Well, I’ve started to put together the PowerPoint presentation for next Tuesdays Street Talk. If you’re in London, please pop along to see me discuss such items as Bull Taming, the British Class System and the Ford Capri. I shall also, as a finale, be taking you on a pictoral trip from my house to the sea on a Worthing Cycle Network Route before openly wondering why West Sussex Council Highways Officials shouldn’t be lined up against a wall and shot. Or at least made to ride a bicycle along the Magical Mystery Tours that they design and build. I shall be giving away Fererro Rocher and a Worthing Bucket and Spade! Yes, I know Worthing has a pebble beach but only at high tide.
Also, if you are in Worthing this evening, do pop along to the Beechwood Hall Hotel for 7.30pm (in the Bar, obviously), where the monthly meetings of our local campaign group, Worthing Revolutions takes place. We had to change the name from ‘Revolution’ to ‘Revolutions’ as ‘Revolution’ sounded a bit too…well, Revolutionary for Worthing.
In local news:
From Worthing Herald (1 April 2011) – my emphasis in bold:
THE elderly cyclist who was knocked off his bike in Goring yesterday (March 31) has been released from Worthing Hospital.
The 82-year-old man was released last night (Thursday, March 31) after his bike collided with a black Honda Jazz at The Strand roundabout, near The Boulevard, at around 10.45am that day.
He was taken to Worthing Hospital with head injuries, which were not as serious as police first feared.
The local male driver of the black Honda Jazz was shaken but uninjured in the collision.
Traffic was diverted for more than an hour as police secured evidence from the road and made it safe.
Anyone with information is asked to contact Sussex Police on 0845 60 70 999 quoting Operation Electra.
From The Argus (6 April 2011):
A schoolboy has been left with serious head injuries after being struck by a car outside a college.
Emergency services went to the A23, Crawley Avenue, Crawley, at 3.15pm yesterday, where a 12-year-old boy had been injured following a collision with a silver Vauxhall Meriva saloon car outside Ifield Community College.
An air ambulance landed at the scene, but the boy, who lives with his family in Crawley, was subsequently taken to St Georges Hospital. Tooting, South London, by road.
The 38-year old Crawley woman who was driving the car was unhurt.
Road closures were in place at Gossops Drive and Ifield roundabout whilst the boy was taken to hospital and the scene was examined by police investigators.
A Sussex Police spokesman said; “We are asking anyone who saw what happened to contact our Road Policing Unit at Haywards Heath via 0845 60 70 999 quoting Operation Fraser.”
Finally from The Argus (6 April 2011)
A man has been charged with causing the death of a 28-year-old passenger by dangerous driving in a crash in central Brighton.
Jonathan Wenham, 40 of Ridgeside Avenue, Brighton was charged on Tuesday with causing the death of Nicholas Messenger, 28, of Old Kent Road, London.
Mr Messenger was a passenger in a BMW which collided with a tree in Grand Parade on January 21.
Wenham was also charged with driving with excess alcohol, making a false statement to obtain insurance and failing to stop at the scene of an accident.
He has been bailed to appear at Brighton Magistrates’ Court on April 21.
The Lo Fidelity Bicycle Club 
Someone should tell The Argus that unless a tree is Tolkienesque, it cannot be involved in a collision. Our style guide here (which is ignored a lot, it must be said) states that collisions / collidings are between two moving objects, and we’re talking more than yer average tree rustles.
Looking forward to the Street Talk; illness forced me to miss the last one and I’ll be blowed if it makes me miss this one too.
And meanwhile, the solution to congestion in West Sussex is to… build more roads.
That’s always worked, hasn’t it?
Discussions on a notorious West Sussex bottleneck are to be held on Friday.
Nick Herbert, Arundel and South Downs MP, will be meeting with Arun District Council and West Sussex County Council in Littlehampton on April 8 to discuss the A27 and, in particular, the need for an Arundel bypass
The stupid thing is that Arundel already has a bypass. It’s a single carriageway road, that does, admittedly, get very busy at peak hours, although obviously not intolerably so, otherwise people would have stopped using it, or would have switched to using a bike or the train.
Of course the stupid solution – the one that doesn’t involve tackling the root cause of the congestion – would be to waste tens of millions of pounds on a new dual carriageway, creating extra capacity that is only going to be filled up in a few years’ time.
But that’s what’s going to happen. Excellent.
It is amazing the way the press always blames the victim for the collision, utterly amazing 😦
Do you not think this is just shoddy language rather than an attempt to blame the first incident on the cyclist? Local press hacks rarely have the time, inclination or payscale to justify rereading their prose for logical progression.
Nick Herbert, Arundel and South Downs MP, will be meeting with Arun District Council and West Sussex County Council in Littlehampton on April 8 to discuss the A27 and, in particular, the need for an Arundel bypass
Ah, apparently the current road around Arundel isn’t a “bypass”, it’s a “relief road”. As explained by a WSCC councillor at an A27 meeting a decade or so ago. Quite seriously, I think!
I don’t think they’ll ever find the money for an Arundel bypass, but if they do it will merely make the currently-free-flowing A27 either side busier and Worthing even more congested. A Worthing bypass is most unlikely before the oil runs out.
The reason WSCC are so keen to emphasise the need to “improve” the A27 and the A23 is that both roads are maintained by the Highways Agency. Focussing on these means WSCC doesn’t need to spend any of their own money, and the real problem of hopeless congestion in West Sussex towns can be quietly ignored.
The Guardian readers’ editor was tackling the issue of ‘accident’ vs collision & crashes yesterday – he came down on the side of continuing to use ‘accident’ for most incidents, but it’s interesting to see the reasoning behind it, & that it’s not just journalistic laziness. I think it will change though. And there’s absolutely no excuse for ‘a cyclist collided with a car’ unless it really was the cyclist pedalling full tilt into the side of the car – surely in English when we say ‘X collided with Y’ we are implying that X was the active collider and Y merely the collidee.