Do stories of death and injury affect your attitude to cycling?

I ride roads where cars pass
I ride roads where cars pass at 60. It doesn’t scare me, you have to hope your clocks got time on it still. Just enjoy your world and the ride.

I did a thousand miles’
I did a thousand miles’ commuting in London, riding very defensively and so on, and then got wiped out on a roundabout in the countryside in broad daylight.

The recent accidents are a statistical cluster, but none – sadly – are inherently unusual; just the likely outcome of darker evenings, stupid road layouts, big vehicles and squishy humans sharing a space with insufficient care given on one or both sides.

I’ve been cycle commuting in
I’ve been cycle commuting in London for well over 20 years and one thing the current statistics and news stories don’t reveal is how much worse things used to be. The news gives the impression that the fatality rate amongst cyclists is increasing hugely. It isn’t. The death rate for cyclists on London’s roads is now far, far lower than it was in the 70s and 80s.

What’s changed? Well the Internet and modern communications means we know more than we did back then, and find out more quickly too.

It’s true that there has been an upturn in the death rate after years of this falling. But this is a spike and we aren’t anywhere near the fatality rate we used to have amongst cyclists on UK roads in the bad old days.

I let my kids ride on the road and they have had appropriate training. But I’m still cautious as well and despite elder son wanting to cycle to school and us having discussed a route, I’ve not let him yet.

As a cyclist you do face a lot of aggression from white van drivers or BMW drivers for instance. And Jermey Clarkson is to blame for some of that at least. There are many drivers too who are plain careless. Just yesterday I was nearly taken out by a dolt in his MPV who flicked on his indicators as I was passing and then started to change lanes, oblivious to the fact that I was in the process of overtaking. And I was on a large and fairly noisy motorcycle with a very bright headlight too, rather than my bicycle.

But I remember just before the congestion charge was introduced and London’s junctions were really bad. Now that was a very dangerous time and I think analysis of the data would reveal a much higher fatality rate then than now.

When I was hospitalized after
When I was hospitalized after a car accident (nothing to do with cycling, and not of my own making, I was a rear seat passenger), I had fairly severe injuries but very little pain and no recollection of the actual incident, so that led to a fairly acute awareness of the risks of using roads, but in a very abstract sense, cognitive rather than emotional. No post-traumatic stress disorder or night terrors.

I’ve never been hit by a motor vehicle while cycling, probably partly because I’ve simply been lucky, partly because I’m not the fastest cyclist (I use a hybrid rather than a road bike for town cycling), partly because I tend to cycle quite defensively, and partly because I’ve been living in Germany for years now and hostility towards cyclists seems to be less common here. I’ve cycled regularly in my current location for the last four years and in that time I’ve only once had occasion to catch up with a driver after a dangerous overtake and have a chat with him about it, and that driver wasn’t German. (Although in fairness, there were also 2 or 3 more drivers, probably German, that I just didn’t catch.) Scary overtakes are still quite rare here, though, even when I’m provoking drivers (not deliberately!) by taking the lane to stay out of the door zone and cycling at 25 km/h in a 50 zone.

When I am angry (or simply terrified) it is often because of inadequate cycling infrastructure adding unnecessary hazards to my journeys and/or somehow preventing me from cycling defensively in the manner that has successfully been keeping me very safe for the last 20 years. Cycle tracks on side-paths that allow right-turning trucks to come up alongside me to my left, for example, when I’m going straight. (Without a cycle path, I would be able to “take the lane” and make the trucks wait behind me if I got to the lights first; if they got there first, I would wait behind them.) Or “protected” cycle infrastructure that prevents me from veering towards the centre of the road when passing side roads where vehicles coming out might not check for traffic until they’re already sitting in the cycle lane crossing the junction. I’m sceptical about dedicated cycle infrastructure in general – when badly implemented, it definitely makes things worse. However, I think London is a bit different. The current situation at locations like Bow and Aldgate absolutely seems to merit fully Dutch solutions. I just wouldn’t generalize that to the rest of the UK and Ireland. By and large, I like cycling on roads and don’t mind sharing them with other traffic; it certainly beats sharing with pedestrians in many cases. I have had most of my bike accidents while using sub-standard cycle paths (sand, gravel, mud, potholes, kerbs not properly dropped that had to be crossed at odd angles). When I find a road scary, it’s as likely to be because of a steep, twisty descent as because of traffic. I do find heavy traffic on narrow roads quite unpleasant, though, especially at night.

I find the current safety discussion incredibly frustrating: hi-viz, helmets, lights and RLJ/rule breaking by cyclists in general are all issues of marginal relevance and yet they take up 95% of the column inches in the media that are desperately needed to send out much more important key messages that are still going largely unheard. Yet I also sense that we may finally be on the cusp of a more meaningful debate like the “Stop de kindermoord” one.

I dislike the way they are
I dislike the way they are reported and I dislike the fact that they do skew the opinion of people. We have people screaming blue murder on its website all the time. It is much better and responsible for them to report the full reasons and causes than the ‘news’ of the deaths.

I don’t need it, you don’t need it, no one needs it. But if we know cyclists are dying because of poor education/poor infrastructure/poor driving then we can all make educated decisions about these events. It actually annoys me that road.cc use these events as headlines – coroners reports I appreciate.

I returned to road cycling
I returned to road cycling this summer after a gap of about 20 years. I usually do a 40 to 50 mile ride at the weekend and a couple of commutes of around 10 miles round trip during the week. I would add that this is in and around Bradford, not in London.
Since the days that I was regularly riding to work before, the roads are significantly more congested for all road users, and you do get more of a feeling of the close proximity of vehicles.
The recent incidents of fatalities certainly do add to the determination to do all that I can to be safe, but not to the extent that it affects my approach to riding, which I consider to be ‘assertively defensive’. I think that you have to take the view that anyone on the road could do something unpredictable and prepare as best you can, but at the same time avoid allowing yourself to be forced in to the gutter. Make clear signals and look for acknowledgement of them, then take your position in the road.
We have quite a lot of ‘cycle lanes’ around Bradford, but they are primarily just the usual one metre (if you’re lucky) of gutter with a white line painted next to it. Some of the road surface contained in these lanes is atrocious and does nothing to encourage a safe, segregated ride.
As with all things in life, you have to try to control what you can, but accept that you cannot control everything

Hi Nixter, my point was
Hi Nixter, my point was really that the way you ride is highly likely to influence outcomes – if you have a a margin for error, it might be that margin that keeps you from a coming together with a no margin for error/bad driver. Sadly for me riding in London has pretty much always felt dangerous but maybe that’s a good perception to ride with ? Sure, the stats should encourage people to get out there on bikes but my big beef with superhighways is that that they could lull those with limited experience into a hugely dangerous sense of security.
There are certain categories of road user that must be avoided at all costs and those blue painted lines feed you right into harm’s way.
Anyway I didn’t mean to come over indignant but I must admit I am less than happy with what is going on on London’s roads.

Arfa, don’t get me wrong, I
Arfa, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t suggesting the advice you and others were giving was wrong or even that it wasn’t helping you as an individual reduce your risk or that the risks weren’t real.

Stating the bleedin’ obvious the average hides a great deal of variation and commuting in London at peak times will be right out there in terms of higher than average risk I’m sure. And again stating the obvious no amount of defensive riding will counter the effects of the drunk/incompetent/negligent/malicious as you note, so the risk remains in some degree.

My point was only that the original question was ‘how does it make you feel’ not ‘what defensive riding tips do you have’ and that defensive riding, what ever else it does, makes people perceive their level of risk to be lower as a result.

I would hope that people don’t let their perception of risk be driven by isolated events to the point that they give up riding altogether. e.g. if someone like me who doesn’t commute in London (but has been cycling on and off road for decades) thinks its now all got so dangerous I should stop.
And perhaps the way to address that is to put incidents in a wider context?