"spindrift" wrote in message
...
1/

Name a "militant cyclist" who "hates other road users" and provide
evidence for your claim, you know, like a concrete example of anyone
here ever saying anything that justifies this petulant outburst. Got
any examples?

2/

" (although only 40 of 800 cyclists [11 of which were
Spindrift, "

You claim some of the posts on The Telegraph web page are from me.
Evidence, please, since my name doesn't appear anywhere on that page.

3/


"who isn't really a cyclist at all "

15 mile commute a day, cycle from Cherbourg to Corfu a whiole ago, Col
du Tourmalet 4 months ago, Budapest to Krakow in July.

There's photos of me on the Tourmalet on this newsgroup.

You seem a strange, obsessive figure, and on motorbikes in bus lanes
I'd refer you to conclusive
evidence that it makes things much more unpleasant for cyclists:

http://www.camcycle.org.uk/newslette...article13.html


http://www.ctc.org.uk/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabID=4789

http://www.croydon-lcc.org.uk/campai..._bus_lanes.htm

None of your citations offers a shred of evidence that ptw's _in bus lanes_
pose an increased risk to cyclists. I realise that you cited them as
'conclusive
evidence that it makes things much more unpleasant for cyclists', but the
only conclusion that can be drawn is that some cyclists are very vocal in
their opposition. Even the Bristol study is only quoted as saying that 31%
of cyclists _said_ that they experienced problems with ptw's, not what
questions had elicited these responses or what the alleged problems were,
and not a hint of any statistics related to accidents or injuries. What
would the response of motorcyclists have been if asked whether they had
experienced problems with cyclists in bus lanes, I wonder? Or buses with
cclists and vice versa?

As a cyclist, motorcyclist, pedestrian and (dare I admit it) motorist, I
despair of the ghetto mentality of cyclists who cannot see common cause with
other vulnerable road users.

Mark McNeill wrote:

Response to JNugent

[ ... ]

That reminds me - I was surprised, given your interest in the subject
(based AFAICT both on intellectual curiosity and on an amount of BEER
which depended on the answer) that you didn't respond to my post re cab
law a few days ago. Did you miss it?

I must have done.
Still have it?

Sure, it's Message-ID:
and here it is -

What's next, taxi drivers required to keep a bale of hay in the back?

That one went in 1976...

Did it?
That's interesting.
The only taxi-related legislation passed that year was the Local
Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976. It did not purport to
revoke, repeal or replace either the Town & Police Clauses Act 1847
(which operates in E&W outside London) or any of the various London
Cab Acts - or any of their provisions. Both the T&P Act and the London
Cab Acts are still in force.
So which Act compelled cab-drivers (until 1976, there was never any
mention of "taxi" drivers in national legislation) to carry hay?
I really want to know this (many pints may depend on it) - and which
provision it was that you say repealed it.

Twenty seconds or so of googling found the website of the Law
Commission: -

QUOTE
An enduring misconception about hackney carriages is that the driver
must keep a bale of hay in the boot to feed the (nowadays) non-
existent horse. This misconception probably comes about because of
section 51 of the London Hackney Carriage Act 1831 which made it an
offence, punishable by a 20 shilling fine, for the owner or driver of
a hackney carriage (or any one else) to:

"feed the horses of or belonging to any hackney carriage in any street,
road or common passage, save only with corn out of a bag, or with hay
which he shall hold or deliver with his hands".

This offence was repealed by the Statute Law (Repeals) Act 1976. As a
result any taxi driver who travels around accompanied by a bale of hay
does so purely for his own amusement and not in compliance with any
legal requirement.
ENDQUOTE

www.lawcom.gov.uk/docs/legal_oddities.pdf

My ISP has severely limited the bandwidth available for usenet in the
evenings (I'm going elsewhere as soon as I can) and it is possible
either that the post didn't propagate or that I left it in my "draft"
folder and didn't get to send it.

Let's check the sent and draft folders...

No... nothing... That's odd, because I recall writing that response.
But here's something like it from memory (perhaps a bit shorter than
the original):

From the above (and from a collateral reading of the Town Police
Clauses Act 1847), it appears that there simply never was a
requirement to carry hay in or on a cab. Rather there was a
prohibition on feeding a cab-horse except by handing straw direct to
the animal or by feeding it "corn from a bag" whilst on the highway.
That did not amount to an actual requirement to feed the horse in
those ways (the beast could be fed any old way off the highway),
simply a law against doing it differently whilst out on the highway.
Complying with that (local London) law by carrying a bag of corn or a
quantity of hay would be sensible (for a cab-driver), since it
obviated the need for mid-shift trips home or back to a base.

Note that this part of the law would never have had any effect at all
on taxis. A taxi/taxicab, by definition, is a motor-vehicle (trust me
on that one - there's a huge history of the distinctions between
cab-drivers [cabbies] and motor-cab [taxi] drivers), and the
prohibition of certain ways of feeding a beast of burden used to draw
the carriage would obviously be of no effect. There was, of course, no
requirement to carry hay or corn (any more than there was to carry
them on a horse-drawn cab, as discussed above).

If the prohibition on feeding a cab-horse other than by feeding it
straw from the driver's hands or from an bag of corn was repealed in
1976, it was both:

(a) unnecessary - no horse-drawn cab has been licensed in London since
1946 (presumably the licence expired in 1947) and the London Hackney
Carriage Act 1831 never applied outside the Metropolitan area; and

(b) not taxi-related (because a taxi is not horse-drawn, so is
unaffected by the 1831 prohibition which was revoked).

I think that was about the gist of it...

Mark McNeill wrote:

That reminds me - I was surprised, given your interest in the subject
(based AFAICT both on intellectual curiosity and on an amount of BEER
which depended on the answer) that you didn't respond to my post re cab
law a few days ago. Did you miss it?

Please see below in the thread which starts "Taxis and bales of hay".

On Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:54:18 +0000, JNugent
wrote:

snip
"feed the horses of or belonging to any hackney carriage in any street,
road or common passage, save only with corn out of a bag, or with hay
which he shall hold or deliver with his hands".
snip
Rather there was a prohibition on feeding a cab-horse except by handing straw direct to
the animal or by feeding it "corn from a bag" whilst on the highway.

You've been on that IAM course, haven't you?

The one where you learn that wisps of straw will tell you there's a
hay wagon round the corner?

Horses can't eat straw.

--

Ian D

Ian Dalziel wrote:
On Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:54:18 +0000, JNugent
wrote:

snip

"feed the horses of or belonging to any hackney carriage in any street,
road or common passage, save only with corn out of a bag, or with hay
which he shall hold or deliver with his hands".

snip

Rather there was a prohibition on feeding a cab-horse except by handing straw direct to
the animal or by feeding it "corn from a bag" whilst on the highway.


You've been on that IAM course, haven't you?

The one where you learn that wisps of straw will tell you there's a
hay wagon round the corner?

Horses can't eat straw.

Mea culpa.

I was brought up in the middle of a big city and although I remember
horses on the streets readily enough, I don't know much about their
dietary habits or about the differences (if any) between hay and straw.

On Feb 4, 1:29*am, "John Rowland"
wrote:
MIG wrote:
On Feb 3, 4:58 pm, "John Rowland"
wrote:
MIG wrote:

Hailing taxis and having them dart over to the kerb is dangerous and
illegal in any case, regardless of any bus lanes.

It's not dangerous if the driver doesn't do it dangerously. As for
it being illegal ... what *are* you talking about? Are you thinking
of minicabs?

I believe that minicabs can be hired by telephone or from the office,
while taxis can, in addition, be picked up at an authorised taxi rank.

I'm not aware of any kind of taxi that can legally be hailed in the
street, unless the rules have changed in the last few years.

So how come safely responding to a street hail is specifically tested in the
taxi driving test?

Because I was failing to distinguish between where they can ply their
trade and where they can passively allow themselves to be hailed.

No doubt their is some exemption that covers stopping at traffic
lights with their light on.



Taxis can legally respond to a hail nearly anywhere within their licensed
area. Exceptions include zigzags, clearways (not including red route
clearways), and a few short stretches of road in Kings Cross and Victoria
(marked with a thick red line by the kerb). They are subject to the same
laws on obstruction and dangerous driving as anyone else, which rules out
fast roundabouts and narrow slip roads. They can't pick up within 30 yards
of a (visible) rank which has a taxi on it - so the existence of a rank
creates an area where taxis can't pick up, rather than creating a place
where they can pick up. They are also not supposed to pick up in the few bus
lanes from which they are forbidden, however, there always seem to be taxis
stopped in the taxi-free bus lane in Bishopsgate by :Liverpool Street
Station, so I don't know how well this last one is enforced.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

On Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:47:59 +0000, JNugent
wrote:

Ian Dalziel wrote:
On Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:54:18 +0000, JNugent
wrote:

snip

"feed the horses of or belonging to any hackney carriage in any street,
road or common passage, save only with corn out of a bag, or with hay
which he shall hold or deliver with his hands".

snip

Rather there was a prohibition on feeding a cab-horse except by handing straw direct to
the animal or by feeding it "corn from a bag" whilst on the highway.


You've been on that IAM course, haven't you?

The one where you learn that wisps of straw will tell you there's a
hay wagon round the corner?

Horses can't eat straw.

Mea culpa.

I was brought up in the middle of a big city and although I remember
horses on the streets readily enough, I don't know much about their
dietary habits or about the differences (if any) between hay and straw.

Heh.

Hay is cut grass, straw is corn stalks. Cattle can digest straw - just
- but horses can't.

That's off the top of my head, so I could be wrong - but the same
thing they ain't.

--

Ian D

solar penguin wrote:

Personally, I'd love to see all forms of private transport banned

I'd like to see YOU banned.

Graham

Brimstone wrote:

Neil Williams wrote:
On Sun, 3 Feb 2008 08:08:15 -0000, "solar penguin"
wrote:

Personally, I'd love to see all forms of private transport banned,
and force them to suffer the way I do!

While I imagine your situation is not a fun one to be in, it is not
sensible to restrict everyone because of one person's disability,
rather just to accommodate that person in society as best as possible
(such as by the existence of public transport, in your case).

Or shoot the moronic little ****; not because he's disabled but because he
wants to drag the world down to his own sorry state. It's the typical "if I
can't then no one else should be allowed to" attitude that bedevils progress
in the UK.

Indeed.

We're screwed.

Graham

Derek Geldard wrote:

"solar penguin" wrote:
Nuxx Bar wrote:

You're only half right.

Aren't we all ?

Except when we're half wrong.

Graham