London mayor Sadiq Khan plans to ban unsafe lorries from capital's roads

Yes, things have to change now, not in 5, 10 years. when thousands more lives will have needlessly gone. No driver who cannot fully shoulder his or her solemn responsibility to drive with full attention, care and consideration for everyone else has no place on any road.

Most people would view their lives as precious, and cyclists are no different so why should our lives hinge on whether drivers choose to concentrate, or to text, or rummage around for a lost cd.

It is sickening and ridiculous that being squashed by a truck is seen as no big deal compared with being shot by a gun. The pain of the families left behind is no less.

Thousands more are taking to bikes, there should be proportionate moves to ensure our safety. Maybe slowly it is happening but it is slow.

One step at a time folks... Change the vehicles the there are no hiding places for the bad drivers and the result will be change in driver training and safety.

Yes, it obviously requires drivers to look as well as have better vehicles. Equally, a driver paying the attention they should will not hit a cyclist (barring bad cycling or some other unusual outside feature).

The world is not divided into careful drivers and drivers with their eyes shut. There is a sliding scale of attention. A driver who just fails to notice a cyclist in a lorry with poor visibility may well see the cyclist if he's in a different lorry.

Moments of carelessness happen. Any driver who says they've never had one is either a liar or a moron. Moments of carelessness in vehicles with poor visibility are more likely to kill people so let's improve the visibility. Seems pretty simple.

We have to face it, nothing will change unless the drivers do.

We all know that truly responsible and concentrating drivers would never kill anyone, let alone cyclists, barring bad cycling of course, even if truck visibility were worse than now.

Motorist threat in general, I absolutely hate the uncertainty of cycling, all because of drivers who don't view our lives as important enough to at least give us a bit of space .

Our lives are allowed to continue only because of privilege, through people being kind enough to not be texting, not be changing cd's,  not fiddling with satnavs etc

It doesn't seem to be our right and that's the problem

Why should we feel sick with trepidation, fear even, when we go out on our bikes?

I'd like to see him look the families of the dead cyclists , killed by HGVs in the eye, and tell them it's "unfair" that the industry has to make their lorries safer.

Apparently, the majority of lorries that would be banned by 2020 will be banned from the Low Emissions Zone anyway, which means Sadiq Khan doesn't actually need to do much to implement this. It also means the RHA are complaining for no reason.

Hopefully they will spread this nationwide so the haulage companies can't just use substandard lorries elsewhere in the country.

Out of interest, is there something like the Euro NCAP safety ratings for HGV's? I know NCAP cover pickups and vans as well as cars, but it would be interesting to see how badly they would fail in a proper test.

The BBC was quoting 66 pedestrian deaths with 23% of those involving an HGV.

As to 'unfair'. If the RHA can get a signed agreement from all the families and friends of the victims of preventable deaths, not to mention the drivers who live with causing a death on their conscience, if they can get those people to agree that requiring HGVs to be safe for road use is unreasonable, then he may have a fair point.

Perhaps the reason lorries are being demonised is because they are demonic. 

Clearly the RHA thinks that dead cyclists and pedestrians are just a price worth paying to keep their members in business and the shops and economy of London going... Hmm.

Your views may be more valid if you replaced the word "pleb" with the word "driver".

While redesigned lorries are nice, the major stumbling block is the pleb behind the wheel. Introducing all this clear-vision-proximity-warning malarkey is all well and good, but the guy at the wheel still has to actually drive responsibly and that's 95% of the problem.

So, they think these measures are 'unfair', yet I haven't seen any 'fair' proposal by them to reduce the number of fatalities. I don't think it's demonising lorries - it's just that some of the lorries have really bad visibility and these tend to be the ones killing people.

Let's do a bargain - stop killing cyclists and we'll stop demonising lorries.

“We want to bring balance to the argument. We’re not convinced these measures are the solution. Improved visibility isn’t going to sort the problem alone,” he added.

He's right, the driver will still need to actually look and indicate...

PS. Anybody know the number of pedestrians that were killed by HGV's that makes of the 23% number? I've been having an argument with a reporter about this on twitter.

You know what's unfair?  Cyclists not being able to safely use public roads.  That's unfair.