Police Acknowledge Drivers at Fault - So Hand Out Hi-Viz!

[dawesome]

I fully accept that some road users put other road users at risk. I'm a cyclist; I frequently see drivers in traffic tapping away at an SMS on their lap. What I do not accept is that the rights of vulerable road users are being eroded.

As I said, mobile phones are a recent phenomenon, they didn't exist twenty years ago, they are a distraction and the practise is relatively unpoliced. That's an example of how things have got worse for cyclists. Take the explosion in traffic use in the last twenty years, way over and above any increase in cycling rates. In London policies are being pursued at the expense of cyclists, that's a fact, a situation you denied existed and claimed the suggestion was "risible".

The prioritising of motor traffic over all other considerations like facilities for pedestrians or cyclists, the stated aim of the mayor of our capital is to make things smoother (read faster) for motor vehicles. That's an erosion of the rights of vulnerable road users.

 

[Boris Bajic]

As I said, mobile phones are a recent phenomenon, they didn't exist twenty years ago, they are a distraction and the practise is relatively unpoliced. That's an example of how things have got worse for cyclists. Take the explosion in traffic use in the last twenty years, way over and above any increase in cycling rates. In London policies are being pursued at the expense of cyclists, that's a fact, a situation you denied existed and claimed the suggestion was "risible".

The prioritising of motor traffic over all other considerations like facilities for pedestrians or cyclists, the stated aim of the mayor of our capital is to make things smoother (read faster) for motor vehicles. That's an erosion of the rights of vulnerable road users.

I was cycling to school along Stamford Street in the mid-70s. There were no mobile phones in the 70s*, but there were drivers looking for cassettes, looking for their ciggies, tuning their radios, looking at their A-Z, tidying their make-up. There were plenty of distractions even then.

I'm not sure what your 'explosion in traffic use' is. What is an explosion in traffic use? Does it hurt? We may never know.

I made no mention of policies being pursued in London at the expense of cyclists. You did that. What I said I found risible was your assertion that the rights of vulnerable road users are being eroded. I explained why when you asked me to and nothing has changed my mind since. I base this on forty years of cycling in and around London.

I rode up to Camden Town and Canonbury and out into Leyton, Ilford and Stratford to visit friends as a teenager. There was no Congestion Charge. It was more crowded on Kingsway and S'oton Row than it is now. Essex Road was a racetrack. It is safer riding in the CC zone now.

There were far fewer concessions to cyclists from UK urban planners in the 1970s and 1980s than there are now. I do not for one moment contest that the current situation is ideal. It is clearly not. What is clear to me is that the rights of vulneable road users are not being eroded and have not been in the time I've been cycling.

I fear we have to leave it there. I rather like things as they are and find that my rights are better protected and my interests better served as a cyclist than they were ten, twenty, thirty or forty years ago.

You think otherwise.

* (Although I'm not sure what gives you the idea they didn't exist twenty years ago).

 

[dawesome]

I made no mention of policies being pursued in London at the expense of cyclists. You did that. What I said I found risible was your assertion that the rights of vulnerable road users are being eroded.

The stated aims of the policies pursued by Boris in London is prioritise motor traffic over cyclists and pedestrians. Warnings about dangerous junctions were ignored and cyclists have been killed. In what way is this erosion of cyclists' rights convincing you that it is nothing of the kind? You asked why I feel this erosion has taken place, I've provided examples. Do you think marginalising cyclists is NOT an erosion of their rights?

 

[dawesome]

A spokesperson told me that in the past three years City Police issued 12 fixed penalties to motorists for entering ASZs unlawfully.


Yet in the same period it handed out just over 6,000 fixed penalties to cyclists for jumping red lights.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/bike-blog/2011/aug/24/safety-red-lights-cyclists

Once you allow for the different numbers of motor vehicles and cyclists on the roads, that policing makes no sense at all. The cops spend their time policing the road users least likely to hurt anyone. How can you claim that's not a backward step? It's regressive and silly, a complete waste of resources.

Is there an antipathy within the police to cyclists? Remember the chap who was strangled to the point of black-out by a taxi driver, and when the cops got there they arrested the cyclist?

 

[Boris Bajic]

The stated aims of the policies pursued by Boris in London is prioritise motor traffic over cyclists and pedestrians. Warnings about dangerous junctions were ignored and cyclists have been killed. In what way is this erosion of cyclists' rights convincing you that it is nothing of the kind? You asked why I feel this erosion has taken place, I've provided examples. Do you think marginalising cyclists is NOT an erosion of their rights?

You win. A few tragic deaths prove everything you've been saying. How can I have been so blind?

I continue to disagree with you about this erosion of rights that you see. But I am wrong.

Luckily for me, in my ignorance I do not associate the tragic and too-fequent sqidging of cyclists with an erosion of rights.

That way I can keep riding happily as I have been for forty years, in city and countryside alike.

I'll leave it to you and others who think as you do to get jolly cross about the erosion of my rights.

If I'm very lucky, your melodramatic Internet cant about eroded rights will bring about a massive step change in urban planning and traffic will suddenly become as lovely as it was before this alleged erosion began. I can hardly wait. How will I know when it's happened?

Sadly, as a myopic fool who is unable to see the erosion in the first place, I'll have no idea how much you've done for me.

I lose. Badly. As always.

In the meantime, I'l keep pootling around in blithe ignorance and continue to encorage my children to do so too. My daughter (working abroad) just skyped and suggested a bicycle tour of Serbia when she gets home. Should we look out for erosion there, too?

What will it look like? And will it be in Cyrillic?

 

[dawesome]

school

You win. A few tragic deaths prove everything you've been saying. How can I have been so blind?

Errr, that's not what I'm saying at all, and lay off the sarcasm. I'm attacking your idea, not you personally.

I'm saying that with traf pol numbers slashed and ever more elaborate hand held devices on the market cyclists are more at risk.

The number of young drivers checking social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter while on the roads has increased by 50 per cent in the last year, according to the RAC.

This is a recent distraction, nobody checked Facebook whilst they drove twenty years ago.

 

[Boris Bajic]

But you win. I lose. It's over.

I know you're not attacking me; nor were you when you called me a troll. Twice. It's just the idea you were attacking.

And may I say you attacked it very well. I quite understand. I disagreed with you and I was wrong to do so.

I made the inexcusable error of calling a notion of yours risible and I see now that it was sage, brilliant and full of clarity and truth.

I was naughty to take the tone I did. I realise now that it sounded mocking. It was childish of me.

Everything you've written on this thread has been right. I am the one who should be mocked.

And I should stop using stupid smileys.

 

[GrumpyGregry]

My daughter (working abroad) just skyped and suggested a bicycle tour of Serbia when she gets home. Should we look out for erosion there, too?

sounds like a great idea.

I've only cycled in slovenia and in a tiny bit of Croatia (where the border post was in the middle of a car park I was lost in, very odd)

What's the cycling like in serbia?

 

[Boris Bajic]

I think it sounds slightly barking as an idea, but I like to encourage a sense of adventure in my loved ones.

I've lived and worked in Serbia but never cycled there. If we go, it will be a new thing to me.

I used to cycle to my office in the RS entity of Bosnia, which in many ways is 'Serbia outside Serbia' (but don't say I said that).

My general impression of cycling in the western Balkans is that motorists may not be expecting to find a cyclist in their path and may react unusually.

How was the cycling in Slovenia?

 

[Recycler]

The prioritising of motor traffic over all other considerations like facilities for pedestrians or cyclists, the stated aim of the mayor of our capital is to make things smoother (read faster) for motor vehicles. That's an erosion of the rights of vulnerable road users.

I'm not sure where you get this idea of the erosion of rights for cyclists from.

There are far more cyclists on the roads than there were 20 or 30 years ago and there is far more provison of cycle paths and cycle lanes. Traffic levels everywhere have increased but, to be honest, I can't think of one right that has been removed.

It would help your case if you were to provide evidence to support it.

 

[dawesome]

How high was the percentage of drivers checking their facebook status twenty years ago?

 

[Recycler]

How high was the percentage of drivers checking their facebook status twenty years ago?

????? Ugh?
For that matter, and equally irrelevant, what percentage of cyclists RLJ'd 20 years ago?

More relevant, what cyclist rights have been eroded?

 

[dawesome]

????? Ugh?
For that matter, and equally irrelevant, what percentage of cyclists RLJ'd 20 years ago?

It's not "equally irrelevant" because rljing by cyclists has NEVER featured as a significant factor in rtcs. Drivers on mobiles killed 11 people last year.

 

[dawesome]

Who are the two politicians with the most influence over cycling in the UK? Bozza and Mike Penning, the Transport Sec:

http://m.guardian.co.uk/environment...governed-dimwits?cat=environment&type=article

Peter Walker
guardian.co.uk, Fri 25 May 2012 16.10 BST
Blogpost
That's it. I give up. It's the final straw. I spent years hoping, in the face of the evidence, that one day cyclists in Britain would get a fair hearing by government. I was deluded.
I say this, with only very slight exaggeration: I despair. When it comes to cycling policy we are in the hands of dimwits.
Exhibit one, and the catalyst for today's realisation: Boris Johnson.
Yes, he's mayor only of London, but he remains the UK's best-known cycling politician, perhaps even its most celebrated non-sport cyclist. As such his views on the pursuit carry weight well beyond the capital.
Even though many of Johnson's cycling policies have prompted criticism I couldn't shake the feeling that, as someone photographed more or less every day on his bike, he had at heart at least some sense of the cyclist's interest.
Seemingly not. At his regular mayor's question time earlier this week, Johnson, in answering a question on law-breaking, made an eye-catching claim.
He said:
I've seen a figure, I think, of 62%, which is the high proportion of cycling KSIs (killed or seriously injured) that are associated with some infraction by the cyclists themselves of the rules of the road.
That's a big claim – that around two-thirds of serious cycling accidents are, fundamentally, the cyclist's fault. There's just one problem: there doesn't seem to be any evidence to back this up.
The most authoritative statistics on blame in bike accidents came from the quasi-official Transport Research Laboratory (TRL), which analysed police reports from 2005-7 for the Department for Transport (DfT). Their 2009 report found that with adult cyclists killed or seriously injured, police found drivers solely to blame in 60-75% of cases. As a TRL researcher pointed out to me at the time, this is the conclusion of police, not usually known as militant pro-cyclists.
What of cyclist law-breaking? Riders disobeying red lights or stop signs was considered a factor in just 2% of serious crashes, with the same figure for cyclists not using lights.
I asked Johnson's office where he acquired his 62% figure. A spokesman explained, almost unbelievably, that he had been "told it by a member of the public" at a mayoral hustings meeting. Other mayoral underlings were currently hunting for the source of the figure, he added. I wish them luck but I'm not holding my breath.
That the famously detail-light mayor should pluck a figure out of thin air isn't the greatest shock. What bothers me is that he should do so in a manner so damaging to cyclists' interests. It's the sort of figure that will return to haunt us, much like the Institute of Advanced Motoring's "57% of cyclists jump red lights" buffoonery.
Johnson's implicit message is clear: if I can't make London's roads safer I'll blame cyclists for getting killed. As such, he takes a remarkably similar line to John Griffin, the chairman of bus lane-coveting Addison Lee.
Exhibit two: this is a few weeks old but, if anything, more shocking still. It's quite possibly the most stupid public statement I've ever heard from a government.
The scene was last month's Transport Select Committee, where two junior transport ministers, Mike Penning and Norman Baker, answered questions about cycling policy.
At the end of the 45-minute session the committee chair, Labour MP Louise Ellman, asked the duo what, if anything, the UK could learn in terms for cycle safety from the Netherlands and Denmark.
Baker's response was astonishing, not least because, as the sole Lib Dem in the DfT he is, in theory, the department's voice of cycling. Statistics, he said, showed that the Netherlands actually had higher cycling casualty rates than the UK: "What we can learn from the Netherlands, in my view, is probably not safety issues, particularly."
Penning stepped in to quote from a supposed table showing the UK well above the Netherlands in European bike safety rates. He added, not without some smugness: "I think the Netherlands may want to come and see us, to see how we are making sure so few people are getting killed cycling."
Baffled – it's more or less universally known that cycling in the Netherlands is considerably safer than here – I called the DfT press office. The response was amazing. Baker and Penning were quoting casualty rates per 100,000 people. That's right, a statistic which takes no account of the fact that the average Dutch national cycles around 10 times further per year than the average Briton.
It's like their colleagues at the culture and sport department suggesting their Dutch counterparts might want to pop over and learn about why our speed skating accident rate is so low. It's the sort of mistake for which a GCSE maths student would be justifiably mocked by his or her peers.
There wasn't even a DfT apology, merely sending over a pre-prepared Penning statement about how we are "all united in wanting to encourage cycling".
I don't think Baker and Penning were trying to pull a fast one. It appears the error simply hadn't occurred to them. That's almost more unforgivable than anyone deliberately misleading over cycling statistics. With such a weak grasp of your brief you don't deserve to be a minister.
So there you are: those shaping our cycling future are either idiots, charlatans or both.
Like I said: despair.

The two most influential politicians with regard to cycling come out with an absolute load of old bilgewater that demonises cyclists and says if they get killed it's their fault.

But there's nothing wrong with cyclists' rights, nothing to see, move along.

 

[Recycler]

Dawesome,

You still haven't said what cyclists rights have been eroded.

Nobody wants to see cyclists, or any other road user killed or injured, but you seem to think that if somebody is harmed then some "right" has been infringed. Nobody has conferred a right to injure cyclists on drivers, or anyone else.