Guide dog owners 'fearful' of cyclists in London, charity claims

[Dogtrousers]

Tonight's Evening Standard: "Blind people 'terrorised by cyclists on pavements '"

The charity cited as the source is "The Guide Dogs" dunno if that's the same as GDB

 

[cisamcgu]

Charity was, I believe, "Guide Dogs UK" - which is commonly referred to as "Guide Dogs for the Blind"

A chap on Radio 5 , from the charity, said that the vast majority of cyclist were considerate, and careful, but a tiny minority caused problems, as do cars parked on pavements, chairs outside shops..etc....

 

[jarlrmai]

Tonight's Evening Standard: "Blind people 'terrorised by cyclists on pavements '"

The charity cited as the source is "The Guide Dogs" dunno if that's the same as GDB

Maybe they asked the dogs..

 

[ufkacbln]

I was touring a few years ago an ended up in Leamington Spa
I was amazed the high proportion of blind people.

It wasn't until I mentioned this to my wife.... and she pointed out that it was more likely to be Guide Dogs in training than blind owners, which simply had not occurred to me!

 

[downfader]

70% of the 20% asked out of the 320 guide dog owners had had some sort of incident, at some point in their lives, with a cyclist... that's 46 people in their lifetimes... how many had had an issue with a vehicle or another pedestrian? This is sensationalist journalism at its worst. But, I agree some cyclists need to be more aware, be more courteous and have more sense.

I know from the reports about local blindness charities that bad parking etc is raised and complained about. Sadly ignored by local authorities and Police...

I think that the BBC are becoming an organisation of bike haters.
Yesterday on the Jeremy Vine show they were talking about an incident where a couple of surfboards fell off a moving car and caused an accident that hospitalised 6 people. That was very quickly turned by JV into bikes being unsafe loads on cars and how they fall off and cause accidents.
BBC saying the cyclists cause problems and now roping in another charity organisation other than RoSPa, really doesn't surprise me.

The BBC certainly aint helping. At least with JV he IS a cyclist and will stick up for them. He regulalry posts vine/youtube links online demonstrating why a particular bit of driving really isnt on. However the Beeb is well known for not probing numbers properly, relying on scares for stories, and wont challenge the antis properly.

According to a tweet by Mark Treasure of 'As easy as riding a bike' blog:
320 people with guide dogs in London > 1/5th surveyed > 1/4 of whom say have suffered a collision = *16 people*. Over how many years?

He's good with numbers, as is the War With the Motorist blogger Steinsky who is also on twitter. I understand a blog/news piece was put up on the Guidedog charity's website with a video showing legal riding this morning. Now told its all been "revised" due to errors. This is the point I often make in local newspaper letters pages and online - if you have a complaint you have to be sure that its right, the legal side is understood enough (you dont have to be a lawyer), and that you don't demonise an unrelated majority.

 

[davefb]

Pretty annoyed about how this has been reported.
this is the road.cc version of the article..
http://road.cc/content/news/128389-1-4-guide-dogs-london-have-been-struck-cyclist-says-charity

in the comments theres' a link to what was claimed to be a survey..

https://twitter.com/GuidedogsLondon/status/482112258756337664

"Vision impaired with strong views on cyclists in London?Fill in our survey to help with our campaign https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/gdcycling"

So, that's not any vision impaired in london, thats anyone with strong views on cycling...Because we don't have comparative information on say have guide dogs been hit ever by a car, have you ever felt worried by a pedestrian, have cyclists had dogs run across them or uncontrolled dogs hit them there is NO statistics here at all..
We could actually have the info "cyclists are pretty amazing because compared to other modes of transport they dont worry guide dog users" but we have no way of knowing.

 

[slowmotion]

I ride in West London. Here, significant numbers of riders sail through red lights and weave amongst pedestrians. I see them every day. I quite regularly get thanked just for coming to a stop where I am supposed to...zebras and red lights etc. That's bonkers. People who can't see at all well have my entire sympathy. This tribal defense of inconsiderate peanuts grinds my gears. Sorry.

 

[the_mikey]

I ride in West London. Here, significant numbers of riders sail through red lights and weave amongst pedestrians. I see them every day. I quite regularly get thanked just for coming to a stop where I am supposed to...zebras and red lights etc. That's bonkers. People who can't see at all well have my entire sympathy. This tribal defense of inconsiderate peanuts grinds my gears. Sorry.

I don't think anyone is defending crap cycling, they're just defending us from the generalisation that 'cyclists' as a whole are terrorising blind people.

Yesterday I witnessed a pedestrian angrily demand a cyclists to ride on the road, there was lots of room and the passing cyclist, a young woman on a hybrid was riding about 12mph, about the speed of a jogger, and the path was shared space, it looked like a path, it didn't have any special surface but there were blue signs indicating that it's a cycling route. How much of this kind of misguided outrage is happening, not because of any actual incident but because they don't understand the infrastructure? Is the infrastructure at fault, leading to conflicts? Are the right questions being asked?

 

[steveindenmark]

You do realise that the only people who read these articles are cyclists :0)

Steve

 

[John the Monkey]

I don't think anyone is defending crap cycling, they're just defending the generalisation that 'cyclists' as a whole are terrorising blind people.

Exactly. (I think - I assume you meant "defending us against the generalisation")

And pointing out that it's being done on the basis of what appears to be a poorly constructed survey of inadequate size to yield anything meaningful.

 

[davefb]

It's not about the tribal defense, its that the survey isn't just wrong, it's not actually a survey and you can't make any extrapolation from it. All you can say is some people have had their guide dogs hit by cyclists (note no time scale mentioned either).
Compare with tfl data showing about 3 visually impaired people killed each year by cars in London.

 

[the_mikey]

Exactly. (I think - I assume you meant "defending us against the generalisation")

And pointing out that it's being done on the basis of what appears to be a poorly constructed survey of inadequate size to yield anything meaningful.

Agree, and thanks for the correction.

 

[John the Monkey]

BBC have corrected their story with the following;

In a survey conducted by the association, of 33 guide dog owners in London who responded, 14 said they had been involved in a collision and 25 said they had been involved in a "near miss" with cyclists on pavements or jumping red lights.

A further five blind people without guide dogs said they had been in collisions with cyclists - out of 16 who responded to the survey.

There are 41,060 people registered blind or partially sighted in London with just over 320 using guide dogs in the city.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said a quarter of guide dogs working in London had been hit by a bike. The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association has since said the information it provided was incorrect.

 

[albion]

Far more worrying for them will be the headphone clad pavement watcher zombies gossiping on Facebook.

A 100% problem I quite imagine.

 

[PK99]

I ride in West London. Here, significant numbers of riders sail through red lights and weave amongst pedestrians. I see them every day. I quite regularly get thanked just for coming to a stop where I am supposed to...zebras and red lights etc. That's bonkers. People who can't see at all well have my entire sympathy. This tribal defense of inconsiderate peanuts grinds my gears. Sorry.

Don't apologise, you are entirely correct