Proportion of cyclists without lights

[pshore]

I've been thinking about the 'student and poor' connection with no lights and wondering how we can show that this applies to the car world too. This has led me to the stats for the proportion of cars failing their MOT.


I have fallen upon a fairly recent BBC news blog entry: MOT failure rates released
and also Ford leads in MOT failures ... story.

This is showing that for the most popular vehicle models:

10-33% of 3 year old vehicles fail their MOT (overall 20%)
30-52% of 10 year old vehicles fail.
(Caveat - lots of unanswered questions re what the numbers really mean)

Interestingly, the top reason for failure is lighting !


I am sure those same bikes that have no lights will have poor brakes etc and would fail a bike MOT, but I am certain that I would rather have a poorly maintained bicycle on the road than a poorly maintained car.

The numbers here will make for some interesting repostes to the usual no-lights arguments. We have been making some inroads on the road tax argument - now for the lights, even if it does drag us all down to the same level.

 

[downfader]

I've been thinking about the 'student and poor' connection with no lights and wondering how we can show that this applies to the car world too. This has led me to the stats for the proportion of cars failing their MOT.


I have fallen upon a fairly recent BBC news blog entry: MOT failure rates released
and also Ford leads in MOT failures ... story.

This is showing that for the most popular vehicle models:

10-33% of 3 year old vehicles fail their MOT (overall 20%)
30-52% of 10 year old vehicles fail.
(Caveat - lots of unanswered questions re what the numbers really mean)

Interestingly, the top reason for failure is lighting !


I am sure those same bikes that have no lights will have poor brakes etc and would fail a bike MOT, but I am certain that I would rather have a poorly maintained bicycle on the road than a poorly maintained car.

The numbers here will make for some interesting repostes to the usual no-lights arguments. We have been making some inroads on the road tax argument - now for the lights, even if it does drag us all down to the same level.

A bike with s*** brakes can be stopped with the feet atleast. Certainly not recommended but can happen.

Heres an unlit cyclist from this morning:

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHIa0IfNJO4


And another from yesterday:

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldy_VXHaTQY


TBH they were the only ones I saw over this week. Everyone else had their lights on, and I've seen a fair number of other cyclists this week.