Bicycling

winding roads, sharp corners, 10@ and more high hedges, and in some places the trees meet overhead and turn them into tunnels!

middle... and a tarmac strip for the wheels! the grass tickles the cars tummy as you drive along!

mph, or 80!

Round here it's more of an idiot enforcement issue! There are not enough police to patrol all the THOUSANDS of little lanes that count as public highways round this part of Kent. If every idiot in his or her

4x4 the size of a battleship drove at a speed conversant with road conditions and visibility, cyclists would be safe. Unfortunately they almost all seem to drive as if they were either on their own driveway or on the motorway!

of apples at this point in the cycle.

And make the drivers of nice shiny new Mercs and BMWs VERY IMPATIENT! They are all Important People, and the rest of us are just farmers who ought to keep out of their way. Hm...

They drip, sometimes copiously, for ages after they have stopped active spraying... And even when they don't, they smell. Pig exhaust makes really good fertilizer, but is rather fragrant close up!

I really don't object to the roads, or most of the drivers, and certainly not to the farmers trying to make a living out of their land. Most of the danger comes from the sheer volume of traffic these mediaeval roads carved for horse traffic over centuries now have to cope with, when almost every family has two cars.

It may be like that round Newmarket, but not so much round here. yes there are both bridalways and public footpaths that cross the countryside away from the roads, but they are just that: bridalways and footpaths. Taking a bike on them is severely frowned upon by the legitimate riders and walkers.

It used to be one of mine. I used to cycle all over Lincolnshire when I lived there. It was nice and flat! ;) Here is far from flat, even though the hills are not very high. There are very few cycle paths close enough to be useful to me. What stops me, other than the sheer weight of traffic on our unclassified road passed the house is the fibro. Walking is great, and I regularly walk the mile to school to collect James, and we walk back together. Sometimes we take the longer route home and go round by the footpaths through the orchards. I also swim three times a week.

No... Sounds good! I used to do better: I used to cycle for miles across the fens at night, with nothing to light my way but the stars, the sky as wide as forever, and the harvest moon sitting huge and friendly over the gleaming dykes and drains... The Forty Foot Drain was put in by the Romans to drain a bit of the fens. I'd smell the damp and the frosty fields and have occasional clouds of millions of starlings screaming as they streamed over as evening settled in. I'd slide silently by, nodding to the ghosts of Tattershall Castle, standing like a giant chess piece in the chequered fields, and listen to the reeds in the moat rustling in the dark, whispering secrets only they knew.

Other people cycle: I don't. I lost my nerve somewhat when my brother was almost killed in an accident. It was touch and go whether or not he kept his leg, for a few days. I was an impressionable teenager at the time. *HE* went back to riding the bike, NOOOO problem! I was never happy after that episode.

James doesn't cycle as there is nowhere round the village for him to practice safely. The only footpath is on the wide section of road over the motorway bridge: cars come out of the village and speed up when they see this wide clear stretch, and we have mopped up several collisions outside the house over the years where some pillock doing 80 or more has hit someone coming in the other direction. Just where the houses start the road narrows to half the width of the bridge and has a shallow but blind bend with adverse camber.

Age hasn't withered me. Experience has perhaps made me over cautious. And I no longer trust my vision sufficiently to take to the roads. I have difficulty with depth perception these days.

Yeah, right... And Wilma is the fault of some butterfly in Africa...

BTW I hope everyone is getting out of the path of that one - it looks like one MEAN lady!

if you are worried about cars, get a mountain bike. ;-)

just mount a video camera on your bike, and when the idiots in cars try to kill you, show the footage to the police and get them prosecuted for dangerous driving.

Also, dont be shy, you have as much right to be on the road as they do, make them give way, make them move out of the road, dont hug the curb, let them see you. Make mental notes of number plates of idiots if no camera, and report them also.

Cycled across britain several times, never really had much of a problem with cars, other than a few idiots.

But *first* she has to take cycling lessons, or she'll do all the wrong things.

Probably not as bad as the kids in my former home town, whose parents had been told -- by a uniformed policeman -- that one must always ride in the oncoming lane.

The ones who missed that lesson got the one saying that when two children are riding together, if a car comes along, one of the children must dart across the road so as to force the car to pass between them.

I came across an "expert" somewhere who claimed that a road lined with parked cars is safer than one where parking is forbidden!

And I myself once thought that a road was safer if you painted a "bicycle lane" on it. I'm rather embarrassed about that, but common sense really can't get a grip if it doesn't have any *data*. It isn't obvious that one must pause to consider what happens at intersections.

Oh, just a week or so ago, I found, for the very first time, an actual study of bicycle safety. It was at

-- not much, but infinitely more than wishful rumors.Joy Beeson

winding roads, sharp corners, 10@ and more high hedges, and in some places the trees meet overhead and turn them into tunnels!

middle... and a tarmac strip for the wheels! the grass tickles the cars tummy as you drive along!

mph, or 80!

of apples at this point in the cycle.

of apples at this point in the cycle.

Never met a 14 ft combine on a 12ft road, have you? Yeah, they may

*move* at bicycle speeds, but they also take up the entire road, from hedgeline to hedgeline. Which is fine if you're going the same direction as the combine, but if not....

-- Jenn Ridley : snipped-for-privacy@chartermi.net

of apples at this point in the cycle.

Round here a 12' road would be generous... We have some where the hedges press the doors closed on both sides of our smallish car (Seat Ibiza) as you drive along. And quite a few of the roads LOOK like they have hedges on either side, but in fact they have chalk banks or flint walls with hedges on top and the rocks hidden by trailing branches and ivy.

Here's a fairly typical view of Kentish roads from a cycling-friendly place:

course, we also have Brands hatch: ...and the M20 and Operation Stack...

So some folks aren't easily intimidated!

HTH

--Karen D.

Out by Stour Farm you are on quiet backroads that go from no-where to no-where-else! Up here you are on back roads used as rat-runs between the M20, the M2, the A2, and 4 towns that the folk going home from the motorways want to avoid the middle of because they all have only half a one-way system and 43 sets of traffic lights...

Yep, sounds like off-the-beaten-bath cycling, not go-to-the-market cycling.