Chris Thingy and the VC Mob

I thought it sounded like the title of a band or an album

Warning: This blog post requires a small pinch of salt

So a few days ago, this Chris Thingy bloke posts a video.  You know, these bloody ninja cyclists that go everywhere with a camera strapped to their heads. Militant bunch they are.  They go looking for trouble.

Well based on a few things my new bestest mate Maggie Richardson had to say, I wanted to take the opportunity to tell Chris Thingy that he is a shit cyclist.

I don't care who he thinks he is the jumped up flaming leftie.

A short journey from British Cycling on Vimeo.

Now, where do I start? According to my new mate Maggie, anyone who talks about cycle lanes is clearly a crap cyclist.  I don't know who this guy is but I have to agree with her.  Look at his positioning on the road.  not once does he take the lane.  And then like so many dreadful cyclists hopping on and off the pavement.  you'd never see anyone from the CTC or British Cycling doing that.

There would be no need for a cycle path next to this roundabout if this Chris Thingy cycled according to the laws of Vehicular Cycling! What he should have done was position himself in the middle of the road and taken the lane, then proceeded to carry on as if he were a car across the roundabout.  SIMPLE!

And without the need for any of this cycle lane nonsense.

BUT....

The problem is, he is only small compared to those large cars and even smaller still to a HGV driver.

Most collisions where cyclists are involved take place at junctions, where drivers simply do not see them.  We can talk until the cows come home (which will be a long time as I do not own any cows) about better training for drivers, but the basic biology is that our eyesight has not evolved enough to see everything we 'think' we are seeing.  Our eyesight is made up of where we are looking now and peripheral vision. When we scan a junction we do not look at each individual point we look back and forth and the scanned image is mainly made up of fuzzy peripheral shots and put together by our brain.

No amount of training is going to force us to evolve quicker.

Would you let your child cycle around this roundabout?

This has to be the litmus test for anywhere we expect people to use a bike.

Oh and Chris Thingy happens to be one of the best cyclists this country has ever produced.

PS I am not longer in touch with Maggie. ;-)