It might seem counterintuitive in a sport built around speed, but the world governing body for competitive cycling wants to slow elite riders down.

Worried about high-speed crashes during pro-racing events, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) has proposed a cap on the gear size riders can use. The idea is to lower the possible top speed bikes can achieve.

The risks are real, too. At the recent Tour Down Under Men’s Classic in Australia, a high-speed multi-rider crash on the final corner sent bikes into the barriers and into the crowd, badly injuring a spectator.

In August this year, champion British rider Chris Froome crashed while training in France, suffering a collapsed lung, broken ribs and a spinal fracture.

But would restricting gear size prevent these kinds of high-speed crashes? Certainly, not everyone thinks so.

Earlier this month, a Belgian court paused the rule change after teams and a major cycle component maker argued the safety case was not proven. While slower bikes might sound safer, they argue, the evidence tells a different story.

What the evidence tells us

The proposed rule would limit the largest gear size to 54 teeth on the front chainring and 11 on the rear sprocket. The idea is simple: lower the top gear to reduce top speed and, in theory, cut risk.

But while speed clearly matters when it comes to crashes, it is only one part of how they happen in a tightly packed peloton (the main pack of riders in a road race).

Our recent review of 18 studies of race speed and crash risk found two clear patterns:

• higher speed makes injuries worse once a crash occurs
• but the link between speed and the chance of crashing is weaker and depends on context.

Injury rates in the UCI WorldTour have climbed even though average race speeds have been steady. So, something else is at work.

We also examined the proposed gear cap itself. Based on our analysis, we argue any rule change should be evidence-based rather than simply a reaction to pressure after high-profile incidents.

Understanding why crashes occur is central to this. Essentially, they are about people and space, and happen for a number of reasons:

• when riders fight for position as they enter a narrowing corner
• when sprint “trains” (riders in the same team lining up for aerodynamic efficiency) cross wheels
• or when road “furniture” appears too late to be avoided.

In this year’s Paris–Nice race, for example, Mattias Skjelmose struck a traffic island at speed and abandoned the race. Reports described it as a poorly marked obstacle.

Course design, peloton density and inconsistent rule enforcement often play a bigger role than a few extra kilometers per hour.

Why a gear limit won’t help much

On hill descents, where many serious injuries occur, riders freewheel in a tucked body position. Gravity and aerodynamics set the speed—gearing does not.

When riders are actually pedaling in a sprint, a 54×11 gear at high “cadence” (around 110–120 revolutions per minute) gives a speed of roughly 65 kilometers per hour (km/h). The very fastest finishes in elite men’s races reach about 75 km/h—the absolute peak speed.

A cap on gearing would trim roughly 5–10 km/h from the top-end, bringing the fastest sprints down to around 65–70 km/h. But most sprint pileups start below those speeds and are triggered by contact or line changes.

Lowering everyone’s top speed could even bunch the field more tightly and raise the risk of contact. The pro-cycling world already knows what helps:

These steps match what other high-speed sports have done to reduce injuries. Motor sports redesign the environment rather than just limit speed, with NASCAR and IndyCar having adopted energy-absorbing barriers to cut wall-impact forces.

And alpine skiing manages risk with course design, as well as nets and airbag protection to control speed and crash severity.

Similar approaches to safety are used in aviation, mining and health care. The aim is to focus on the environment and behavior, measure exposure, fix the hotspots and share what works to keep improving safety.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“If there’s a camera that knows the cards, there is always some kind of underlying threat. Customers are gonna be essentially at the mercy of the person setting up the machine,” poker player and card house owner Doug Polk previously told WIRED. “If you’re showing up in a private game and there’s a shuffler, I would say you should run for the hills.”

Hacking the Deckmate 2, according to prosecutors, was only one of several cheating techniques the mobsters allegedly used, albeit the one that’s described in the most detail in the indictment. The charging document also claims that they used invisibly marked cards, electronic poker chip trays, phones that could secretly read cards’ markings, and even specially designed glasses and contact lenses.

While the details of those schemes weren’t spelled out by prosecutors, they’re all well known in the casino security world, says Sal Piacente, a professional cheating consultant and the president of UniverSal Game Protection. Cards can, for instance, have hidden bar codes on their edges—printed invisibly, such as with infrared ink—that can be deciphered by a reader hidden in a chip tray or in a phone case laid on the table. In other cases, cards are similarly marked on their backs with ink that’s only visible with special glasses or contacts.

“This kind of equipment is being used more than you would think,” Piacente says. “When you go to a private game, there’s no regulation, no commission, no rules. Anything goes.”

Britain’s flagship home insulation program has received a damning verdict from the National Audit Office. Under the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme, tens of thousands of households have been left with faulty or even dangerous installations. It’s a result, the auditors say, of weak oversight, poor skills and confused accountability.

This report is troubling not only because of the human cost but because it exposes a deeper failure of governance in how the UK tries to decarbonize home heating. It’s a complex task that demands long-term stewardship, but is instead being left to the market.

The ECO was designed to make energy suppliers help households cut emissions and bills. Suppliers are the companies that buy electricity or gas from generators and sell it to you—the company named on your bills is your supplier. In theory, the ECO means these suppliers meet government-set carbon or energy saving targets by funding insulation and heating upgrades for households, with regulators checking that installations qualify.

The ECO was preceded by two other schemes that operated on the same principle. For years, they worked reasonably well for simple and low cost measures like loft or cavity wall insulation. But in 2013, the ECO was launched and expanded to cover more complex and expensive retrofits like solid wall insulation—an unprecedented shift.

So what went wrong?

The National Audit Office’s latest findings confirm fears that this was an approach set up to fail. Many installations require major remediation, some pose immediate health risks. The problems are familiar: an under-skilled workforce, uncertified installers, weak regulation and oversight.

Individually, these problems could be fixed. The government could improve installer training, tighten audits and crack down on fraud. But together, they reveal a deeper problem: a misplaced belief that market-based tools can deliver foundational change.

Energy efficiency obligations such as ECO work well for standardized, low-risk actions, like swapping bulbs or improving boilers. But, as we warned back in 2012, they are less suited to complex, capital-intensive retrofits of millions of households that require lots of coordination and long-term financing.

The UK’s energy efficiency governance still sits at arm’s length from the realities in people’s homes. Responsibilities are split confusingly between suppliers, Whitehall departments, auditors and local authorities, and it can often seem like no one is really in charge.

That’s why the failings highlighted in the National Audit Office report are not just implementation glitches or down to some “bad apple” installers. They’re failings of a governance model designed for incremental change, not the transformation required for net zero.

German lessons

If the UK really wants to retrofit millions of homes, it should look to what’s worked in other countries. Germany’s long-running KfW loan program is one example. For more than three decades it has supported high-performance refurbishments through low-interest loans and grants. Successive German governments have recognized that the returns—in jobs, tax revenues, economic stimulus—have consistently outweighed the upfront cost.

By contrast, ECO has been repeatedly restructured, with shifting targets and funding levels that make it hard to plan ahead. Treating home retrofit as a short-term obligation rather than a long-term national project has left the UK far behind its peers.

Retrofitting homes is inherently local (you can’t pick up your house and move it to a different area). Local authorities should therefore play a much stronger role in coordinating delivery, enforcing quality, and linking retrofit to other social goals such as tackling fuel poverty.

Getting councils involved would align retrofit with local priorities rather than distant central government targets. It could also rebuild trust among people who may understandably be wary of such schemes.

The UK’s forthcoming warm homes plan is a chance to reset. The government should take a hard look at the tools at our disposal and think about what is needed to foster the creative and courageous policy needed to decarbonize our homes.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.