I commute at strange times (chef) is my life worth less than someone working nine to five?
Sadly it seems to some people that is the case.
What also seems to be forgotten is outside of the banned hours there would be more lorries on the road than now.
Imagine for simplicity that there are 240 lorries passing along the road in any 24 hour period. If evenly spaced, that would be 10 lorries an hour
If you ban lorries from the roads for say 6 hours a day, then it means there are only 18 hours for those 240 lorry journeys so there will be 13 1/3 journeys per hour in those 18 hours available to the lorries.
Thus to make the roads safer for 6 hours a day you are increasing the danger by increasing the number of lorries by 1/3 outside those hours. Add to this that some of those hours available are the most dangerous as they are night time. You are making the roads much more dangerous for those who ride outside the hours when lorries are banned.
An additional factor is that banning lorries does nothing to deal with the underlying problems. The problem is not lorries per se, it is the attitudes and abilities of those using the roads, whether motorists, cyclists or pedestrians. Banning lorries is dealing with the symptoms rather than the underlying causes.
Perhaps a better way of dealing with the problems would be to look at a system of licencing of HGV in urban areas. The Olympic development used a number of consolidation sites so that less in number, but more fully laden lorries went into the urban areas.
If HGV's had to obtain permits to use Urban roads, then if numbers of permits were limited, it would encourage the consolidation of transport to reduce the number of lorry journeys. The driving standard for those HGV drivers who are licenced should be significantly higher than at present. As there will be fewer drivers permitted to drive in urban areas, it would be possible to insist these have to pass an HGV+ test and have regular training like that given to london transport drivers
We also need to look at the behaviour and attitude of cyclists (and indeed all road users). We need a programme of education and training for road users. I have in mind the old public information films that we used to have on TV - remember Charlie the Cat? The sailor in his sailing dingy etc.
We also need to crackdown on illegal acts by road users, not just red light jumping, but for example the number of cyclists riding without lights, bad driving, bad cycling etc.
Rather than treating road traffic offences as minor matters, they should be treated as "proper" criminal offences. More people are killed on the roads than in Domestic Violence for example yet the police and CPS are forever introducing initiatives in that field and sentencing is increased, but motoring offences are continually downgraded. It is often only a matter of chance that careless driving does not result in a fatality.
