Recent comments

Well thanks cat1commuter for pointing out the blindingly obvious … I only wear a helmet when riding my bike!

STATO: Yep I have failed so far to convince her, she is very stubborn and Cologne is supposed to be a “cycle friendly city”, she can’t drive (at the moment)!! So she has no choice but to cycle or use public transport (which she hates! Stubborn!!).
As for the hazard logic assessment it is in my mind the most credible hazard that endangers not only her life but the children’s too I cannot see anything “Silly” about that. These are not particularly dangerous roads and the cologne drivers have a lot of respect for the cyclists but the roads do contain hazards which she has fallen foul of in the past (eg tram lines). Is it not correct that a mother should do her upmost to protect her children? If she wants to take the risk with her own life then that’s up to her but the father, I know, would like to have his children alive and with him at least.
Can I ask what type of bike you were riding with your unfortunate accidents? I have experienced 3 occasions where at least a serious head injury would have resulted if I hadn’t been wearing a helmet (all on road bikes): 1. Dropped it on a bend on black ice, broke helmet and got a sever headache; 2. Dropped it on a bend with a smear of diesel on the road, broke helmet and fractured cheek bone (the day of the 7/7 bombings!); 3. and potentially the worst, cycling in the dark was hit square on head, at about 20mph, by a hanging tree branch dislodged by a lorry on an unlit road, stunned and helmet cracked but better than lying in the said unlit road unconscious waiting for a car to run over me!!
The 2 times I’ve been hit by cars it has been at low speeds and the helmet wasn’t needed!
The “Logic” as you put it is to control the hazards as best we can and mitigate them as much as possible. They are by definition impossible to eliminate as we have to share roads with other users!
Safe cycling out there

Interesting how this is even a story. "Minister refuses to wear lycra shorts and fingerless gloves" doesn't make much of a headline yet there's the same absence of legal compulsion to do so.

Chris, you talk about understanding the risks and taking appropriate mitigation but you dont pursuade your friend not to take her kids out on the bike? as it would obviously be safer for her to take them by car, to that end she should not be cycling at all as we know many cyclists die on the dangerous roads and that would leave her children without a mother!

You see what happens when you try and apply that sort of logic to the situation? it just gets silly.

As you say we have the right to choice, i tend to not hit my head when i fall (not even when MTBing) but i mostly still wear a helmet, by my choice. Infact the one time i destroyed a helmet was when i got hit by a car, sure it saved me from injury but from death? i dont think so.

(oh, and by your logic i would not ride on the road as that is the only 100% mitigation for not getting hit by a car)

Campain of encouragement is the only way on this subject.
I wear a helmet all the time because I've had so manty incidents where it has almost certainly prevented brain damage or worse!
I've been trying to encourage a friend in Cologne to wear one too ... she cycles with a trailer with her 2 young children in it, but does not wear a helmet because no one else does. If she was to get her wheel stuck in a tram line and come off hitting her head then she would be unconcious with her children left vulnerable in the middle of the road!!
Well may be I have made the arguement for compulsary helmet wearing when you are responsible for another human's life!?
Other than that I know the risks and take the appropriate risk mitigation action. If others choose not to then that is their freedom to do so but to my mind expect no compensation in court as you have already accepted the increased risk!

By the way my Cloogne friend did get her wheel stuck in a tram line and did fall off, hitting her head and bending her bars ... but her kids were not with her at the time!

That top photo of Brad looks like it was taken not last week, but last year, whenever it was he first heard Contador's beef story.

I don't know the facts of the case and beyond listening to an understandably emotionally distraught mother on the radio today have no detailed knowledge though she claimed the cyclist was riding on the pavement.

I listened to 5 live drive this afternoon and Peter Allen had a chap from the CTC on. He was very reasonable and objected to Mr Allen trying to shout him down when he advanced the argument of relative risk around motorists actions and cyclists actions. When further challenged Mr CTC (sorry didn't get his name) said that he had no problem with cyclists who break the law being prosecuted. This rather took the wind out of Mr Allen's sails. However it does raise the interesting point that many will try to excuse the cyclists actions by saying "but cars do far worse to us". In fairness I thought the CTC made a good fist of this one saying that demonising cyclists is pointless and that road safety laws relating to dangerous / careless driving should be harmonised and penalties appropriate to the crime handed out. (Pretty much Tony's quote from the CTC in fact).

We need to do more within our own community rather than just looking outwards for fairness. I'm in London this week for a few days and have already seen more than my fair share of red light bandits, lane weaving and signals that look like the rider is dropping some ash of the end of his fag. Whilst I'm not saying we should go all Cycling Proficiency on it, our own need educating as much as ignorant drivers and pedestrians.

I wonder if the Minister will take on board the regular comment made by the Police/CPS when dealing with accidents involving motor vehicles? When asked why drivers are charged with "driving with undue care" as opposed to "dangerous driving" the response is that the latter is so hard to prove. Surely this would then be even harder to prove with a bicycle (though I assume if you are riding on the footpath you will be instantly proven to have been riding dangerously)?

Tony - how on earth was it proved that the cyclist entered the Cul-de-sac at 20mph and hit the girl at 17mph? Was this done forensically? Seeing as motor accidents can't always have speeds proven this is yet another dubious aspect of that whole case.

Got to say, that I've seen nothing in any of the reports of the court case at the time to suggest that the group Rhiannon was a part of had been drinking or playing chicken. Jason Howard did admit though that he could have swerved to avoid them, but chose not to - the other thing to note is that this accident occurred in a cul de sac and Howard entered it doing 20mph and he hit Rhiannon doing 17mph and he was riding a mountain bike so something relatively heavy.

The issue here is not whether he was at fault because he clearly was, but whether a new law should be brought in to tackle a very rare occurrence - especially when the existing laws covering forms of transport that kill pedestrians on a daily basis are not rigorously applied. Indeed it was the rarity of this sort of tragedy that made it news in the first place, had Howard been driving a car Rhiannon's death would have barely made the news pages even in her home town, and her parents calls for something to be done would have fallen on deaf ears as do the complaints of the loved ones of the many hundreds of pedestrians killed by motorised traffic on our roads every year.

As Kevin Mayne of the CTC said back in 2008 there would be no problem with cyclists being covered by dangerous driving legislation so long as dangerous driving legislation was applied properly to all road users that caused death or injury.

On you and Yours today the debate completely missed the point that the death of Ms Bennet was as a result of a collision between her and a cyclist on the road and turned up stats on footway deaths involving pedestrians and cyclists and vehicles drivers with their respective machines.

The whole issue in the case has very shakey ground for pursuing the cyclist further - a group of young people who had been drinking walking on the carriageway (not as many try to claim the footway and a cyclist correctly using the carriageway warns of his approach but through a failure of the deceased to act in an appropriate way AND the cyclist's failure to adjust his speed and direction of travel delivered a collision. Naturally the weight of responsibility does fall to the user of the moving vehicle who failed to have sufficient control to stop in time, but the absence of a reliable independent witness has left many doubts as to whether a deliberate act of 'chicken' was being played out, something many of us experience when riding past a group on foot.

In almost every collision BOTH parties carry an element of liability. Yesterday I was cut up by and made contact with a mini-coach (the coach ended up with a handlebar height scrape down the side), but in retrospect holding a stronger primary position would have prevented the coach getting in to the danger zone position with me on the nearside.

Another case of bivalent standards occurred in Bath recently when a cyclist collided with a pedestrian in the carriageway and ended up in the cells for 4 hours with the potential charge of involuntary manslaughter hanging on the pedestrian's recovery. Now if that happens for cyclists - why don't the Police make a precautionary arrest of all motorists who are party to a fatal collision - or one with a potentially fatal outcome?

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