On Sat, 19 May 2012 19:33:36 +0100, "Simon Mason"
wrote:


Unusually, BikeBiz.com, an industry newsletter, and the Guardian broke an
embargo to publicly criticise the IAM and its statistics in advance of
publication by the rest of the media. Reaction across cycling forums and
Twitter was quick to condemn the validity of the IAM's figures and to
question the organisation's motives and integrity.

Funny how they didn't do this on any of the previous polls they had
encouraged cyclists to "participate" in, often many times.

I'm trying hard to see this debacle as a case of good intentions gone
horribly wrong

You mean the cyclists took their eye off the ball and forgot to stuff
this vote?

But I'm also pretty angry with the IAM, for this reason: I am one of their
57%. I picked up the tweets, I read about the survey on my local cycling
forum, and I filled it in, wanting to add my experiences thinking, as I
suspect many others did, that it would add, in some way, to the calls for
improvements in cycling provision.

Ah, so the vote stuffing took place - but the result wasn't quite as
expected?

I've designed those and I know they don't involve
tweeting your mates and sending them to a website where you can complete the
survey as many times as you like.

As push bike riders have been doing for a long time. Where were the
objections then?

Distorting the data and giving the impression of cyclists as serial
lawbreakers

All the evidence is they are.