Fab Foodie said:
Very sad news, 500 yards from where I sit now
Traffic was very bad today because the town centre is closed due to the Annual Fair running through the whole of the town.
I feel sick in my stomach, Abingdon is a small town, the grief won't be far away from anybody.
That's really awful
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Fab Foodie said:
There are a lot of good cyclefacilities here and cycle-usage for the school run is high. I'm thinking that we need some kind of "Cycle-craft" training of kids and adults alike. It might have helped.
I went out on a little ride last week and was proceeding down a quiet residential dead-end road in Mytholmroyd, near my home, when I spotted a couple of young children riding towards me. They were both wearing fluorescent jackets. When I got to the other end of the road, I saw that a cycle-training scheme was in operation. There were 4 or 5 adults supervising about 20 children. It looked pretty well organised. There were warning signs positioned on all the approach roads and adults watching the junctions.
I remember having the same sort of training in Coventry back in the 1960s as preparation for my Cycling Proficiency Test. My parents made me taking that a condition for buying me a bike. I think that it is a very good idea, because you see some kids who obviously don't have a clue what dangers they face. (I'm not suggesting that the girl who died in this case was to blame - we don't know what actually happened yet.)
I walked down to the local Spar one Christmas lunchtime and I saw a child aged about 10 on a new-looking mountain bike shoot out of a side road without looking. He was probably out for his first ride on his Christmas present. It could have so easily been his last... There wasn't a parent in sight. It really shook me that somebody would let a naive kid like that loose on a bike.
Despite all of this, we have to remember that cyclists live longer than non-cyclists on average. I'm beginning to notice the number of threads about fatal cycling accidents (incidents?) and wonder whether dwelling on them is a good thing? Each one is a tragedy, but we don't want to put people off cycling.
More training for novice cyclists would be good. Motorists should also be better-trained. So many people now have never ridden bikes before they learn to drive. I don't believe that many cyclist-drivers would overtake cyclists so close that they hit them with a door mirror, but I've heard of it happening so many times. I've had my own fair-share of near-misses. How about making every would-be learner driver pass a Cycling Proficiency Test before (s)he is allowed to have their first driving lesson? I'm sure that it would make them more cautious when they became drivers.
