When I arrived at the Melia White House Hotel in London recently I found that there was no convenient and secure place to lock up my bike. Feeling rather irritated about this and noticing the impressive range of cars parked up on the pavement around the entrance I choose to leave my bike on an unusable section of pavement close to the font-door where the porter could keep an eye on it.
Unfortunately, the porter told me that I couldn’t leave it there for ‘elf and safety’ reasons. I press him politely, I then pressed his boss and then that person’s boss as well. The conclusion was that if I left my bike there then it would get removed, but that I could carry it through the hotel up into my colleague’s room which was a bit weird. Unfortunately, by that time my colleague, who had been fascinated by the conversation, was ready to leave so I wasn’t able to test out their lifts with my very grubby bike. We left, took a few photos and put my bike somewhere else. The staff were helpful, polite and very professional throughout, but were being constrained by some very stupid and indefensible hotel policies. Health and Safety being yet again wheeled out as the catch-all reason to enforce any daft prejudice.
My bike was a ‘health and safety’ risk, the BMW and plant container on the pavement next to it were not!
These Range Rovers on the pavement outside the hotel clearly aren’t a health and safety problem
Pedestrian Liberation 
Makes a change from the usual “security” argument, apparently terrorist groups are prone to leaving bicycle bombs all over the place, but would never think of using a car…