Strange clothing choice (From Oxford Mail)

Strange clothing choice

10:30am Wednesday 30th May 2012 in Letters

I read with interest the front page story (Friday’s Oxford Mail) about Oxford City Council’s plans to spend up to £840,000 to improve safety to cyclists over the next four years.

I also observed the photographs of city councillor Colin Cook (‘a keen cyclist’) riding his bike, and Richard Mann (‘chairman of Cyclox’), also astride his machine, dicing with the traffic only inches away from him under the Botley Road railway station bridge.

I couldn’t help but notice that both of the riders rigorously campaigning for cyclists’ safety were helmetless, and one of them had his wide-bottomed trousers flapping in the breeze perilously close to the chain.

When I took my Cycling Proficiency Test in the late 1950s, we weren’t allowed to partake without a pair of bike clips.

It reinforces the argument that cyclists have to take a certain amount of responsibility for their own safety, and these two gentlemen surely must set an example to all cyclists when asking for expensive safety measures to be handed out to protect them.

CLIVE HARRISON, Quarhill Close, Over Norton