Here’s another example of good intentions gone wrong through ill-considered design and lousy implementation — the traffic calming in the Surrey village of Dockenfield. It’s a pleasant place, but the one road through the village had, until recently, a national (60mph) speed limit. It’s also a straight road, so it’s been crying out for both a speed limit and some form of traffic restriction. And a couple of years ago, it got first one, and then the other. I’ve no problem with that — they’re long overdue — but unfortunately, the speed calming measures that have been adopted are blatantly bloody dangerous for anyone on two wheels. Look at the picture — they’ve put into place an angled restriction, and then made it look even narrower by extending smooth raised kerbs further into the road. Now the idea of ‘perceptual restriction’ is fine and dandy, but here they’ve managed to create an arrangement that’s going to be completely lethal to the first motorcyclist or cyclist who hits one of those kerbs in the wet at night. Not to mentioned the large metal manhole cover that covers the approach. Not only that, but the quality of the work is so poor that the surface is breaking up and the kerbs themselves have moved out of alignment. So let’s add this one to the ever-lengthening list of Surrey’s Bad Ideas Poorly Done.
Page 6 of 11
(A Pillion’s View … of the 2005 WVAM France Trip and beyond)
“Pillion? That’s just sitting on the back and taking it easy, no?”
One of the first pieces of advice I was ever given about how to be a good pillion was ‘pretend you’re a sack of potatoes’. Well you can call me Maris Piper, because I’ve just completed a 1300 mile trip across five countries (and one duchy) – behind someone who, had I been less than chipper, would have been the first to give me a good roasting.
Having heard great things about the annual WVAM trip to France I had a feeling it would be a lot of fun, and it was! Not only did I have the chance to witness some really first rate riding skills and learn a lot about bikes, but I made a personal voyage of discovery (a cliché I know, but it’s actually true!) … and met a lot of new friends, too.
In his famous book, King Solomon’s Ring, the great naturalist Konrad Lorenz describes the time he spent observing the behaviour of a family of shrews. Like you do. He observed that the shrews always took the same path around their territory, and after the first few times of cautiously sniffing their way along, they’d follow the path at a flat run, looking neither to left nor to right. At which point he wondered what would happen if there was a sudden change in their environment. So he removed a rock that the shrews had been in the habit of leaping over on their route. And…
Just a week ago, Winter was very much with us. It was snowing in my little corner of Surrey, and had been for a fortnight. I’d had flu, and life was very much about not going anywhere beyond the warm and inherently stable confines of a motor car. Then, come Thursday morning, Spring arrived with a burst of bright and glowing sunshine — outside, the sparrows were coughing their way through the first dawn chorus of the year and inside, the cats were darkly muttering their desire to get outside of those same sparrows. And, to round out the signs and portents for this first day of Spring, Haslemere Motorcycles had also arranged to hand me the keys to their very shiny, very new Triumph Sprint ST demonstrator, for a test ride, which was definitely worth getting up for.
Now you’ll notice that was spelt T-r-i-u-m-p-h, not D-u-c-a-t-i. But if you’ve read other stuff on this site, you’ll also know that, despite being a hardened Ducatista, I’m just generally in favour of excellence in the form of good and characterful motorcycles. And it’s always been a toss-up for me between the V-twin and the in-line triple as the perfect engine format. That’s an opinion that hasn’t changed since my motorcycling adolescence of the 1970s and my formative exposure to two of the great biking icons of the day – the Ducati 900ss and the T160V Trident.
I’ve ridden most current Ducatis, and not a few of the Triumphs of the last several years, and been impressed with all of them. The difference however is that I can usually manage to look at a Ducati without wincing, which hasn’t always been true of the Trumpets. Worthy and thoroughly competent motorcycles certainly, but frequently with all the stylistic finesse of a lard blancmange and occasional lapses of finish that would shame a Trabant.
First Impressions
That’s all been changing in the last couple of years — Triumph appearing to have adopted the very un-British view that a bike that looks good as well as working well will, funnily enough, sell well. And the latest incarnation of that thinking is the new generation Sprint ST, Triumph’s sports tourer and a direct competitor to my own ST4s. So here we have the Triumph, resplendent in electric blue paintwork and triple-themed lights, clocks and pipes: matching tie, handkerchief and socks. Parts in fact seem slightly and contrivedly over-designed, giving parts like the clocks the impression of cosmetic plastic rather than alloyed engineering.
Overall though, this bike looks great – it has a spare elegance of design and line, with an aggressive and very non-lardy rearward-rising stance and a remarkable overall slimness to the package — it looks, and feels, light and lithe.
This is about wind. A very particular type of wind — the cross-wind. Any other sort of wind is your problem, not mine, OK? Winter is coming, and I’ve heard and seen a lot of comment to the effect that riding in cross-winds worries people. Not unreasonably, as there’s little more unsettling than suddenly and unexpectedly being propelled sideways across a couple of lanes of highway. Or across one lane of highway and into a hedge. But there are things that can be done to make life that little bit easier and more predictable.
Of all the vagaries of UK traffic law, the one I’ve heard most interpretations of has to be the “White Line” rule. That’s the one referring to white lines painted on the roads, just in case anyone’s getting ideas. Having read the Highway Cod very recently, I’d gotten it into my brain cell that you were allowed to pass agricultural vehicles at less than 20mph when there’s an “R” in the month, or something like that. I was tested and almost found wanting last week, when Captain Cardigan and I were hopping along a long queue of traffic that had built up behind a very slow-moving tractor/trailer. Normally, on my blithe ‘understanding’ of the Highway Code, I’d simply have popped past it without a second thought, if safe to do so, white lines or no. Our minds were however concentrated by the fact of the vehicle behind the tractor being a Police car. At which point, doubts they do surface. So we didn’t, and played good little bored road users until the road cleared.
When I got home, I did in fact get out my Highway Codes, all three of ’em, from 1987, 1993 and 1999. And yes, the wording has changed in the period. The trouble is, the wording I was remembering turned out to be entirely fictional. So I now stand sheepishly corrected. But at least not ticketed. So read the rest for the sordid details…
Bear with me, will you? I’ve been running this blog and site since late 1998 and have finally gotten around to migrating it all into my Two Worlds vServer engine, a set-up based on Movable Type content management system plus lots of other bits and pieces, held together with various hackettes (sorry, “ubiquity integration modules) in perl and php. Anyway, most of the raw content is across, but I’m still writing a few scripts to handle images and attachments, hence the sudden lack of photos, incriminating or otherwise. This will be completed very soon, at which point whatever passes for normal service will be resumed.
Richard
Here’s an opinion: The Web is about being accessible to all – it is not, nor should it be, the domain of any one operating system, organisation or web browser. There are a good set of international standards which determine how information is delivered to and presented by browsers. Most – no, make that, “nearly all” – browsers are compliant with those standards, within a few degrees of buggishness and interpretation. So making a site work with these is a matter of tweaking by degree, not kind. There is of course one notable exception, and that (again, “of course”) is Microsoft: it’s browsers display a level of both disregard for standards and are of such a bug-ridden nature that making a site work consistently requires delving into an underworld of hacks, tweaks and rewrites that are sufficient to cause apoplexy or death-by-boredom in any thinking organism.
In order to tread the fine line of compromise between high-handed disregard for poor design and monopolistic practice and preventing the many users of such products from actually accessing these sites, I’ve gone for the “greatest good of the greatest number” and made everything work fine with most open source browsers and the latest version of Internet Explorer, on Windows and Mac. Those that don’t work properly at the moment are Opera and Omniweb. This will be attended to just as soon as possible.
Please do consider this, by preference, an ABM site: Anything But Microsoft. If they ever learn and decide to create standards-compliant browsers, then that’s just find and dandy. In the meantime, I look forward to the day when the world’s web designers bring a class action against Microsoft, to claim for the time, lives and money lost in trying to make their bloody browsers work. Me, I’m off to ride my motorcycle.
This site has been developed using CSS and XHTML and most of the code will happily validate against these standards, exceptions being CSS hacks to work around MIE bugs/features and some of Movable Type’s own code. Tsk.
During a recent discussion on the Ducati ST owners’ list about the relative merits of kickstarts and electric starts, I was forcibly reminded of a friend’s 1954 BSA B33 500cc single. Despite having the flywheel mass of the Brooklyn/Forth (choose according to domicile) bridge, it would frequently not-quite-make-it past TDC and kick back with the full force of its very long stroke. But in slow motion, as befits a very leisurely motorcycle (at ‘touring’ revs it was firing every other streetlight). Quite enough to cause any or all of: knee to hit chin (moral: don’t stick your tongue out while kickstarting a motorcycle); knee to hit handlebar with eye-watering force; or, and from the spectator point of view, finest of all, to fire the entire hapless and sweating human being into orbit – half a dozen of these things in sync and Britain would have won the space race years before Gagarin and Thunderbirds got in on the act. Landing was iffy – I’d arrive in the gutter, do a half roll and rise to my feet just in time to watch the thing gracefully keel over sideways and land with the metallic sigh of a job well done. I like – I REALLY like – electric starts.
One of the great shibboleths of advanced riding is that you should be, at all times, in control of your own destiny. In other words, you are riding for yourself, at a level with which you are comfortable, regardless of the behaviour or views of others. Remember that when you’re reading any of this — these are my own thoughts and opinions, so if you choose to incorporate anything herein as part of your own riding, then that’s entirely up to you, but please do so within the context of what is safe and comfortable for you.
Neither I nor any organisation to which I am affiliated can be held responsible for any outcome, whether it be god-like riding ability or close encounters with hedgerows. These are my own thoughts and opinions and not those of either my club or the IAM, with which they may however sporadically coincide.
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