Danger
Monday, December 13th, 2010 by Mick Allan
A recent cycle industry report by Allegra Strategies concluded among other things that: ‘Safety is still the main barrier to cycling, especially among women’.
No surprise there then.
The recent heavy snowfall had a big effect on driver’s attitudes to one another. There were widespread break-outs of tolerance, patience and community spirit as motorists let each other out of junctions and even jumped from their cars to push ice stricken wheel spinners. Unfortunately this new found friendliness to fellow man didn’t seem to cross the barrier to users of other modes of travel.
Over the last couple of weeks ice and snow has been so thick on the ground that pavements have become unpassable. Pedestrians have been forced to walk in the street – as they are entitled to do. I’ve seen cars drive straight at pedestrians, forcing them to jump back on to the pavement! Not isolated incidents either, several times, and including elderly folk and children. We cyclists aren’t getting any extra seasonal goodwill from drivers either – Caz returns every day with tales of too-close passes by drivers, people zooming past with a roar of engine and cutting in too soon or tail-gating whilst revving their engines ! This to a woman towing a child trailer FFS.
I ‘get’ the idiocy of driving a car at sixty miles per hour with only an A4 sized view-hole on an icy motorway. I saw it with my own eyes the other night. I get that. It’s gross stupidity. I understand that people are stupid. What I don’t get is the punitive swerves, the ‘get off my road’ sheer aggression aimed at cyclists and peds when they ‘get in the way’ of drivers. It makes me want to take up arms against them, to chase them down and shoot the crap out of their car whilst they sit there cowering at the wheel. How [enter desired swearing word here] dare you treat me and mine like we don’t matter. How dare you make our roads a terrifying place to be. In your poxy Vauxhall Corsa. How dare you!
The simple fact that most drivers in the UK have forgotten – if they ever knew – is that cyclists (along with pedestrians and horse riders) are entitled to use the roads. Entitled. We don’t use the road with the permission of motorists (there’s the feeling sometimes that we’re only ‘allowed’ to use the roads when there are no cars around and by golly we better get out of the way when they arrive). Cyclist’s entitlement to use the road is enshrined in law. Motorists on the other hand require a driving licence which requires a test of competency and a knowledge of the laws pertaining to driving. But that’s not all, motorists must also be a certain age and be insured. Their car must conform to a set of rigourous safety standards, be registered and after a few years must undergo annual safety checks in the form of a MOT test. And motorists must pay Vehicle Excise Duty. It is this VED which confuses many. Motorists imagine that it is called Road Tax (it hasn’t been called Road Tax since the 1930s When Winston Churchill was minister for roads) and – crucially – that payment of this ‘tax’ gives them some kind of right to use the road along with the entitlement to lord it over more vulnerable road users.
It’s very simple: cyclists have a right to use the road, motorists have no such right. Motorists must obtain a licence. So we should be treated with the utmost repect then right? Sadly not. In many motorists eyes we are somewhere below dogs and above street furniture in the hierarchy of objects which should be steered clear of.
‘Safety is still the biggest barrier to cycling’. Actually as we are probably all aware – ‘The health benefits of cycling outweigh the dangers by a factor of twenty to one’, but how many more people would be pedalling if the roads were safer? There is only one source of danger to cyclists – aggressive or incompetent drivers of automotive carriages. Forget bike lanes and cycle paths, in fact forget cycling ‘infrastructure’ completely. We have a very well made and extensive network of cycling facilities; it’s called the roads. Removing the danger from our roads is a simple job and way cheaper than ghettoising cyclists into their own farcilities. Driver education combined with high quality punishments. Simple.
When I feel scared to let the kids walk to school because I see cars doing near twice the speed limit on an icy local road it’s clear that our car worshipping culture needs to be reined in. And reined in hard. 3000+ people are killed every year on our roads. It’s a massacre. An air crash every month.
No more Mr Nice Cyclist – We’ve waved bad drivers on with a cheery grimace for too long because we wanted an easy life and look where it got us. The next time a taxi cuts too close I’ll report the driver to the council department which issued his license to trade. The next time a suit in a Beemer swerves at aggressively me I will report the incident to the police. And the next time some twerp in a Range Rover threatens the safety of the people I love they’d better hope I haven’t gotten around to installing a Sidewinder heat-seeking missile to my bike.
They don’t have the right to scare us off the roads.
+1
