Cockroaches of the road.

Positive coverage of cycling in the newspaper sometimes hard to come by, particularly in The Australian. There's exceptions to every rule however and it was nice to see a senior journalist like Greg Bearup coming up with a sophisticated analysis of the state of play on our roads. He managed to avoid all of the stock cliches that seem to plague articles on cycling common in the mainstream media and raise some interesting questions about how cyclists and motorist interact. But in my opinion the cover image and the headline really let the article down. (To read the story google the headline: Are Cyclists Fair Game and click the first link. Or if you're an online subsrbiber to the Australian, click here.)

The photo selected was this stock image, which has been cropped to fit the vertical format of the magazine cover.

I'm a cyclist, so I'll always complain about something, but I really have to wonder if an image of someone riding a time trial bike at night with no lights on the right hand side of the road in Warsaw, Poland is really the best image to chose to illustrate an article on cycling in Australia? What would have been wrong, as my mate Tim pointed out, with a less menacing image from Copenhagen? Like this perhaps?

1748km so far this year.