When a pedestrian gets knocked over in similar circumstances, we don't get calls for peds to have training around traffic do we? How do you deliver that training formally to the entire nation, evaluate it's effectiveness and then organise redelivery when you find it hasn't worked.And remember it's a rolling programme, because loads new future pedestrians are born every day.
Well, a cyclist is no different to a ped in that we have to anticipate that anyone, trained or not, can legally hop on a bike and ride it. Which is as it should be, because the more restrictions you place on riding a bike, the fewer people who will do it which is bad in many ways for society as whole.
The problem is that after the age of ten we are legally obliged to ride on the roads with the horrible traffic. We wouldn't put our ten year old kids or any other pedestrian on the road walking in amongst the flow traffic, so why do we expect them to cycle there?
The laws about cycling in traffic haven't really altered since the massive boom in car ownership. Laws are pretty much the same as they were when private car ownership was relatively rare. Roads were not built for cars as Carlton rightly points out, but for decades now, they been designed for the convenience of drivers only in mind.
Something needs to change. People need an option that isn't forcing them to share the roads with lethal heavy machinery, operated with little care or attention.
If the road bikers want to mix it up with the traffic, then let them. For me, my family, I want something different. I want it to be safe, I want to be separate from the danger presented, and where I can't be separate, I want it to be explicit that I have priority (eg don't the dutch have some traffic rule about it being illegal for a driver overtake a cyclist on ordinary residential streets with no segregation? I may have made that one up).
Someone mentioned riding at 45mph on their bike. Well I live in a very hilly city (the last mile of my ride home I gain 400ft) My avarage speed is about 7.5mph. I can see why car drivers may get frustrated when they're stuck behind me. Give me a cycle path, everyones happy.
It's a sad fact that our children can't travel independently safely. Then you have the other end of the scale, my would be mother in law who used to be a keen cyclist, now at the age of 72 doesn't feel safe among the traffic on a bike, so she drives a skoda estate instead. My Mum, has some orthapaedic problems and finds walking painful, riding would be more comfortable, but as someone who's never passed a driving test she is too scared to go on the road. I know she'll be in a benidorm wagon soon, which is legal on the footpath. A bike would be so much more beneficial.
All these problems would be solved to very large extent by proper, high quality, segregated infrastructure. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. It's already been done and been shown to be effective by the dutch and in Copenhagen.
We can wait to change attitudes in drivers, but realistically we all know that with the dangerous infrastructure we have today, it's not going to happen.