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Well, it's certainly true that cycling doesn't improve your character. The twats in cars and vans are still / would still be twats on bikes too. But at least they'd be less polluting, less dangerous, and block the roads less...

Yeah that makes it even worse, but honestly, even if they're rushing to get to work there must still be a decent percentage of people who can afford to arrive a few minutes later... it's such a simple thing to stop for a second and just make sure you're OK :/

Thing that has annoyed me is, as I hit the deck 3 or 4 cyclists went around me and not one of them even stopped to ask if I was ok

That's pretty shitty. I always try to stop and help if there is any point. Meaning, if it looks like I might be able to help. If there are already three other people helping I tend to go on as there isn't much gained by just adding more to the mix, and it's not like I'm a doctor or anything.

Same with people having a flat - I'm usually pretty race-y on my commute, but come on people, if someone is wheeling a bike with a flat, go and bloody ask whether you can help. If you have the tools of course! If not, you will appreciate it even more when someone else does it for you when you have a flat... I'll let it slide if you're late for a meeting or something, but there's no way every single cyclist just rushing past is currently late for a meeting.

I don't know, I'm really not trying to style myself as the good samaritan here, but stopping and asking whether you can help out really should be normal. I did give some guy my spare tube once, he was on his way home to Tooting from Chelsea during rush hour - pretty sure I saved his evening when he didn't have to wheel his bike home for two hours. It cost me about 6 minutes of my time and about £3 in materials, so not exactly the biggest sacrifice - I'd hope someone else would do the same for me if I was stuck somewhere.

Well that sounds a lot like the Swiss solution...

Oh my god.

I also love the short description in the listing header, just underneath the 'condition - used' box: "COLNAGO road bike". Oh sorry, I hadn't noticed it's COLNAGO. Sorry, which brand is it again? It's not COLNAGO, is it? Or is it C O L N A G O?

Though, as bad as that is, the wheels really aren't helping of course. And that handlebar tape is a whole separate crime. :/

when do europe start getting pissed off

Europe has been pissed off for a while, but people also realised that it's not worth getting too involved in the shitshow over here. Basically, it's the UK that desperately wants to go (well, parts of it anyway), not the EU. Overall, the disadvantages of uncertainty over Brexit being in limbo are still less impactful for the EU than a no-deal exit would be for certain regions, so... I think when it all comes down to it, a majority of politicians are happy to just let it go on as it is.

Ah yeah that was a nice sturdy bike, definitely hang on to it! Might go again, yeah - depends a bit on the specific date and how busy I am at that point. Also, I'm still refusing to believe so much time has passed already... :/

That might have been me, yeah, especially now that I live right next to the Bridge in Putney! What do you ride? I'm going to go out on a limb and assume it's probably not the 'velocipede' in your profile pic :)

@Camel_toe I can't remember now, is that the one you were riding for the 'hard ride' back in January?

I'm usually the last one without a helmet... but give my gf another year or so and I'll be riding with a helmet too.

Ha I haven't had 4 at one set of lights yet, I think 3 is my high-score so far. It makes sense though, the FXE (and from what I hear, also the Pre Cursa) is a really really solid, but cheap frameset - definitely value for money! If the geared bikes they now sell more of are similar, it's not surprising they are selling a fair few of them.

Yeah to be fair when you ride a Dolan (especially the FXE) you have to accept that you will definitely not stand out much, there's quite a few of them out there at the moment - and I keep seeing more and more geared Dolan bikes, too.

Nope! I don't let it get that far :P

First time this autumn with gloves and fully long lycra, seemed worth it. Probably a bit warm on the way home though.

My bike is making some no-good creaking sounds, the brake needs to be adjusted, and the chain probably needs to be changed. I feel sorry for it, it's not getting much love right now.

Pity - well currently there's not that much interest so if you can make some other time let me know! I'd rather have someone use them than throw them away.

Putney, by the bridge - I'll also be pretty busy though, so it'd have to be in the later evening?

Tomorrow won't work - sorry, should have specified meeting on weekdays. Would next week at some point work?

2x red, 2x white. Need 2xLR03 batteries each, not included (well, 2 of them have some in that are super weak now). A button on the back cycles through steady / blinking / succession of each individual light blinking. They have a clip-on system on the back.

I got these from someone else and never used them, but they all work. Anyone want them before I throw them out? Meeting up at St Thomas Hospital (next to Westminster Bridge) prefered.

The italics suggest I'm not talking about you personally?

Ok, that is not clear from italics at all, but it doesn't really matter, the general point stands.

Yeah I'm sorry but that's all also more of a vague hope than anything else. And yes, I kind of do need to understand it. Because if I don't understand how it's supposed to work, then the causal link from 'make some noise' to 'things change' is way too vague to ever come to fruition.

The noise doesn't have to make you happy and it doesn't matter if it pisses you off.

No. Btw, I'm neither unhappy about it nor does it piss me off. The problem is that generally speaking, when you make a majority unhappy and piss them off, that whole idea of it somehow being 'engrained in culture' becomes unworkable. And that's also the true risk there - not that it might fail overall, but that some actions that aren't thought-through properly might achieve the opposite of what they set out to do.

Also, you know, there's either a large minority or even a small majority currently against Brexit - definitely a large minority very strongly against Brexit. And yet it's far from 'political suicide' to steam full power ahead with it. I just really dislike how that supposed mechanism is always phrased as if it was some kind of inevitability.

As I've said before: a vast majority of people in this thread, myself included, broadly support XR and most of the things they'd like to achieve. That doesn't mean we can't criticise aspects of their thinking, or specific actions like the Canning Town one.

shift popular opinion to such a degree that it would be political suicide not to put the environment first are needed

... and that's exactly why I'm very confused by XR stating they only want to get 'a large enough minority' on their side. Generally speaking, even 'large' minorities aren't enough to make things 'political suicide', especially when there is already a political split on the issue.

Hoping for moving vaguely in the right direction ain't gonna cut it in the time available...

Absolutely nothing I've seen so far points towards us getting things done on time. So yeah, I'm pretty pessimistic about this. It doesn't mean that in my dreams, I'm not hoping for something a whole lot more radical, but realistically...

Yeah, that's a good point.

That's a massive shift.

It absolutely is. It would also absolutely be achievable, but there would need to be a fundamental attitude change along with things like big investments into carbon neutral public transport, while cars are being banned and taxed to high heaven left right and centre. I can't really see it happening realistically, but I won't give up hope we can at least vaguely move in the right direction.

As a side note:

Electricity was easy - any house/bushiness/process designed to use electricity can use green electricity from a turbine down the same wires as from a coal power station.

That part is easy, yes, but electrical / power engineers will tell you that the distribution of power in itself is a super complex thing, and getting it from many individual turbines vs one big coal power plant is not as straight forward as the slightly naive thinking of "well you 'hook it up' to the grid" that us non-electrical-engineers tend to have. Again, totally doable, but even that 'easy' bit isn't that easy when you drill down into it.

Cars are supposed to be the easy bit - but we're still only looking at banning non hybrids in 2040!

And actually, even those aren't that easy, because while electric cars are objectively better in some regards, they start off deeply in the red on the CO2 balance sheet thanks their own production emissions. It's really not that easy and straightforward, and as usual the actual solution is not "let's change everything a little bit to have the least amount of actual changes possible", it is "we need to fundamentally change some approaches - e.g. we need to have radically fewer cars to begin with, full stop".

I absolutely agree with every single thing you say there, especially the 'hypocrisy' thing. BUT:

My impression is that XR fundamentally care less about being liked by the general public than changing high level policy.

Yes but how is this going to actually work? To use a very old meme:

Isn't broad support in the population somewhat of an prerequisite to force politicians to do things that otherwise might not be in their own interests? Considering that, isn't "we're not here to be liked" more of an after-the-fact excuse for not getting the support they'd need to actually change things?

As a graphics guy the rest would really trouble me. #ocd

Well, I'm not a graphics guy, but the logos everywhere really trouble me anyway. I don't want to look like a walking / cycling billboard. At most one large logo is OK. Plastering it all over the bike is just pure anti.