Car parking replaces bike parking outside Hackney school; Tony Gibb calls out sh*t temporary infra; Cycling Mikey gets another driver brought to justice; Lovely bike lane vid; Arnie and Greta go riding; 62% of Copenhageners cycle + more on the live blog

Sam Bennett could do an Adam and make himself a new mate or 3 even.

Vino would never fix a race; what a waste of good drugs that would be.

Really like Mikey's script at the end of his vid; should be widely distributed.

"Sam Bennett answers 'intimate' questions ahead of time on having three ribs removed"

Wow, i knew George Bennett had three ribs removed, but now Sam Bennett is having ribs removed too ... Rib-doping?

Interesting looking at the historic streetview pictures for that Hackney building. Seems the area the cars are parked on was originally just part of the normal pavement. I guess it might still have been part of the property of the building...but are there no planning laws relevant when such land has been used by the public pedestrians for a long time?

Generally am sick of how land constantly gets repurposed for car storage. There's not going to be room left for anything else in the city at this rate. We'll all have to move out of London to make room for a giant car park.

Google maps would suggest that Hackney setup has been like that for a while, whilst turning that space into car parking does seem stupid,I'd question how secure any bikes being left there basically on the side of a pavement and road completely accessible by anyone wandering by all school day were. If theyve replaced it with better secure bike parking inside the school gates,which then displaced those cars...which is the worse problem to have?

Hackney school story - I'm betting (hoping) that the cycle parking was popular but there were concerns about security, so they provided secure spaces inside the school instead...  

Would be good if more could be found out about that Hackney school story (which is just appalling). Is there any truth in the comments on the thread that the space used now for car-parking has been public access for decades? And where RantyHighwayman says "In 2017 it was an office with highway paving up to the boundary. It's since been replaced with the red paving" - does that imply any established right to public access?

Also - is this down to the council, or one of those oligarch-run academy empires, or is it a private school?

Where is that Max Wakefield video filmed?  With that long mandatory cycle lane that's wide enough to fit the whole width of the handlebars? 

Looking at that empty road in Copenhagen I'm surprised more people don't drive.

Ah, so that's what it is - didn't know it had a name (slipped rib syndrome). Sympathise with George, it's intensely painful. I've had it for a number of years in my right side, only gets triggered when sitting and bending forward (e.g. to do up laces) so it's not too debilitating for me. Pain is sharp and stabbing with a dull lingering pain afterwards. If you've ever crashed down on your crossbar, or caught your bollocks twixt inner thigh and the nose of your saddle, it's like that. I'd always assumed it was a muscle spasm because stretching out made it go away.

Now that Copenhagen has been mentioned, it's probably worth bringing up the wide bike lane that was mentioned a couple of weeks ago. It is absolutely awful. It is part of one of the routes that I can take to and from work, and it's a complete mess. I haven't heard a single good thing written or said about it, but plenty about how bad it is, to the point where the council have acknowledged that it is causing problems. The change has disrupted a perfectly fine route, created two huge bottlenecks (it's only wide on the bridge - it's quite narrow coming on and off it, making you need to squeeze up in advance), made people on bikes from one direction do U-turns to get on to it, forced people walking and cycling to cross paths with each other at a very busy point, and generally been shit. It was far better before, including when there were extensive roadworks during the process of the change.

One article online about it is here - https://www.tv2lorry.dk/koebenhavn/cyklister-melder-om-kaos-paa-dyr-og-r... - but there's plenty out there. It feels like the people who planned this have never cycled or seen the area. Just goes to show that even in a place with fantastic infrastructure, mistakes can be made!

Also, the bike lane didn't need to be 5 metres wide. It was never busy enough to justify the change and I'd say there are fewer people using it now than before, but now it looks busier because everyone is bunched up. The video in the article shows just a bit of how bad it is.

"But London is not the same as Copenhagen." is the cry so often heard from petrolheads.  Well, neither was Copenhagen.  Like all western cities, it was gridlocked and more roads just made things worse, so it was very much like London.  The difference is that they acknowledged that trying to satisfy the car monster was never going to work and actively pursued the alternatives, especially cycling.

We could do the same, but while we have endless governments who simply refuse to look at those alternatives, except for some derisory crumbs off the road builder's table, it won't happen here.  There's an election happening, so all of us cyclists should be hassling the candidates and parties to commit to sign up to the BMA's proposal of £20/head/year for active travel, and to finally get around to the comprehensive review of road law, promised so long ago.   The BBC R4 prog "Today" is asking for subjects from the public for them to ask politicians, so take a minute and tell them to ask about those two subjects pm [at] bbc.co.uk