Live blog – Driver fined for giving cyclist brother a tow, bus driver cuts in on cyclists, road.cc wins an award and much, much more
All the news from the site and beyond as we start a new week
Mon, Feb 26, 2018 15:09
Help us to bring you the best cycling content
If you’ve enjoyed this article, then please consider subscribing to road.cc from as little as £2.49. Our mission is to bring you all the news that’s relevant to you as a cyclist, independent reviews, impartial buying advice and more. Your subscription will help us to do more.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
9 Comments
Read more...
Read more...
Read more...
Latest Comments
quiff 27 minutes ago
Nick, brake to a stop. Now take your foot off the brake. No, don't put it on the accelerator. Now what speed are you doing? If it's more than 20, drive to a garage.
mdavidford 1 hour ago
@chrisonabike I think we probably do need a finer grained approach than power-of-ten speed limits, unless you're going to allow for fractional powers, which is going to put an excessive cognitive load on the poor old drivers...
mdavidford 2 hours ago
Were you always missing the first period?
chrisonabike 2 hours ago
@Rendel Harris indeed, but giving this a sympathetic reading it *is* a bit harder to see cyclists especially in low light conditions. I think this usually means "I was a bit startled when I noticed cyclists where not expecting them / so late that if I had needed to I wouldn't have had time for evasive action". That might be when unlit non-reflective cyclists appear from a side road - or where people are salmoning against traffic flow / on and off the footway. We all have tons of experience looking for motor vehicles and are familiar with where they'll be and how they will move. Cyclists are significantly smaller, have more complicated shapes and may not be exactly "where we expect the motor vehicles". They may be moving at unexpected velocities. Plus even if cars don't have their lights on they tend to reflect. I put this one in the "follow the opposite philosophy to 'shared space' for better safety" category. That is: safety between road users is enhanced when a) people can clearly see other road users b) and have as much time as possible to deal with them c) and know exactly where to expect them / what to expect from those other road users. Most humans perform very poorly when faced with the unfamiliar and worse when startled...
chrisonabike 3 hours ago
@ajuk.uk@gmail.com "There does seem to be evidence that 20 mph limits work on roads that already lend themselves to such low speeds, and I do think the lack of a 25 mph limit option is an issue for some roads." Again - not disagreeing that numbers alone are not the best way. But I ask: were people already doing 20mph or near that when those roads that "lend themselves" to that speed had a 30mph sign? I would expect in most cases the answer was "no, people saw thirty and that primed them for the 'expected' speed". Or perhaps "they hadn't noticed the signs at all but it seemed like e.g. a residential area and they recalled from all those years back 30mph probably made sense"? Since we've previously gone through the evidence * that merely changing a number on a sign *does* in fact change behaviour and lower average speeds, and AFAICS nobody has proposed a "a set amount" they hope it will constrain people to ... ... is it fair you're disputing the evidence because it doesn't fit with how you feel it *should* work / your local experience? Or do you believe that eventually everyone will revert back to the old speed or higher because 'freedom' or because nobody's actually getting nicked for ignoring the limit? (And if the latter - what's the point of proposing that the speed limits should help with policing, if there aren't the police?) While I can believe that the truly reckless and *some* less circumspect wrong'uns are more likely also to wildly speed, I think this assertion needs more scrutiny **. As for "forcing the police to target them" I think it's been amply illustrated on this site that many of the police don't feel forced into doing much if any enforcement on the roads (see wtjs etc.). Even where they are more active the level of enforcement isn't such to make many drivers worry about "what happens if I break the law *and* get caught?" I don't feel we need 25 or 32 or other intermediate speed limits. In practice where there's enforcement at all there *may* be the discretionary 10% + a few mph in play - so you might even be fine and not fined doing 35mph in a 30mph limit. But you're far more likely simply not to experience any enforcement. And even if you are detected it's still first chance, then maybe any number of 2nd, 3rd etc. with a reasonable lawyer / sympathetic magistrate. Although if you feel the most important thing is to identify indifferent drivers (and assuming we've got enough police / cameras / "spy in the car" black boxes from somewhere) then having lots of non-power-of-ten speed limit signs might be a way to spot who's paying attention or not. Or ... if we changed to km/h (imagine!) you get a finer-grained 10 / 20 / 30 etc. * The last time this topic came up, or the time before! ** I don't know if anyone has studied this, but I'm not sure of the relative amounts of harm caused by a) a small minority of reckless joyriders and "sod getting a licence" types (who *are* very likely to cause serious harm) and b) vastly more "average reasonable drivers" - who are human and thus cut corners and sometimes make unfathomable errors - who cause damage (up to killing people and destroying buildings) at a small but definitely non-zero rate overall. It wouldn't surprise me if the overall determinant of harm turned out to be simply proportional to the number of drivers times time driven for times some measure of speed. (Since speed reduces both time to do something about a situation and increases the harm, absent a lot of engineering to mitigate it - e.g. evidence shows motorways are statistically safe environments).
belugabob 3 hours ago
Now the wands are gone, I look forward to the cycling lanes being cleaned regularly - and not parked in (thereby leaving plenty of room for the buses and emergency vehicles) (all to delivered before Coventry win the FA cup again)
chrisonabike 3 hours ago
@perce everyone should wear lights, full stop. And punctuate properly - that really gets up my colon! Anyway, must dash...
perce 3 hours ago
@Ojisan My old English teacher told me i had to work on my punctuation, so I started going to school half an hour earlier.
60somethingcyclist 4 hours ago
Arrogant obnoxious Tory.
Rendel Harris 4 hours ago
How do you see them then? Do you regularly drive into black cars?
9 thoughts on “Live blog – Driver fined for giving cyclist brother a tow, bus driver cuts in on cyclists, road.cc wins an award and much, much more”
The government knew full well
The government knew full well that phone driving was just as likely to kill as drink driving but imposed a much smaller punishment, a hundred pound fine and three penalty points. Understandably, most drivers took the chance, the very small chance, of being caught. Now they are so used to doing it that doubling the punishment has made no difference. The punishment should be the same as for drink driving.
And the same for hands-free, which causes exactly the same distraction as hand held.
Let’s be honest here, the
Let’s be honest here, the research shows phone use at the wheel to be more dangerous than drink driving. And texting or using a phone for Internet use is more dangerous still. The fact is that the penalties we have, six points for phone use at the wheel compared with 12 for drink driving, do not relfect the actual risk. This is part of the problem. Until the penalties match the risk, drivers won’t take them seriously. For using a phone at the wheel to make a call, the penalty should be 12 points and a 12 month ban, as for DUI. For using a phone to send texts or use the internet, the penalty should be a mandatory two year ban. Hands-free kits nee to be banned, as research shows them to be no safer. Check the TRL and FHWA or NHTSA websites. There are plenty of studies.
The police also need to be more open to receiving video use of drivers using phones at the wheel and committing other offences for charging drivers. There simply aren’t enough traffic officers, thanks to Theresa May’s budget cuts to the police.
Surely hanging onto a car to
Surely hanging onto a car to get a lift from someone you know is only a momentary lapse in concentration and not dangerous so should be totally let off, them’s the rules innit?
I just rode to the hospital for a check up appt at 4pm, wasn’t too bad going but driving tiny flakes of snow on the way back on open country roads was certainly stinging a bit so feel Kwia’s pain
Oh and still morons drive too fast and cut the corners even though the roads are slippery, fucktards!
BehindTheBikesheds wrote:
Who is it that you think got the fine?
Apart from that, it is a conscious decision by both parties.
hirsute wrote:
Oh FFS!
let me spell it out seeing as you dont ‘get it’
We often see/read the ‘momentary lapse of concentration’ defence, and judges so often like to use in summation when protecting motorists and hand out lean sentences despite having killed or maimed someone so are anything but. They are conscious decions to do something inherrantly dangerous but are glossed over massively.
Pease learn what sarcasm and tongue incheek means!
BehindTheBikesheds wrote:
Who is it that you think got the fine?
Apart from that, it is a conscious decision by both parties.
— hirsute Oh FFS! let me spell it out seeing as you dont ‘get it’ We often see/read the ‘momentary lapse of concentration’ defence, and judges so often like to use in summation when protecting motorists and hand out lean sentences despite having killed or maimed someone so are anything but. They are conscious decions to do something inherrantly dangerous but are glossed over massively. Pease learn what sarcasm and tongue incheek means!— BehindTheBikeshedsYou do post quite a number of angry posts, so it’s hard to know if you are being sarcastic. As it is, it was the driver that was fined, not the cyclist, so your orginal post doesn’t make sense.
I pretty much agree with the
I pretty much agree with the comments regarding needing proper penalties, and the need to get the resources to enforce the rules in the first place, although there are a couple of minor things
– the hands-free/hand-held thing may be a bit of a red herring as far as distraction/danger due to loss of attention is concerned; research seems to have shown it’s the amount of cognitition required during the phone use – spoken or otherwise – that looks to be the major pertinent safety factor. Similar presumably can be said about conversations in the car itself. The other wrinkle with having a phone in your hand, unfortunately not qualified that i’ve seen, is that any required interaction with the vehicle will necessarily be slower and unlikely to be as precise or controlled as it may otherwise be. Phone holders are a debate in themselves, I’d happily ban headsets and the like myself though.
– personally I have no problem with someone glancing at sat-navs on phones, when appropriate and safe, nor engaging in brief conversations when the vehicle is stationary for a period of time, e.g. at traffic lights as long as they remain aware of surroundings and act accordingly and their attention is fully on driving immediately prior to, and after, moving off. Safety is the prime concern but 2 years ban for texting Auntie Bessie to say you’ll be late, stationary with the hand-brake on in your 45 minute queue on the Portway would seem a bit harsh and un-necessary to me, .. however it’s also difficult to formulate effective rules that reflect safe-use and common sense without comprimising them.
fukawitribe wrote:
You may want to look at the studies carried out by the TRL. There is a big diference between speaking with passengers in a car and on a phone according to research. Basically, when a driver is speaking with passengers in a car and requires mental processing effort to handle a situation on the road, the person defaults to the driving task and pauses the conversatio. Conversely, when speaking on a phone and also requiring mental effort to deal with a situation in the road, the person’s brain processing prioritises the phone conversation. The TRL has a report on this and so does the NHTSA in the US and the European ETSC. Check the websites of all three.
As for using a phone while stopped in traffic, research also shows that after speaking on a phone it takes around one minute for mental processing to be able to refocus on driving. The time delay is longer for texting or Internet use. Again, the TRL, ETSC and NHTSA websites will have links to the studies into those if you want to search for them.
So yes, a two year ban for texting at the wheel would be appropriate, even in the driver is stopped in a traffic queue.
I do a lot on road safety for my job. I’m up to date with the latest research into driver distraction.
OldRidgeback, nice.
OldRidgeback, nice.