I live in rural Warwickshire, just outside of Stratford-upon-Avon, and it is a beautiful part of the world. From my window I have views over the Cotswolds, we have the world-famous Royal Shakespeare Company bringing the best actors in the world to perform, and this area is repeatedly voted as one of the best places to live.
The cycling here is also amazing. You can find miles of quiet country roads, there’s plenty of mountain biking trails around, and there’s even a disused railway nearby where hundreds of children learn to ride every week.
As I was driving back to my house the other day, I was around half a mile from home and found the road was blocked by a couple of police cars. It emerged that a cyclist had been killed after a “collision with another vehicle”. This shook me, because this isn’t just near my house, this isn’t just somewhere that I occasionally pass on my bike – this is on my normal route, I include this section of road on at least 50% of my rides. I have been riding for 20 years, I know there are awful drivers around, but to see it so close to home feels different. I also drive this section of road at least twice every single day.
I don’t know the name of the person who was killed, and I don’t know the circumstances around it. What I do know is that this is not a particularly dangerous piece of road. There are some wide corners, but they’re not blind, and there aren’t so many of them that a driver might become impatient having waited for a long time to pass a slower-moving vehicle. There are always two sides to a story, but with 70%–80% of cyclists’ deaths finding poor driving as the cause according to Cycling UK, the conditions and layout would strongly suggest this will also be the case here.
Regardless of circumstances and fault, the overwhelming feeling I have is of sadness and loss – somebody lost their life while out on their bike. There is never a reasonable explanation for this, it’s always a tragedy.
However, when I look at the local Facebook group, you wouldn’t think somebody had died, because on posts about it people are instead focused on the person being a cyclist, so it was probably their fault.
Luke Chapman thought it appropriate to say, “I do feel the need to point out that whilst the laws now favour cyclists, they clearly don’t protect them from 2 tonnes of steel. I don’t know what happened but I know unfortunately it was fatal.
“Don’t pick fights you cant win, might is always right.
“It doesnt matter as a cyclist if you were right or wrong if youre dead.”
It is genuinely shocking that somebody who uses the same roads as my children and me thinks that going out on your bike is somehow “picking a fight” with a car, or that it’s always the responsibility of the smaller vehicle to just get out the way. It’s their fault if they get killed.
Chris Dunn said, “Unfortunately in my experience cyclists could do more to read the road better and avoid putting themselves in dangerous situations rather than expecting everyone else to look out for them.”
It looks like Chris is a bus driver, so his job is literally to look out for cyclists and other road users. Again, somebody who drives on the same roads as me in some of the largest vehicles you will regularly encounter, believes that all cyclists’ deaths are their own fault for putting themselves in a situation where somebody else might kill them.
Niki Swingler decided that a post about somebody losing a family member on the roads was an appropriate place to say, “I thought that they have to stop at a red light too but who knows because I saw one cycle through one on Evesham Road yesterday.”
Again, somebody who is likely to have overtaken me on my bike appears to think that the death of somebody isn’t deserving of a show of sadness. Instead, because they were on a bike when they were killed, the most important point is to tell the world they saw a different person on a bike cycle through a red light.
When I look at the same forum, Warwickshire police posted at almost exactly the same time, “We’re currently with Officialwmas (WMAS) responding to a serious collision between a car and a pedestrian on the Warwick Road near the Welcombe Hotel.”
Guess how many people in my community thought it pertinent to blame the pedestrian for holding up the car [driver], or mention how many pedestrians they saw crossing the road outside of zebra crossings? I don’t even need to tell you, you already know.
It shows how publications like the Daily Mail, Daily Express, and the Telegraph have done their job. Cyclists are dehumanised, and the people in my community demonstrate this better than any study or focus group ever could. If you’re killed on a bike, you deserve it.
Looking at the comments section, there are 19 direct comments at the time of writing. 15 of them are the standard bingo card comments about cyclists’ behaviour with no sympathy for somebody being killed. It’s sickening.
This is a lovely area to live, and you don’t often meet people who are clearly this awful. Still, it’s genuinely depressing to realise that I share the road with even one person who may hold these views.
17 thoughts on “There’s nothing like the death of a cyclist to reveal how sickeningly awful some people in your local community can be”
George: It’s easy to blame idiots on FB for stupid comments, but they are merely the tip of a much bigger and more problematic iceberg. Their views, for better or worse, merely reflect what the legal system has conditioned them to believe.
We live in a society where deadly motor vehicle collisions are treated as “accidents” no matter what they might now be called. This treatment gives motorists no reason to believe that they are responsible for the control of a deadly weapon every bit as dangerous as a firearm and will be held accountable if it is misused.
As a result, it’s only logical that cyclists become to them objects no different than the many animals killed along the highways, objects waiting to “traumatize” drivers who might strike one lacking the sense to get out of the path of a motor vehicle.
This, sadly, is a belief the legal system has reinforced for a long, long time now. So what else can we expect drivers to think when a vulnerable road user is killed?
They don’t see a dead person. They see an “object” involved in an “accident” that has left some poor driver traumatized, because said object strayed onto a roadway built, intended and reserved for motor vehicles.
And this belief isn’t going to change until the legal system starts making it clear that it is the responsibility of drivers not to kill people, instead of the responsibility of people to get out of the way of drivers.
Completely agree with the comments about the legal system, but I think it goes further and somehow diminishes road crime. There is currently the story of the man who has been jailed after his illegal dangerous dog mauled someone to death. Ten years he was sentenced to, quite rightly I feel.
However, in this story
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg40133w2eno
A delivery driver knocked down a pedestrian walking his dog and drove off to continue his deliveries. The pedestrian, who had been wearing a high vis jacket, was killed, the police state that the victim would have been clearly obvious on the stretch of road where it occurred. The driver got four and a half years. Road crime is seen as unimportant these days
I surprised that case wasn’t looked at for being unduly lenient.
Driving dangerously enough to hit and kill a pedestrian who would have been clearly visible and then driving off.
Lifetime driving ban seems reasonable for this.
And based on the incident and lack of remorse from the driver, another case were loss of taste buds and libido might actually be a deterrent.
Awful, awful comments. People seem to have lost all empathy.
“It shows how publications like the Daily Mail, Daily Express, and the Telegraph have done their job.”
True to an extent. But I think there’s a deep well of dissatisfaction with cyclists on pavements and many pedestrians are also drivers…
I don’t know how we get out of this mess. I’m fed up with car drivers passing close & driving on my back wheel. We can have all the laws we like but ultimately people have to want to obey them. We are a long way from that.
The “deep well of dissatisfaction with cyclists on pavements” also stems in large part from the media, both social and mainstream. I cycle in London most days of the week and honestly, it is a real rarity to see a cyclist on the pavement (I reckon I’ll see maybe one every ten miles of cycling), yet the press would have us believe that it’s virtually impossible to use the pavement for the hordes of lycra-clad terrorists whooping up and down it at 52 mph.
Not where I am. No cycle paths in my town worth mentioning, roads genuinely too narrow. So theyre on the pavement…
Indeed. But it’s the same old story – it’s impossible, unthinkable … until it is, then it’s normal.
Neither cycling nor driving are protected characteristics – and indeed people can morph from “drivers” to “cyclists” multiple times a day. And even more easily from walker to cyclist.
As you say, the media is at least partially responsible for the ‘othering’ of cyclists, inflaming the petrolheads and making hating cyclists acceptable. We live in an era when the msm is either owned by oligarchs who have no interest in informing anyone of anything, just presenting their biased world view as the only rational one. Anyone who disagrees will be destroyed by innuendo, lies and misinformation e.g. Corbyn.
‘A lie often repeated becomes the truth’ was never more true.
Of course, it doesn’t take much – they are, by their nature, somewhat flammable.
… and it’s their copious noxious emissions when they are that are the problem.
Stories like this make my blood boil. As I rode home last night, a Porsche Macan was slow to pull away from a set of traffic lights on the Kings Road in London. He’ll be messing with his phone was my first thought. How wrong was I? As I passed him in the cycle lane, he had a hard-back book open on his steering wheel and he was clearly reading it as he drove along the Kings Road in peak going home time! When are there going to be proper consequences for this level of unbelievable selfishness and downright dangerous behaviour. As this story highlights, the consequences of this sort of behaviour are profound, and profoundly unfair.
Reading a *book* at the wheel? An aesthete! Or a rather rich hipster?
Perhaps it was the Highway Code there – for reference?
I’ve only spotted this (reading and driving) once.
I reported it to the Met police.
Got no response, so I presume no action was taken.
I’ve seen it quite a bit, newspapers, magazines, books, reports…never reported as my handlebar-mounted camera doesn’t catch them. I would guess that unless the original video is much higher quality than the one you’ve posted then the police reason/excuse (delete according to opinions) for not prosecuting would be the absence of a clear shot of a numberplate; I know you read it out but I’ve had other cases knocked back when I’ve had no photographic numberplate evidence, e.g. someone who nearly hit me jumping a red light at a crossroads, I had the evidence of what they did but they only evidence of who they were was me calling out their numberplate, which the police deemed insufficient.
the police reason/excuse (delete according to opinions) for not prosecuting would be the absence of a clear shot of a numberplate
And if you’ve already negated/ thought of all of their excuses and thwarted them, they just refuse to respond because they are malevolent anti-cyclist b******s
Same here in Wales. A 16 year old boy was killed last Wednesday whilst riding his bike in Cardiff. People were posting videos of the accident on social media within hours!
It’s the same here in Wales. A 16 year-old boy was killed while out cycling in Cardiff a few days ago. Footage of the accident was being posted on social media within hours!