Singlespeed & Fixed Gear “I still feel that variable gears are only for people over forty-five. Isn’t it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailer? We are getting soft…As for me, give me a fixed gear!”

Henri Desgrange (31 January 1865 – 16 August 1940), a French bicycle racer and sports journalist who set twelve world track cycling records, including the hour record of 35.325 kilometres on 11 May 1893, and the organiser behind the 1^st Tour de France of 1903

Charlie Alliston [new tattoo ‘trophy’(?)]

Our British ‘broken’ scales of justice came into use again just last week, when teenage pedestrian killer Charlie Alliston [the first cyclist ever to have been charged with the offence] was acquitted of the manslaughter of a lovely 44-year-old lady crossing the busy road in central London in her lunch hour, a year and a half ago.

This was certainly NOT the first time a speeding, shouting, twenty mile an hour, ‘thrill-seeker’, cyclist has hit and killed a pedestrian, as it certainly happened a decade ago to Rhiannon Bennett, when her reckless affluent middle-age killer, Jason Howard, riding a 5 grand customized carbon fibre titanium bicycle no less (without reflectors on the back or pedals though, so non-compliant with the Highway Code), hurtled towards and mowed-down the teenager, as she and her group of friends walked to the village shops, smashing her head on the kerb. HE got away with a derisory 2¼ grand fine (not even the maximum of £2,500), despite a previous conviction and his admission that he could have avoided her if he had slowed down, eh? Tellingly, he had shouted “move because I’m not stopping” before he finally hit the group.

Oh yes, in this most recent case, the legal authorities tried their best to get justice for Mrs Kim Briggs, who had sustained non-survivable brain injuries when mowed down by Alliston, a crazy anti-social cyclist (wearing a top with ‘Anti Social’ on it), who was acting out, in real life, his personal fantasy of being like American alley cat style, film stunt cyclist, who screeches and dodges traffic through city streets at breakneck speed.

But the lax indulgent law we have here let them down, and despite the litany of lies told in and out of court by Alliston about what had happened; he even lied about the victim being on her phone at the time of the collision (known categorically to be wrong), and ignoring his warning calls, he nevertheless got off, when on conviction he could have faced a maximum of life imprisonment. In many of our minds, Alliston actions fall well into line with involuntary, or gross negligence manslaughter term, which covers the situation where a death results from an unlawful act, or from gross negligence.

Unfortunately, the Defence persuaded the jury otherwise, though the jury did nevertheless find him guilty of the other serious offence he was charged with, that of ‘wanton and furious driving’. Now like us majority, you probably have never heard of that one before, eh? Well it is an offence that dates back to the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, and yet that remains the only law covering the most serious cycling offences which has been used for successful prosecutions in recent years [It was of course originally aimed at the wanton drivers of ‘horse-drawn carriages’ who showed disdain for human life].

All and sundry at trial could see, including the Judge, that Alliston was totally without a grain of remorse and he just didn’t give a damn. Now instead of immediately getting banged-up, he’s off home to enjoy himself ‘on bail ‘until sentenced in mid-September, despite the clear fact that he is facing jail-time. Like all UK criminals, that’s what happens in this day and age, and he thinks he needn’t be too concerned – is he right? Probably.

The MAXIMUM punishment he faces now, will be a 2 years custodial sentence, and you can fully expect the Judge to be more lenient [his lawyers will plead, due to his young age (and possible clean record?), that he should get a slap on the wrist, eh?], so perhaps just a year – which actually will turn out in reality to be only 6 months in a cushy open prison [you see the Judge will say ‘her hands are tied’ and she can’t give him a harsher jail term simply because he has no remorse and won’t accept that he has done wrong or refuses to accept any responsibility whatsoever in this tragedy].

IS THAT JUSTICE WHEN HE HAS SENSLESSLY AND NEEDLESSLY KILLED SOMEONE and has left a husband a devastated widower, and her two young children with no mother, and them all to suffer the pain of an ongoing life sentence, do you think?

Many, many months AFTER the fatal crash killing, Alliston inexplicable and insensitively had a ghoulish designed ‘death skull’ with three blood-red tears coming out, tattooed behind his left ear [the skull representing death and the tears as used by some criminals to show they have killed someone?]. Mind you, he hid it by growing his hair during the actual trial and then immediately had it cut when the Jury went out – seem a bit like a sick mental problem, to you?

Now, the past our law makers had found that juries were for some obscure reason reluctant to find killer drivers guilty of manslaughter – that is why the optionally statutory offence of causing death by dangerous driving was also brought-in some thirty years ago, so it surprised many of us that it was tried in this case against a cyclist, who is able to claim car drivers are much more of an enormous risk, so the law should concentrate on them to try and improve safety on our roads – what a crass cope-out, don’t you think? The push-bike evangelists seem prepared to ignore the dreadful fact that perhaps some 3 pedestrians are killed EVERY year by cyclists, but they don’t count, eh? Try telling that to those killed and their families? Surely, there is no defence in any circumstances to seeking to excuse one crime by pointing-out that others are doing worse things, is there?

It is an inescapable, undeniable fact though that in this Country, there exists a group of cyclists riding our roads, who clearly present the risk of doing physical damage to pedestrians, so such folk do need to be reigned-in and harshly dealt with when they offend, but that doesn’t happen just now, does it? No, never mind not enforcing the letter of existing legislation, that is simply because currently, the necessary law is just not there to protect society against the increasing number of egoistic, obscenity-spewing, bloody dangerous, inconsiderate, wildly out-of-control, excessive testosterone driven, cyclists – and who is to blame for that, do you think?

Well, it is our successive Governments of course, who consistently have done ABSOLUTELY nothing about it, ably aided and abetted by our out of touch members of Parliament, as well as the cyclists’ own groups. Just a few years ago the MP Andrea Leadsom tried to introduce a Private Members Bill to toughen-up the law against ‘dangerous cycling’ – but it failed because the Government didn’t back-it as promised and MPs decided that extending daylight saving was much more important to discuss than actually introducing the specific offence of causing death by dangerous cycling {They all, including ministers, should now consider themselves ‘killer lovers’, don’t you think?].

Perhaps, Alliston in his trial, ought really to have pleaded diminished responsibility, due to impaired mental capacity, as that would have been quite believable to many of us outsiders, eh? After his reckless riding, he had even ranted at his poor victim who was lying critically injured in the road, then later posted abusive, accusing, smearing, stuff about her in online internet posts to falsely blame her for the collision, claiming it happened as she had zero respect for cyclists., and even more so wrote a pack of lies in London’s Evening Standard newspaper about the event, which we now all know was indeed an ‘accident waiting to happen’, wasn’t it?

Yes, rebel Alliston started on this particular road to notoriety, when he first removed the front breaks of his road-bike, to get the extra thrill he found in that [Two year’s previous to this dreadful collision, he had tweeted: ‘The time when you first take your brakes off and feeling like you’re in a @lucasbrunelle movie’ (Lucas Brunelle being the film-making stunt cycle rider)]. That’s why HE thought it was ok and “cool”, to ride around London without a front brake, which even responsible courier cyclists know is not, as they consider that having such a brake is the right thing to do (even if they are keen ‘fixies’).

Then just a MONTH before he killed Mrs Briggs, he then bought the off-road Planet X carbon-frame track-bike with its trendy, cycling ‘fetish’, fixed-gear rear wheel, with no front break, as used for velodrome racing, so 100% illegal to ride in our streets. This was bought second-hand, when he lied to reassured the seller that it was only going to be used ‘legally’ on the track – but he had no intention of ever doing that whatsoever, did he? [NO, so he blatantly lied to the Court when he claimed that he didn’t realise his bike was illegal on the road, when he had bought the thing off the LFGSS forum, a cyclist group focused on fixed-gear bikes, and which is crystal clear about that, eh?]. Such bikes are difficult to ride and control because you can’t even freewheel with a fixed-gear, as the peddles keep turning.

A professional study of the incident concluded that Alliston would have been able to stop and avoid the collision if the bike had been fitted with a front brake, as required by law for exactly that reason. [As tested, a Track bike took 19M to stop – six times the 3M distance of a Road bike (when Alliston had as much as 6½M to stop, but of course couldn’t or wouldn’t (at least if he’d slowed sufficiently, her life could have been saved – he didn’t even get out of the saddle to stand on the peddles as the technique most used to stop as quickly as possible), did he?]. Even a 20mph car can fully stop in 12M.

[To stop quickly on fixie-bike which hasn’t been fitted with a front brake, riders can force the bike to skid by locking-up the rear wheel, or use a skip stop where you do a wheelie on the front wheel, or try to pedal backwards].

Fixed-gear may have been the old fashioned original drive for cycles, but it has been re-popularist over the past fifteen years or so, for reasons apparent only to its bike enthusiasts?

After Alliston’s collision with Mrs Kim Briggs, he was more concerned about damage to his illegal ‘fixie’ bike, than he was about the fatal injuries he had caused.

Like a car, a bike in the wrong hands simply becomes an offensive weapon, so a fit 150lb cyclist hurtling down the road, can easily cause fatal or life changing injuries to an adult or even more so a child. Its combined weight in a collision would be in the region of say 175lb, delivered at a speed of some 20 miles per hour. Imagine that hitting somebody and just compare it with what physical damage would be done to a person by striking them on a full swing with a very large sledgehammer, weighing only 20lb, and say at even half the same speed, eh? [That devastation human body impact force, is precisely why we have a law forcing car back-seat passengers to “belt-up” to preventing them being thrown forward and killing those in the front if the car is involved in a bad accident, isn’t it?].

As soon Alliston, the self-styled ‘anti-social’, risk-take cyclist, realised he was actually facing the court high jump, he quickly decided (on legal advice, perhaps?) he was quite ill (post dramatic stress disorder of course) and as always happens in court, illness (together with depression now), was rolled-out at the Old Baily by his Defence team. Well, his demeanor in Court certainly didn’t appear to demonstrate that at all, did it? He was ‘anything but’ what one would expect from a fit young man accused of the dreadful crime of homicide, and remorseful for causing the death of an innocent person. He was an unlikeable, arrogant, self-confident prat, who showed his utter disregard for his inexcusable actions and indeed distain for our society that includes him even now still sporting clothing with ‘antisocial’ emblazoned across it.

[The cycling fraternity apologists would have it, that there isn’t a problem with ‘antisocial’ cyclists, so how comes then that in 2015, they were involved in 2 deaths amongst 525 other casualties (which was a fifty percent increase in just 6 years), eh?]