Bikes, bumps, and a burn-up...

Another pedicab (a.k.a. another traffic hazard) caught my eye last night. Note the lack of lighting (hours of darkness, around 2am in Central London off a busy Oxford Street on Saturday Night). It's also parked up illegally on not one but two crossing points, this being the corner of a traffic lit junction. If a car parked there, it'd be lifted rather rapidly by Westminster... yet this gormless candidate from the Darwin School of Parking seems to have got away with it.

I'll say it until I'm blue on the face, most likely, but the riders of these things are dangerous. They do NOT obey the rules of the road, and they appear to have no regard for others on either the road or the pavement. Their machines do not meet even the bare minimum of regulations for road-going conveyances - hells bells, they don't even have red reflectors, let alone lights, and they weave in and out of traffic with wild abandon, whether they have paying passengers or not. When the hell will someone actually DO something about these morons?

Next up... bump!

The owner of the somewhat wrecked vehicle behind the Police car obviously watched too much Dukes of Hazard as a kid... he tried to impact weld the post he hit to his engines' piston block! Messy!

I was a bit luckier than my colleagues following me a few minutes later, mind... shortly after I passed the scene, a broadcast over my two-way radio informed me that the road had closed "for a short hold" to allow for recovery of the wreck. "Short hold" in this case meant, I was later told, forty-five minutes of waiting for a recovery truck driver to meander all over the place trying to get a good angle from which to lower his stingray lift flat bed recovery truck, attach a cable, and drag the thing onto the back of his flat bed - oops!

And lastly this time around... a burn-up :)

I've been trying to get a decent photo of this guy for ages :) Finally got a half decent shot this time :) he's shown great initiate in setting up his BBQ set opposite a night club in south London, but unluckily for this lad, it was not only cold, but a tad damp last night, which reduced, rather dramatically, the amount of potential customers he could serve!

He did, however, have a full rack of (presumably) chicken on the go when I passed him at five a.m. this morning morning, though - being a little blocked of nose, I couldn't smell it - which may or may not have been a good thing ;-)