Jeremy Vine offers to pay £75 fine of woman booked for cycling in Bedford town centre

Are electric scooters and pushchairs allowed in Bedford town centre during the restriction time periods?  If so, it’s total descrimination against pedestrians who happen to be on a bike. Wake up council you are infringing human rights. 

Such a fucking pedantic attitude I agree . But this is  also about revenue . Look at parking tickets and how much revenue it generates . Every fucking council is the same and the police as  well they are.revenue generators .  Did you know in some parts of the states the law just take your assets with no   Reason other than they can https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/05/18/how-police-steal-citize...  This law  will come here eventually.  We used to have a jeep . ( don’t need a car where we live in London now the kids are older )  MY wife turned on to the main road on Xmas eve . Not any traffic anywhere ,she heard a bang from the back of the jeep so she pulled over ( my youngest son was in the baby seat at the time ) to check it was ok .  She had not quite closed the tail door . She shut it closed  and went on her way again no traffic anywhere .  She got a £60 ticket for stopping in the road .Fucking ridiculous and to fight the ticket we she would have had to have taken a day off work and travel right across the other side of London . They had video of the whole thing ,not another vehicle in site on the video yet they claimed it was dangerous. Pulling over to the side of a very wide fucking road may I  add that council cars ,workman and disabled cars do all the fucking  time  on a daily. Even if there had been traffic she would have obstructed no one . This is what you get with privatised governments who only care about cash control power and squeezing the fuck out of everybody whenever they can .,,,,,,,,cunts all of them . 

Dear Jeremy,

The offer of £75 is very kind. However, a donation on a larger scale would get the poor lady out of the shit hole that is Bedford. Keep giving and she may get past Flitwick, Rushden, Luton, Milton Keynes and out of the North London / East Midlands overspill and provide her with a much more positive outlook on life.

Yours,

Former part time resident of Bedford (now cured)

What's to stop you ignoring them and cycling off other than British politeness? Also, how can they enforce the fine if you don't give them your details?

Another medium sized town (my home town) going rapidly downhill, with nonsense like this really not helping. Behind the camera, Marks & Spencer’s has just closed down - next door to that, was Woolworths and then BHS - all gone. Opposite, to the right is Beales department store, looking seriously on its uppers for ages - maybe Sports Direct can rescue them? 

I’m not convinced that large-scale pedestrianisation is as helpful a measure as it first seemed. In Bedford’s case, how desperate do things have to get before someone really does something?? About a mile east is the Castle Road area, which is morphing into quite a nice bustling  “village” high street sort of affair. It’s traversed by a normal road, no dedicated parking. The planners haven’t got to it. It’s not perfect, but compare and contrast.

Can we have the same level of law enforcement on the ordinary roads please?

Handlebarcam : let me educate you, educate you on the hypnotic power of the hazard flasher. Feel the power of of the hazard flasher, “it’s only for a minute”, it seems to stay.  Switched off, “what’s that bloke doing stopped there?” activate it and its hypnotic effect is released.  

Add a scrappy note in the windscreen, written with the worst biro ever saying that you are working in a nearby property and we are in complete awe.  We can only imagine what vital task you are engaged in, and that frequent visits to the van are going to make all the difference - restoring Lassie’s sense of smell,  healing Flipper’s poorly flipper,  fixing Skippy’s poorly knee. 

So equipped, you are as the Samurai and your van can do literally anything, you are unstoppable, and untouchable - eat a a Greggs pasty on the top of a volcano, drive the surface of the Moon (to drop off spare parts for Apollo 11) drive up Sword or Juno beach on D-day and sit reading the Daily Star, deliver pizza to the Taj Mahal, stare at your ‘phone in Buckingham Palace Gardens. 

Easiest option is to not cycle in what are traditionally pedestrian areas? Even before fines somebody would castigate you. I remember being shouted at by a tramp for wheeling side saddle and ready to dismount if needed. It's an odd day when rolling at 5mph is worse than begging all day and using the backstreet as a toilet.

The fines are enforced and go to a private contract firm. It is nothing more than legalised extortion. The PSPOs have every incentive to tackle those they can easily bully into paying. The arrangement has nothing to do with tackling antisocial behaviour.

It is a symptom of society's warped values that commercialisation for minor infringements of questionable petty rules can be sold to private businesses. Cycle sensibly through places like Bedford and you will be pounced on by overzealous wardens dishing out a £75 fine. Have your bicycle stolen and no-one will want to know.

Just like helmet rule fines, disgusting and against innate freedoms/human rights to go about ones business when you're not presenting harm to others. places like that I wouldn't frequent.

And as per the article a few weeks ago re Hull city centre, I cyclked back through the town centre, past a plastic plod and not an eye blinked, I was moving slowly as it was quite a busy late Monday morning making sure I was watching everyone who might intersect with me so I had plenty of time to slow further/adjust course. No bother whatsoever, oh and the majority of other cyclists weren't drug addicts/sellers as per one posters summation of the city centre!

These things (PSPO) should be challneged as to their validty in law and also with regards to any actual threat of harm

That tweet is timed at 3.54 pm and it looks completely empty there. Can Bedford council please explain what harm that woman was doing to*anyone*???

I got done in Peterborough for the same thing despite the lack of signage and pointlessness of it. The fella who shopped me had a body cam. I requested the footage under FoI and as they didn't give it to me within 28 days I argued that my right to a fair appeal had been compromised as well as Peterborough Council breaking the law in not giving me the footage. I also detailed the inadequate signage and the fact that the PSPO was probably being used against the spirit of what it was intended for (there's some government white paper from 2017 suggesting that certain councils might be using PSPOs over zealously). Eventually, the council just stopped replying to me after I threatened them with legal action w.r.t the FoI request (despite the fact I was never actually gonna do anything about it!). In the end, I never had to pay the fine. The moral of the story is, if you're bored enough it's possible to get out of it!

With the money raised from fines, any town introducing these public space, and send the councillors on a paid jolly to any big town or city in Holland, Belgium or Denmark to show them how it should be done.

Doesn't work like that Jem, motorists are very much individuals, few bad apples and all that, (apart from when the opportunity of breaking the speed limit presents) whereas cyclists are a small homogenous mass, all responsible for each indiscretion, a bit like members of BAME populations, or muslims, but definitely not white christian males.

On his basis, I assume that all motorists will soon be banned in Bedford town centre, as a result of just a few speeding drivers, to make the town "safe and pleasant" for all???

When this was mentioned on his ch5 show, the guest, Robert Winston again called for registration and insurance for cyclists (because that works to prevent lawlessness so effectively for motorists) and seemingly could not recall his alleged assault by an errant pavement cyclist.  Hmmm.

Well done for this Mr Vine.

So, do all the shops in Bedford town centre get deliveries of stock by teams of people carrying individual boxes on their backs, sherpa-style, from the nearest road, where they have also parked safely and legally? Or do vans drive up the pedestrianized streets and nobody bats an eye? And I bet they do so at all times of day, whether technically allowed to or not, as do youths on BMXs that are too hard to catch, whereas from the photos it looks like this lady was riding in the evening, long past the peak of foot traffic. But still, gotta meet those targets.

There's a simple solution to this.  Don't go or live in Bedford.  Let the car drivers chew up their own city.