On Sat, 23 Aug 2014 19:09:06 +0100, Bob Henson wrote:

Uncle Peter wrote:

On Sat, 23 Aug 2014 09:10:20 +0100, Tim Streater wrote:

In article , Uncle Peter wrote:

On Fri, 08 Aug 2014 15:39:14 +0100, robgraham
wrote:

An interesting position exists in Scotland in that the Land Access laws
define a bike as an aid to pedestrianism (or some equivalent wording) hence
allowing bikes on mountain tracks. I wonder if anyone has used that as a
justification for cycling on the road footpaths.

As usual Scotland has more sensible laws. England actually treats bicycles
like cars!

And so they should be. Except for children up to, say, 14.

My car can do 110mph on the flat, my bike can do 26mph. My car weighs
1000kg, my bike weighs 100kg. See the difference? E=.5mv^2 so the car
has 179 times more kinetic energy to impart to what it hits.

But your car cannot do 110 mph anywhere a pedestrian is walking.

Of course it can. And the fact is cars go faster than bikes in a built up area, breaking the law or not, they get overtaken.

At the
legal speed limit in town there is precious little difference between being
struck by a car at 30 mph (shortly to be 20 mph in many places, they tell
us) and a bicycle at 26 mph. The bike has far more spiky bits sticking out
than a car, and is likely to inflict nearly as much, if not more, damage
than a car. The cyclist is much more likely to not be looking where he/she
is going too, as they seem to think their special green status gives them
authority to ignore normal rules - especially red lights.

Absolute twaddle. The laws of physics state that if a 100kg object is struck by a 1000kg object, it's gonna get hurt a lot more than if both objects were 100kg. Look up the conservation of momentum, and you'll find that with a car, the car does not change speed significantly, but the pedestrian is accelerated to the speed of the car almost instantly. If a bike hits a pedestrian (with a similar weight), then the pedestrian and the cyclist will both be accelerated/decelerated by half the speed of the cyclist.