Friday, April 04, 2008

MP hits cyclist

Undoing all his party leader's positive work on two wheels Tory MP Simon Burns hit a cyclist outside Parliament whilst driving his Range Rover. This sounds like the sort of accident that happens every day- driver pulls into traffic without looking and hits a cyclist, it's happened to me though thankfully less painfully- and only made the news because of where it happened and who the driver was.

Let's see "Dave" Cameron come out and make a statement about always looking out for two wheelers at junctions.

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posted by Ian at 10:50 AM
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Thursday, January 03, 2008

Matthew Parris loses his head

Matthew Parris, previously a charming if slightly dull ex politician turned radio presenter feels the need to string piano wire across the lanes and decapitate cyclists. Why? Because a few inconsiderate riders left bottles and energy drink wrappers in the hedgerows around his home.

Ignore the fact that all the sins he attributes to cyclists are committed on far greater scales by drivers. You can bet if a cyclist wrote an article for the Times suggesting the keying of cars that blocked the advanced stop lane, putting a D lock through the windows of cars that come sailing into cycle lanes or slashing the tyres of cars parked on double yellows it would never see print. And those are calls to damage against inanimate objects, not violence against people.

via Matt Seaton in the Guardian

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posted by Ian at 7:33 PM
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Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Let's cut car use

Lynsey Hanley in the Guardian has a go at those drivers too stubborn or dumb to get out of their cars. Obviously a bunch of the people she's criticising have posted the usual nonsense about the horrors of public transport and how their cars save them so much time.

I have one suggestion to everyone who says their commute takes only 20 or 30 minutes by car, especially whoever complained about finding time for the gym if they used public transport.

Get a bike.

Unless you're popping straight off your drive onto an empty motorway or A road and then getting straight off it into the works car park I could do your journey just as fast on my bike. Faster in some cases. And I wouldn't need to go to the gym after work. A decent commuter bike would pay for itself in four months or so.

In fact, it probably wouldn't take me much longer to do the journey on foot in most towns.

So I'll issue a challenge to you half hour commuters. Get on your bike one day. If you don't have a bike, borrow one. If you're scared about riding on the roads ask someone who does it regularly to show you the ropes. And bear in mind that the rest of the time you're one of the people who makes cycling scary.

Once you start cycling to work you'll wonder why you ever did it any other way.

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posted by Ian at 6:29 PM
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Thursday, December 21, 2006

Cycle Rage

A cyclist near Wigan smashed the rear window of a car that knocked him off his bike. An over the top reaction, but justified in all but its ferocity as far as I'm concerned. The comments thread on this story breaks down into reactionary drivers trotting out the usual anti-cyclist rubbish and people who have actually ridden in traffic and understand how stupid some car owners can be.

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posted by Ian at 8:01 PM
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Thursday, December 07, 2006

Not all drivers are idiots, but there are still too many

In over 16 years of cycling around Manchester I've only been knocked off my bike twice. This morning was the second.

Despite the fact that it was entirely the driver's fault I can't help but blame myself. I usually pay a lot of attention to cars pulling up at side roads ahead, expecting them to be idiots and just rail out without spotting, or looking for, me. (To their credit, most drivers don't live down to my expectations.) Going through the Sharston industrial estate this morning I let my mind wander. I may have been worrying about the large roundabout up ahead, or thinking about sex (it had been at least 14 seconds) or relationships. Whatever it was, I didn't do my usual assessment on the metallic orange Fiat Punto that was approaching the end of the side road ahead and didn't realise it was sailing straight on until it was too late.

I did just enough braking and dodging to avoid broken bones- the car missed my leg but still hit the front wheel and took the bike out from under me. Turning the air blue I bounced off the car's A pillar and managed to get my hand inside the open driver's side window as I went down.

Sat on the wet ground, but certain I'd suffered no worse than bruises, the first thing I did was inform the driver that he really should watch where he's going. He just stared at me blankly, shock beginning to filter through his beanie hatted head. He asked a few times if I was okay. I guess I should have taken contact details in case the collision has damaged the headset (the wheel still spun fine), but you never think of these things when you've just dodged harm. I sent him on his way with a final admonition to pay more attention in future, remounted and carried on the ride to work.

There's very little I can do to become a safer cyclist. I could, and plan to, mount more lights and reflectors on my steed. But this collision happened in near total daylight when lights would have made no difference to my profile. I'll just have to remember that some drivers are idiots and I must judge them all by the standards of their worst if I'm to avoid future injuries.

Cross posted from Spinneyhead.

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posted by Ian at 10:52 PM
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Friday, August 04, 2006

Driver fined £180 over crash that killed cyclists

The driver in a crash that killed four cyclists when his car spun out of control was yesterday fined £180 and given six penalty points on his licence.

Robert Harris, 47, was driving on the A547 near Abergele, north Wales, in January when his Toyota Corolla skidded on black ice and collided with riders from Rhyl Cycling Club who were out on an early morning training exercise. The car hit the riders with such force that two of them were thrown over a wall into a field.

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posted by Ian at 8:33 AM
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Thursday, July 06, 2006

Beware White Van Man

The cliche has been proven in a test by Bath University. Dr Ian Walker cycled more than 186 miles in Bristol and Salisbury over a two-month period with sensors and a camera fitted to his bike to see how close vehicles passed him. White vans left an average of 10cm less space as they overtook.

To be fair, they were probably just as inconsiderate to other drivers. The Highway Code says that drivers should give cyclists as much space as they would any other vehicle, and having seen the way some people all but clip mirrors as they overtake I'd say we're just getting some unwelcome equality.

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posted by Ian at 10:04 AM
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Friday, June 02, 2006

Left turn for the Tories

The Conservative party are proposing new driving rules, including allowing left turns at red lights if there's no traffic or pedestrians. I don't like the sound of that, drivers turn left in front of oncoming cyclists too much as it is. Now if they proposed the rule should apply to cyclists only..... (Some would say it would just be legitimising existing cyclist behaviour.)

The proposal to take more cycle lanes onto the pavement isn't one I like either. We need cyclists to be made more visible to drivers, so they're always looking out for us, not having them pop up occasionally from nowhere.

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posted by Ian at 12:38 PM
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Friday, May 26, 2006

The Driver Menace



If the embedded video won't play click here to go to Revver.


All the footage for this video was collected whilst wandering around in the rain mid-morning today. If I'd gone out during rush hour I could have enough to make a documentary.

This is something I've been meaning to do for a while because the hypocrisy of all those people complaining about cyclists' behaviour annoys me. Few people stand up and say how dangerous motorists can be, so let's start here.

Obviously there are drivers who don't speed up when they see an amber light, use their mobile whilst driving or think certain laws don't apply to them. But they're not the ones who endanger the rest of us.

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posted by Ian at 4:17 PM
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Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Police seek hit & run killer

The Police in Wigan are looking for the driver who hit a cyclist and then left the scene whilst the 36 year old lay dying. The car involved is believed to have been a blue Rover ZR hatchback- a similar vehicle matching witnesses' descriptions was later found burnt out.

Next time someone starts going on about how dangerous cyclists are ask them about this sort of homicidal driving.

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posted by Ian at 9:23 AM
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Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Ticketting the school run

Stephen Newton writes about a refreshing sight in Chorlton today- Police and Traffic Wardens cautioning and fining parents stopping outside Chorlton Park School to drop off children. Let's hope they keep it up long enough to change parents' behaviour.

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posted by Ian at 9:33 PM
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Thursday, March 16, 2006

Dialling and Driving

Cross-posted from Spinneyhead.

The comment I left on the MEN's news item about the crackdown on drivers using phones in their cars-

A couple of weeks ago I was nearly flattened by a driver who sailed through a red traffic light whilst talking on his phone. He stopped at the next set of traffic lights, so I cycled after him, bashed on his window and uttered a few choice words about his idiocy.

He ignored me, of course. As the phone call was so important he'd risk killing people for it, he wasn't going to let an irate cyclist put an end to it.

I should have used my phone to photograph his car and post the picture to my website to shame him.

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posted by Ian at 5:51 PM
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Thursday, February 16, 2006

Risk Adjustment

Cars these days are too safe. As the drivers become more coccooned they feel they can drive faster, cut more corners and speed up for amber lights. Which means that the rest of us are in greater danger. The theory of risk adjustment (I may have misremembered the name) was first put forward by economist Sam Peltzman in 1975. I quite like Tim Harford's take on this-

We need more dangerous cars. A spear mounted on the steering wheel, pointing at the driver's heart, would do nicely. Cheese wire instead of seat belts would work too. Of course, these innovations would skewer and slice the typical crash-test dummy, but drivers aren't crash-test dummies. Give them the right incentive and they will drive more carefully, to the benefit of the cyclists and pedestrians.

via Velorution

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posted by Ian at 8:48 AM
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Friday, February 03, 2006

Modern cars are designed to kill cyclists

Not deliberately, of course. In moves to make cars safer in rollovers and collisions, the A pillar, to either side of the windscreen, has become much fatter. This creates a blind spot that drivers may not compensate for. The most likely road users to disappear into this dead zone are cyclists and motorcyclists. So, as drivers become ever more coccooned, the rest of us have to run higher risks because of them.

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posted by Ian at 5:22 PM
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Sunday, January 08, 2006

Four cyclists killed in Wales

Four cyclists died and eight others were injured today when their group was hit by a car.

The group, which included adults and children, were on the A547 Ludland Road near Abergele in North Wales at about 10am when the accident happened.

They were hit by a Toyota Corolla travelling towards Towyn.

Emergency services, including an air ambulance, were called out and four cyclists were pronounced dead at the scene.

The accident happened on a straight stretch of the road. What was the driver doing to run into a group of cyclists on a straight road?

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posted by Ian at 7:27 PM
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