Welsh Labour government to prioritise walking projects over cycle lanes, as cycling campaigners fear "missed opportunity"

Those exceptional riding skills of yours must come in handy when riding with that self-blowing trumpet attached to your handlebars.

mark1a wrote:

Those exceptional riding skills of yours must come in handy when riding with that self-blowing trumpet attached to your handlebars.

Whilst your own sneer-klaxon is still in full working order I see.  Have you automated it or do you really really enjoy the anticipation of pressing its button every 5 minutes?

E6toSE3 wrote:

Liked except... you and I (I'm age 70) are confident cyclists who can look backwards (I had a few years with a neck problem that discouraged me riding and physio only helped a bit but regular pressups fixed it), control bike with one hand, and signal with fully outstretched arm for many seconds. Very few bike riders can do this: very few have their bike set up ideally or have brakes adjusted perfectly, many have awkward loads, coats, misted up glasses. Most people on bikes are in various states of unconfidence even on an open flat space with no cars. And they don't have £150+ locks and they struggle to manoeuvre a bike in and around racks with other bikes.

I'm 76 and can't easily turn on the sadddle to look back.  Modern handlebar mirrors are actually much better than a look-back as they have a wide and clear view, don't shudder and allow us to see both forwards and backwards in less than a second, unlike the saddle-squirm that can blind one to events to the for'ard for just long enough to hit them.

I also maintain my bike and the riding apparel, as with every other gubbins I use. Not doing so is just a lazy neglect of learning how then doing it. The lack of confidence is an issue, both for riding properly and for maintaining the bike so as to do so. As with motorised drivers, incompetence should be a reason for not-using; or for being trained until the incompetence and associated lack of confidence disappears.

It's much easier to learn to road cycle when the roads aren't infested with hordes of motorised loons, though. Motorised looning really needs to be much more severely policed and prevented, by all sorts of possible means not implemented because of motornormativity and its support by "the authorities", from newspapers to judges and politicians.

Once the cycling proficiency test was de rigeur but those days are long gone. Many here will cry "curtailment of freedom" but I would have some means to ensure that bike buyer-users are competant to ride on the road before letting them out on those roads. After all, the reams of highway code stuff apply to cyclists too, as does the ability to control a machine one uses, for the benefit of one's own wellbeing as well as that of other road users.

E6toSE3 wrote:

Deep travel infrastructure would start with vulnerable pedestrians and these unconfident cyclists and add community confidence building so they want to ride further for fun. Such infrastructure would frustrate you and me (until my grandchildren are ready to ride with me). We had pretty much this dream in Royal Docks in London from 1990. It was great: I could ride with my children from Beckton to Isle of Dogs, Greenwich Foot Tunnel, Thames Path to Woolwich, Woolwich Foot Tunnel or Ferry, back home, almost entirely on cycle paths. I have to remind myself that, despite its faults, London walking, cycling, bus, train, even driving, is far better than most of the rest of the country. And I could race flat out on 14 miles of roads in Docklands and Isle of Dogs with few traffic lights and few cars - those days gone now that tens of thousands of flats have been built

There is, in practice, still a lot of places where learning to ride a bike, including the rules of the road, are possible without the danger of loon-traffic and a lack of experience in dealing with it. What there isn't is a well-orgnaised enough infrastructure and legal requirment to do so before buying and riding a bike "in the wild". CyclingUK and some others provide a bicycling teaching structure but it's not used by nearly enough new bike riders.

One place to learn would be school playgrouinds and playing fields, as used to happen in the days of the cycling proficiency test. But schools now seem to operate only according to the latest crap ideology imposed by some silly new minister-of-the-month, with many necessary skills and understanding for use in everyday life completely purged from the syllabus.

E6toSE3 wrote:

Liked except... you and I (I'm age 70) are confident cyclists who can look backwards [...] control bike with one hand, and signal with fully outstretched arm for many seconds. Very few bike riders can do this

Virtually anyone who rides a bike even semi-regularly, provided they don't have a disability preventing them from doing so, can do this. Lots of people don't but that's not because they can't, it's because they're being careless. You only have to look at the number of people (pretty much all of them, one sometimes feels) on Lime bikes are who are capable of riding along with one hand controlling the bike whilst texting with the other and certainly not looking forwards. Your skills really aren't as unique as you imagine.

While wheelying?!