Labour promises new police powers to curb noisy off-road bikes

Party would boost powers to remove dirt and quad bikes from streets in crackdown on antisocial behaviour

Labour is promising new powers for police to quickly scrap noisy dirt and quad bikes causing havoc in neighbourhoods as part of a crackdown on antisocial behaviour.

Keir Starmer’s party also wants to raise on-the-spot fines for using off-road bikes or ignoring officers’ instructions to stop, which are as low as £100.

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Call for crackdown on dirt-bike ‘urban rodeos’ in France after child critically injured

Ten-year-old girl suffers major head injuries as motocross bike rider at meet-up in Pontoise hits two children

French politicians have called for a crackdown on urban dirt-bike riding as a 10-year-old girl was critically ill in hospital after being hit by a motocross bike while she played on a housing estate north-east of Paris.

An 18-year-old boy was being questioned by police on Sunday after he handed himself in at a police station, accompanied by his lawyer.

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Easy rider? We’ll miss the roar, but electric motorbikes can’t kill our road romance

For bikers, combustive power is one of the thrills of a long-haul trip. But flat batteries and charging points will just become part of exciting new journeys

A full tank of gas, a twist of the wrist, the roar of the exhaust as you speed towards the horizon … These are the visceral touchstones of the motorcycling experience, and all are a direct product of petrol-fuelled power, as is much of the biker’s lexicon: “open it up”, “give it some gas”, “go full throttle”. For a motorcycle rider, as opposed to the modern car driver, the journey is a full-body communication game, constantly applying judgment, skill and nerve to control the thousands of explosions that are happening between your thighs in order to transport yourself, upright and in one piece, to your destination.

Yet the days of the internal combustion engine are numbered. By 2050 the European Commission aims to have cut transport emissions by 90%, and electric vehicle technology is striding ahead for cars, trucks, buses and even aircraft. But where does this leave the motorcycle? Can this romantic form of transport and its subcultures survive the end of the petrol age?

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