Skip to main content

CYCLE SUPERHIGHWAYS & (UN)ETHICAL SPONSOR

Cycle Superhighway. Let's dwell on the name. Highway is a public road... Super implies bigger, wider, with extra powers. You almost hope when you ride on them that a special force will propel you to your destination in no time and in safety, like in a scene from Tron, zooming around these Super lanes barely seen by the slow traffic around you.

It gives more room than conventional cycle lanes, but apart from being able to overtake slower cyclists it has no great impact on safety.
Vehicles still drive over it, turn left through them without first checking, they are slippery in the wet as most of the lanes are simply painted.

There have been two deaths last week on the Superhighway and I have witnessed many more accidents.
Unless they are guarded they have no real point in existing, giving false sense of safety to many more cyclists, only to let them down when it matters. We need cycle lane cameras and maybe cycling awareness to be included in the highway code.

They are sponsored by a well known bank, Barclays. That is uncomfortable as banks have been responsible for most of our economic woes. Also the biggest British cycling team is sponsored by Sky, responsible for  the phone hacking scandal engulfing British press. Why is cycling attracting these companies? I enjoyed the Sky Ride in London and welcomed the initiatives sponsored around the country, but I would prefer clean and ethical companies getting in the frame. Odd as cycling exudes a certain lifestyle, a healthier, cleaner mode of transport.
Perhaps the obstinacy of many cyclists to defy the highway code, jumping lights etc, together with the too eagerly reported doping cases, are factors that keep away ethical companies.

Let's all respect the roads, after all cyclists are drivers and drivers are cyclists.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CARLO ROVELLI: WHY PHYSICS NEEDS PHILOSOPHY

A few months ago I started to be interested in Physics. It felt like a natural extension to the questions of the self and who we are in this life. I felt that Philosophy gave me some of the answers, but I needed a deeper understanding of what makes us how we are in an empirical way in order to reconcile the metaphysical counterpart. A handful of books gave me a grounding on the subject, then a dear friend recommended "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics" by Carlo Rovelli. It was a revelation. Only once before a book this small has surprised me quite so much, "Novecento", a short play written by Alessandro Baricco. Baricco managed to squeeze an epic story in 62 pages, a literary feat (the book was later made into a film by Tornatore) transporting an idiosyncratic story into a journey through time and seas. In the same way, Rovelli takes on the incredibly complex world of Physics to unravel the most salient parts in a mere 79 pages. From General Relativity to Quantum M...

AN OLYMPIC EFFORT

When the Olympic cycling road race and TT race routes were announced I was extremely excited. I live bang in the middle of both. One of the most important races in cycling was going to be ridden near my house. Television screens would be filled with images of roads I'm familiar with, the pros will be riding my commute to work AND some of my cycling club runs' routes (Kingston Wheelers).

WIGGLE DRAGON RIDE 2012

In the graphics department at Channel4News we're all into cycling, sometimes train together at lunchtime, so five of us plus a friend who joined us there, decided to enter the Wiggle Dragon Ride in South Wales. This is a sportive, a timed road cycling event with over 4,000 participants from all over the country and beyond. I did this event a few years back, but it was a lot shorter and not so much climbing.