, or end up in an ASL in
front of one.
We have another group of people who need to be better educated.
Take this road, St Werburgh's Road.
If you were in Montpelier, a car with its rear window replaced with cardboard and big scrapes down the side wouldn't get a second glance -but here we are in St Werburghs. What is up?
Apparently, the owner of this car dangerously parked their car on the inside of an HGV.
The HGV -entirely innocently, as the car was hiding in its blind spot- scraped down the side of the car, caught the rear bumper and pulled it off. It also clipped the rear hatch, pulling that up, bending it, and in the process shattering the window.
Why did this happen? Because the car driver, recklessly, parked their car on the inside of where an HGV would go past some ten hours later. For this reason, it is their own fault.
We say: people like this need to go on a "safe parking near HGVs" course, rather than complain about passing trucks from destroying their vehicles. At the very least, they could use that spare space to the right of the picture, the "pavement".
There's been a lot of concern in the press recently about Militant Secularists, who are as despised as much as Militant Cyclists and feared as much as proponents of Sharia Law.
The cabinet has come up with a three pronged plan to encourage more prayer and religion in our streets
George Osborne will encourage everyone in the country to pray that his austerity plan will actually work, despite evidence to the contrary.
Andrew Lansley will be encourage people to pray for their friends and family to get better, and in fact this will become the primary front line medical care. When Britain was a Christian nation -right up until the militant secularists and their so-called Enlightenment brought evidence-driven medicine to the country, prayer was the only medicine people had. The NHS reforms will return Britain to its roots.
Eric Pickles will do more to encourage prayer in our cities.
The last is what interests us, as he has come up with a plan to encourage prayer not only in our local councils, but in our city streets.
In a special over-skype interview with us, Eric Pickles declared
For too long the militants -be they secularists or cyclists- have had free reign of our cities. I propose to correct this by encouraging cyclists to pray regularly. I have come up with a cost-effective plan to achieve this, which I call "doing absolutely nothing". This, combined with cost-cutting measures and the wrapping up of even half-arsed attempts to fund cycling in British cities -a European invention, I hasten to add- will make the cyclists less militant and more religious.
We are glad to agree with him, and include a video Eric was particularly proud of that shows how it only took one HGV at a roundabout to turn a Glaswegian cyclist back into a devout Glasweigan who now knows that cycling is not an acceptable form of transport.
Eric closed:
Having rediscovered God, we expect Magnatom to return to the traditions of this great country --going to Celtic and Rangers matches and paying for right to hate your fellow Christians.
We hesitated about pointing out to Eric that Rangers FC is currently in administration, as it would have made him appear out of touch. Nor did we raise the fact that here in the south west, we follow Other Gods. While our Queen declared that she is a defender of all faiths, we are not convinced those that involve human sacrifice were on the list of "all faiths" that she imagined.
The news is now out that he's been sentenced to 17 months in jail after pleading guilty to dangerous driving and GBH, which, given the video, was hard to defeat with the "I didn't see him" defence.
The video is pretty awful for anyone to watch: if you want to know what it looks like when a bus sideswipes someone on a bicycle -when the bus isn't even going that fast.
The evening post says that the bus driver, Gavin Hill, has been disqualified from driving for 30 months, and will have to take an extended driving test afterwards. Apparently the action was "a moment of madness".
Well, we hope that Phil isn't suffering long-term consequences, and that the outcome does provide some reassurance that society frowns on such explicit attempts to cause death and injury.
When we heard the "someone to lie for him" phrase we checked to see if David Lowrey was on the coalition cabinet, but no, he was someone who started a fight with someone on a bicycle who had the audacity to make some kind of gesture to the car as the car encroached into the cycle lane.
Again, "a moment of madness", this time with four months jail; no mention of driving penalty or what penalty he or the "independent witness" get for trying to pervert the course of justice (*)
If these court cases weren't in the papers on the same day, the "moment of madness" defence might sound somewhat realistic. As it is, it comes out looking a contrived.
For that reason, we had a look around to see where else the "moment of madness" defence had cropped up.
Ron Davies, welsh secretary, robbed at knifepoint by a some people he went down to Clapham Common with"a moment of madness"
Sir John Guielgud, set up by the police who actually had undercover police trying to entrap men seeking a bit of discreet consensual sex, again "a moment of madness".
Hugh Grant getting caught paying a prostitute for a bit of entertainment in a public lavatory while on a business trip without his wife.
There we have it then, two separate scenarios where defence lawyers recommend the "moment of madness" defence
You've rammed or assaulted someone on a bicycle and want to make it clear that normally you are a safe and docile driver and suddenly "a moment of madness" came over you. You didn't mean to cause physical injury and hope to be let off lightly.
You got caught by the police engaged in some outdoor sex act which the legal system at that time and place considered illegal. You want to imply that the fact the police caught you with your trousers down was not because you do it very often but because you "had a moment of madness" and you were very unlucky. You also don't want your political/acting/religious career ruined, so you have to pretend it was somehow an accident.
There you have it then, two situations where the "moment of madness" defence crops up. Can we note, then, that for the second of these sets of legal cases, nobody gets hurt. In fact, most of the participants in the situations seemed, at least to an extent, engaged in consensual acts. Whereas nobody volunteers to be run over by a bus at the bearpit, or head-butted by a complete stranger.
Either way, it's become a bit of a cliche. Please, defence lawyers, come up with some new phrase.
(*) On the topic of independent witnesses, can we remind everyone that not only do ex-spouses turn on you, but if you are having someone pretend to be a complete stranger so as to devalue the line up evidence, remember that as covered in Ugander et al., The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph, it's fairly easy to determine if the pairwise distance between you and the independent witness is only one or two hops, or the you are both parts of the same clique of acquaintances. Less formally: you can't say "I have never met this person" if you keep identifying each other as friends in facebook photos.
Update: for anyone in the mainstream media who is not actually appearing in the Leveson inquiry or in a 1:1 meeting with Don Murdoch, trying to contact us -please read more than one article on this site, especially the media corner, before emailing us. You will discover that you wouldn't consider us a serious and unbiased news outlet. Which, coincidentally, is exactly how we view the television and printed news outlets.
Taypet21's video collection now includes a nice one in Staple Hill showing how to deal with congestion when you have a right turn up ahead. The correct tactics are
Drive up to the queue as fast as you can. This is why vehicles in the rear of a queue should always have their foot on the brake pedal, the red lights provide more warning notice to approaching vehicles.
Swing right, around the gratuitous pedestrian crossing with a keep left sign.
Carry on down that side of the road until you reach your destination road.
This shows another problem with pinch points: the audi driver who -was clearly important as (a) they drive an audi and (b) they are in a hurry- was held up by someone on a bicycle coming the other way. Yes, they had hi-viz and a helmet on, but they way they blocked the important person from cutting round the keep-left sign it was, well, as if they thought they owned the road.
The high streets are in trouble, and there is little that can be done.
The government has proposed making it easier to change retail outlets from one use to another without so much paperwork -something the Costa Coffee outlet in Whiteladies road has done pre-emptively.
Another area was improved parking, which the whiteladies showcase bus route promises -by converting whiteladies road to 1h short stay parking during the day. Which shows how naive the government high street survey was -where do they expect the staff to park now that there is no long stay parking in front of the shop?
What Whiteladies road does have is an overflowing bike parking area, which gets in the way of pedestrians.
It also fails to recognise the benefit to the high street were it converted into retail advertising space
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