edit #4, and home again in the dark, still 31C at 9pm. It’s a really nasty commute, can’t let the concentration down for a second and multiple dismounts and hairy road crossings.
Nice punishment pass this morning. Ironically they gave the cyclist on my wheel plenty of room then cut right back in on me.
No traffic at all on the other side of the road.
Having gone years without reporting anyone - thats 2 in a month.
I suspect f**k all - but it calms me down in the moment “I’ll show you when I report you through a portal that probably goes nowhere and nothing will happen grrrr”.
Cycled into work this morning (son’s finished Uni now so car sharing is done) and realised it’s the first time I’ve ridden a bike since February. Actually enjoyed it and thought I should do this more often.
Been watching weather all day as forecast was for heavy rain after 4/5pm so plan was to go home before it started. It’s just started p1ssing it down so hoping there’ll be break and it’s not set in.
I can’t remember where the discussion about helmets was the other day, but I’ve noticed an interesting trend with helmet wearing around London.
Boris bikes have been around for 10 years or so and now there’s been a huge increase in the number of hire e-bikes around London. You occasionally see people wearing their own helmets on these bikes, but generally folks don’t bother with helmets. That seems to be normalising the idea of not wearing helmets, because I reckon less than half the people I see riding bikes around here wear helmets now.
If you bought a commuting bike the shop would always try to sell you a helmet, so pretty much everyone would wear a helmet until quite recently.
The Lycra brigade still wear helmets and it’s unusual to see someone out riding in Surrey not wearing a helmet, but people riding around town where it’s arguably more dangerous don’t seem to be bothering so much
Funnily enough, the woman who hit me when I broke my collarbone was riding a Boris bike. I don’t think she was going very fast, but she was riding through a red light when she hit me
Boris bikes are already rolled out into zone 2, but the dock less e-bikes are much more prevalent than Boris bikes now and people don’t seem to hang about on them.
TBH I don’t really expect to see people on hire bikes wearing helmets, but it’s people riding their own bikes without helmets that seems to be much more common now.
I’ve written before on this thread at how shocked I was by bad cyclist behaviour when I worked in London for a few days after some years away.
My conclusion was that many (most?) cyclists in central London are commuters who cycle because it’s cheaper/faster than other means of getting about (hence the lack of helmets?).
The lack of respect for other road users (jumping red lights being the most common) was, to me at least, jaw dropping. But it makes sense if you see them as taking the same aggressive attitude they would in a car and with breaking any rule they can get away with.
Most annoyingly (again for me) is that what’s happening in London is affecting the conversation about cycling nationally.
This is 100% my experience. Before cycling in London i was baffled by all the “cyclists jump ted lights” talk. I remember discussing it with people in the tri club and saying how many of us have ever seen anyone do that, given how much we cycle. No one.
Then I started cycling in London and my god it was rife, along with all manner of other dickhead behaviour. You look at cycling in London and yku would think they are all tossers.
A lot of London cyclists are like sheep - if they get to a red light and there’s other cyclists stopped then they’ll stop. If people are riding through the red then they’ll follow them, even though they don’t know which direction the traffic is going to come from
I’ve been commuting by bike in London for nearly 25 years and I’m seriously questioning whether I want to commute by bike when I start my new job. There’s more people on bikes now than ever before and the segregated cycle lanes that would make up a big chunk of my commute are just terrifying at peak times.
There was a big uptick in the number of cyclists during the pandemic, partly because people were taking advantage of the empty roads during lockdown and then because they didn’t want to get back onto busy public transport. The huge increase in the number of hire e-bikes on the roads has only accelerated that trend.
At the same time, there’s also been a big increase in the number of food delivery guys on e-bikes. They’re low paid and incentivised to make as many deliveries as possible, so they pay no attention to any traffic rules.
I did my first cycle commute since my op in September this morning. First time riding fixed wheel in 9 months? What could possibly go wrong?
Thankfully nothing! I only forgot to keep pedalling once .
The most direct route for me would mainly be on segregated cycle lanes, but I’ve been walking past these for the last few weeks and they look like absolute mayhem, so I took a less direct route. I ended up going via Parliament Square and Buckingham Palace and up Constitution Hill to Hyde Park Corner. My office is on the Zwift London course, just after you emerge from the tunnel onto Knightsbridge.
I’m pretty happy with the route in. I think the journey home is going to necessitate a different route because of one way systems, so that’s another new adventure
I would have thought that all the bridges west of Vauxhall would be quieter and more or less due south of Knightsbridge.
Then again, I’ve never cycled there.
Hyde Park Corner was the wild west when I was a kid - cycled round Hyde Park a lot but was never brave enough to take that on. Now they have lots of pedestrian crossings with very long wait times (very annoying when running) but back in the 70s/80s there was none of that
There’s a proper cycle superhighway around Hyde Park now which isn’t actually too bad - you still have to watch out peds blindly stepping out informs of you though
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