The Freight Trade Association is right that road users must ride or drive responsibly. Yes, there is a problem with some cyclists not obeying some traffic regulations.
However, every single time the police conduct tests on lorries in London, they find a swathe of the industry content to regularly break the law - overloaded, dodgy tachometers, dodgy safety features.
When the City of London conducted spot checks on lorries in 2008, 100% (yes, that's right, 100%) of the lorries stopped at random were breaking the law in some way. Spot checks in
Wales recently found 80% of all HGVs were breaking the law.
Or, let's just remember Mary Bowers, The Times journalist hit by a lorry in 2011. The driver was on the phone (hands-free) at the time and then "
and then failed to put the handbrake on when she was trapped under his wheels". The driver had previously admitted a series of tachograph offences, "including driving a lorry for 20 hours in one day when the maximum is 9 hours". Jurors concluded he had been "too engrossed in a telephone conversation with a work colleague, on a hands-free mobile kit, when he knocked Ms Bowers off her bike".
He then tried to deny he'd even been on the phone in the first place and subsequently pleaded guilty to (again!) "driving in excess of the permitted hours".
The pendulum of responsibility swings both ways, Ms Dee, and if you're going to start throwing stones about the place, you'd better be sure your own glasshouse is made of stronger materials.
