Geoff Dossetter calls for cyclists to take responsibility

I had been hit by a car and knocked off my bike. Copies of the Evening News, The Star and the Evening Standard were scattered all over the road! 

 

One of the people staring down at me was the driver of the car which had hit me. I had no recollection of the accident – the last thing I remembered was delivering a paper and then waking up in the road, so I was obliged to take his word for it that it was my fault and not his. But I can still reflect, all these years later, on how awful it must have been for him to see me lying there knocked out – he may have even thought he had actually killed me.

Arguably, cyclists are the most vulnerable of all road users. And the last 20 years growth in the popularity of cycling has generated an increasing conflict between the attitudes and behaviour of the cyclists themselves, matched against the views and experiences of car, van and lorry drivers.

Every year some 3,000 cyclists are killed or seriously injured in road accidents on UK roads. In 2011 there were more than a hundred cyclists killed, and around 18 per cent of those fatalities were related to accidents involving HGVs.

Thankfully, to most of us the horror of being involved in any sort of serious accident is an unknown experience. Personally I can only guess at what it must be like to have been the driver of a vehicle which has killed or maimed a cyclist or pedestrian. It is an experience that all of us involved in any form of transport, either as managers or drivers, should seek to reduce as far as is possible.

As a car driver with long involvement in the transport industry, I make it my business to stay as clear of large and heavy buses and lorries as I possibly can, I like to give them a lot of room. I would like to think that if I were still a cyclist I would take exactly the same approach. I understand that whatever the skills of the bus or lorry driver, and I have enormous admiration for their skills, a large vehicle has vastly different handling requirements from me in my car. The acceleration and braking is different. The steering and cornering is not like a car. And when negotiating a left or right corner, a long vehicle has to first to go in the opposite direction in order to create the necessary arc required to complete the turn.

The visibility and blind spots are also different. The lorry-back signs which say ’If you can’t see my mirrors then I can’t see you’ are sensible and should be heeded.  And then there is the issue of left-hand drive foreign lorries to complicate life. A few years ago there were regular incidents of ‘sideswiping’ when foreign trucks would seem to ‘drift’ in their lane and strike an overtaking car. That problem seems to have been reduced by improved mirrors and the use of Fresnal lens.

But back to the vulnerable cyclist. 

It is certain that in any conflict between a truck and a bike then it will be the bike, and its rider, which are going to come off worse. The facts of physics and human biology make that a one hundred per cent certainty.

So why is it that so many cyclists seem to regard themselves as invulnerable, pay little or no attention to the rules of the road which apply to the rest of us, and go about their daily commute or their weekend excursion as if nothing can possibly touch them?

I suspect that most road accidents involving lorries and bikes are just that, accidents. Equally, I have absolutely no doubt that some are the result of bad driving or bad cycling. Sometimes nobody is to blame and sometimes the blame simply has to be attributed to one party or the other.

The plain fact is that, whatever are the attitudes of the cyclists or the road transport industry, and whoever is to blame, something must be done to reduce the unacceptable statistics.

It is pleasing to see that so many lorry operators, including those engaged in the construction industry which has more than its fair share of problems in this area, are fitting advanced mirrors, electronic warnings, cameras and sensors, warning signs etc and are organising driver training specifically designed to consider the problems of sharing road space with cyclists. Clearly, such vehicle operators have no desire to be potentially held responsible for a human tragedy.

And in London, which seems to have the largest problems, the Mayor has been active in constructing a programme designed to, as far as possible, separate the car and lorry from the cyclist by the expensive creation of bike only road networks. 

Because of the ‘’David and Goliath’ or ‘Beauty and the Beast’ differential between the relative size of lorries and cyclists it is too easy to place all of the blame for accidents, and all of the responsibility for their reduction, on lorry operators and their drivers. Of course, they must do everything in their power to avoid cycle related incidents and be ever alert for their possibility, particularly in vulnerable urban situations like London streets. But the current evidence suggests that they are indeed doing just that.

It is sad and unrealistic that the cycling lobby so often seems blind or in denial to some of the poor behaviour which we really do see from some riders – breaking red lights, undertaking moving vehicles, weaving in and out of traffic, burning the road up at inappropriate speeds etc – and unwilling to take their own share of the responsibility. As much as we must see improved cycle awareness by lorry drivers we must also hope to see improved and road wise behaviour from the overall community of cyclists and a reduction in the bad behaviour of the few to the absolute minimum.

The other day I walked past a corner location in London’s Victoria Street which was decorated with both an appeal for witnesses regarding a fatal accident involving a lorry and a cyclist, and bunches of flowers in tribute to the dead rider. It reminded me of my own paperboy experience, of how lucky I had been, and of how that car driver that night must have been frightened and then relieved. Unlike the poor lorry driver in Victoria Street who, whatever the circumstances, must be feeling so bad, and the unfortunate cyclist who died.