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Eastern Road By-Pass, Cowley, Oxford (Google Maps)Councillor cycling to road safety meeting left bloodied and bruised after being struck by alleged hit-and-run driver in bike lane
A recently elected councillor will undergo surgery this week after sustaining multiple injuries, including a nasty facial wound, when a hit-and-run driver allegedly knocked her off her bike as she cycled on a “safe cycle path” to a road safety meeting.
Oxfordshire County Councillor Trish Elphinstone says she was riding on a designated bike path that runs alongside the A4142 Eastern By-Pass Road in Cowley, Oxford, at around 1.30pm on Friday 21 April when a motorist driving a black saloon car cut across her and clipped her wheel.
According to the Labour councillor, the driver sped off following the collision, which left her head “matted with blood”. She also sustained swelling on her shoulder and knees, as well as a cut to her eyebrow which will require plastic surgery on Tuesday.
The 59-year-old was elected last month to represent Rose Hill and Littlemore on Oxfordshire County Council, following a narrow victory over independent candidate Michael Anthony Evans, who based his campaign on a staunchly held opposition to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and traffic-calming schemes in Oxford, which he described as a “blunt instrument that divides communities”.
Speaking to the Oxford Mail, Elphinstone noted that it was “ironic” that she was hit by a driver on her way to a meeting called to discuss the potential for road safety improvements in Oxfordshire.
“I was on my way to a road safety improvement meeting for Newman Road and Littlemore and I was due to meet officers to discuss road safety. Obviously, I didn’t make it,” she said.
“I have only just been elected and part of what I want to do is improve road safety and it’s ironic that I was due to meet these officers when the incident happened.”
Describing the alleged hit-and-run collision, which took place at the junction of Fern Hill Road, as the bike path briefly enters a residential area, the councillor said: “I wasn’t going fast because I am a cautious cyclist, and I was going downhill and had my hands on the brakes. I must have been going at about 10 miles per hour.
“He came right into my blind spot. I was just thinking ‘he’s not going to stop’, and within a second of thinking that, he hit my back wheel. I rolled over the wing of the car and hit the pavement with my head and my knees.
“You don’t expect it as a cyclist when you are on a safe cycle path for someone to come into the side of you.”
As the driver quickly left the scene, witnesses rushed to help the stricken cyclist, while some managed to take photos of the fleeing motorist’s number plate.
I am grateful for Dylan and another man who took care of me after the man who knocked me off my bike had bolted. I am very moved by their actions to help
— Trish Elphinstone (@TrishElph) April 22, 2023
The councillor suffered two abrasions to her face, “tennis ball” sized swelling on her knees, soft tissue damage in her shoulder, and a cut to her eyebrow for which she will undergo surgery on Tuesday. She was taken to hospital, where she was treated for seven hours for her injuries.
“I want to get back on the bike but at the moment I am a bit shaken up and physically I’m just stiff,” she added.
“Just by chance I had put extra layers on that morning because it was cold and I was wearing a heavy scarf around my neck which took the brunt.
“I was slowing down anyway, and if I had not been wearing that protective gear I would have been in a much worse situation.”
Mrs Elphinstone told the Oxford Mail that the incident is currently being investigated by police.
Unfortunately, the Labour councillor isn’t the only politician to have been struck by a motorist while riding their bike this year.
In February, Lilian Greenwood, the Labour MP for Nottingham South, was knocked off her bike by a driver making what she described as “an illegal u-turn” across a protected cycle lane in central London.
The MP, who sustained a minor knee injury in the collision, tweeted following the incident: “I’m a pretty careful cyclist. This evening I was cycling home, paying attention because it was busy on the roads with pedestrians, cyclists, and cars. I was wearing hi-vis and my helmet. The traffic light was on green. Didn’t stop a driver making an illegal turn and hitting me.”
That time, however, the driver stopped at the scene, and Greenwood said that she hoped her experience “isn’t going to stop me riding a bike but it has frightened me”.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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19 comments
Why the "alleged'' and "allegedly?" Is there some reason to believe Ms. Elphinstone is making up a story about being hit? If not, what other reason could there be? The driver of the motor vehicle is unknown and thus unidentified, and you can't libel or defame someone unless they are identified, which is the standard reason for throwing in the alleged and allegedly boilerplate. One could take the alleged and allegedly as they are used here as a challenge to Ms. Elphinstone's credibility. Is there some reason to do so?
Nothing to do with defamation rather standard legal advice in support of the right to a fair trial rather than trial by social media, main stream media bias, etc.
I don't think the driver was interested in a "fair" trial or any trial at all.
"I don't think the driver was interested in a "fair" trial or any trial at all."
Maybe, or even probably, not. But the facts, which seem to point to a criminal offence being committed, haven't been tested in court and are not yet established. It's in everyone's interests that justice is done by the proper process rather than by common sense: plenty of people's common sense will determine that the cyclist must have been in the wrong.
(And, of course, Parliament should change the law to provide stiffer sentencing and fewer soft charging options for drivers who kill/injure others. I don't really see why we need specific driving offences where manslaughter/GBH etc already cover the situation of being harmed by someone with a deadly implement).
As the driver knew they had seriously hurt someone and drove off, this should be treated as assault with a deadly weapon and they should get 6mths in prison. It is not a collision, or an accident where the driver may be apologetic and concerned. Proper punishment for driving thugs will do more for road safety than any HC reauthoring for stupid people, segregated lanes, helmets or hi-viz.
Also, leaving the scene should involve a permanent driving ban. If you don't care enough about other people's lives, then you can't be trusted to control 2 tonnes of metal in public.
I was with you until:
If you changed that to separated cycle paths (not lanes) I'd say that has indeed been shown to help. Certainly NL is one of the safest places for pedestrians. Cyclists - well there are more cyclist deaths there than in the UK but there is a LOT more cycling and the age profile is different. (Older cyclists are much more likely to be seriously injured or killed in crashes / collisions).
I'd say the other measures likely have rather small effects on road safety. Hi-viz can help reduce some kinds of collisions where drivers are a) looking and b) looking for cyclists. Helmets don't prevent collisions but may provide some protection after the fact. They're good for reducing injury when you fall over though - that's not uncommon.
I suspect that we can't police it much better or train it better. I don't have the stats but I suspect a large part of the death and injury is not caused by a small number of wrong 'uns. It's just the consequence of having a very large number of humans driving for a chunk of the day. Humans are more or less careful and sometimes simply overwhelmed. Mostly that doesn't have serious consequences - but sometimes it does. Those are much worse where you're mixing people in motor vehicles with people on foot / cycling and more so with increased speed difference.
Once again, easily prevented by avoiding the bike lane. Stay in the road where people can see you and know where you are. It's a lot easier to predict what will happen that way.
Also easily avoided by keeping cars out of the bike lanes.
It happened in the road, where the segregated bike lane joins a residential road for a short section:
https://goo.gl/maps/TZsRDmC2GuTbaoUY8
Yup. Stay in the road where cyclists doing less than 40/50/60/70mph are routinely abused and close passed.
Glad she is relatively okay - car v bike, if you can tweet about it afterwards, its a lucky escape.
"he hit my back wheel. I rolled over the wing of the car"
I am struggling to visual the accident - I like to have a picture of it in my head, so I am aware of what to look out for/ avoid.
Is it two cars? The offending car hit her back wheel, which caused her to roll over the wing of another car?
Driver was coming from behind and going faster, so as she fell, the car moved into the space and she then hit the front wing.
Luckily there were no wing mirrors.
ahhhh!
makes sense now.
Those wing mirrors can be treacherous. When driving, I prefer to view the sides using mirrors attached to my doors.
Bugger, it looks like we will now all have to wear protective scarves or be held responsible for any injuries sustained.
What type of car does 'independent candidate Michael Anthony Evans' drive?
Leaving the scene of an incident should automatically carry the same punishment as the worst possible combination of drunk drugged speeding while uninsured and texting and killing someone haveing written about how you wanted to kill them online. It should be unthinkable to leave the scene of an accident because the punishment is so insanely disproportionate to the crime and being caught after the fact means decades in prison even if the collision wasn't serious. People die in the street because drivers are incentivised to try and get away from the scene of an accident by ridiculously low punishments.
This MP had a head injury, the driver had no way to assess how severe that injury was and them stopping easily could have meant the difference between life and death.
It is a collision (or as you said earlier, an incident), not an accident.
So how much community service would that be? Reading this brings back a memory of something I read about drivers in China (I think) - if they hit a pedestrian or cyclist, they don't run away... they reverse back and finish off the job, because if they are caught later and have to pay hospital bills, it will be a lot more than they would have to pay the family in compensation.
Actually, I wonder if you are remembering something that I recall reading - about why bystanders will refrain from assisting if someone is knocked down and injured in public, because there's a risk that they will end up having to foot the medical bill for the person injured. To be fair, the reasons do seem complicated and the law was apparently changed to try to prevent this in future.