London taxi drivers claim film shows most cyclist jump red lights - but does it?

At the second red light the yellow car on the opposite side of the road jumps the red light. Its too boring to watch the rest

At the second red light the yellow car on the opposite side of the road jumps the red light. Its too boring to watch the rest

Perhaps we should do same sort of video at those junctions & post unedited to show the law breaking drivers to prove they arent innocent as the Taxi drivers trying to make themselves. Their own video was showing ASl abuse within seconds of it starting.

Watching some of the red light jumpers made me think. Personally I wait in a queue in amongst cars and on the line a red lights but have on rare occasions after the traffic has cleared carried on (only when I absolutely know there will be no others vehicles coming). Part of the problem with traffic lights is cyclist have more visibility and awareness of movement traffic and feel it's easier to cross a junction generally.

Watching some of the red light jumpers made me think. Personally I wait in a queue in amongst cars and on the line a red lights but have on rare occasions after the traffic has cleared carried on (only when I absolutely know there will be no others vehicles coming). Part of the problem with traffic lights is cyclist have more visibility and awareness of movement traffic and feel it's easier to cross a junction generally.

perhaps a road system with no road markings or furniture with a mandatory limit of 10mph may help. No. Well then, we are where we are. We have a road system thats not designed for cycles and definitely not designed for mixed mode and mixed speed traffic. So, be careful out there and obey the law when safe to do so.

Perhaps taxi drivers should concentrate upon their own particular skills, (actually driving safely). If I was consistently poor at my job then I would quickly be disciplined and eventually be looking for new employment! (Apparently not if you're a taxi driver!).

I try hard to obey every traffic law. I want to have a firm place to stand when I criticise the drivers who risk my life.

Picked another (large) junction and watched the cars behaviour, just for two cycles of the lights.

For both, two cars went through on amber, and two cars went through after the lights had clearly gone red, vs only one that stopped correctly (can only be one per phase doing that, logically).

The first car to stop did so correctly behind the ASL, the second one ended up stopping well beyond the ASL, right across the pedestrian crossing, after starting to run the red and thinking better of it.

True, during the time I was watching, the single cyclist to appear slightly marred my experiment by quite blatantly jumping the red (I wanted to shout 'you're spoiling my numbers damn you!'), but, using the same system as the Taxi Driver study and not counting vehicles going through on green, the proportions for motorists and cyclists breaking the rules were still fairly similar - 100% of the one-and-only cyclist vs about 80% of the larger sample of motorists.

I got bored after two traffic light phases, sorry. I'm a rubbish scientist.

Though I've noticed its not uncommon at this junction for up to four cars to race through after the lights have gone red.

In short, I would suggest that cyclists are actually not very different from other road-users, statistically, in their tendency to pass the stop line when they legally shouldn't.

Of course taxi drivers are the best drivers on the roads..... Pulling across lanes of traffic without indicating to pick up a fare without indicating or using mirrors; doing u-turns in front of cyclists without indicating; cutting across cyclists to turn off main roads...... The list goes on....

Personally my adherence to the stop line is all about safety, not law, if I filter up to the front of the traffic and can't sit between vehicles because they only have 1-foot gaps between them then I will find a safe place in front, where I am visible to drivers, so that once they have finished reading their Facebook messages they don't knock me over.

I can't figure out why taxi organisations care about or study cyclists' behaviour?

Yawn. A random video, showing bad behaviour by all road users. Got bored after about two minutes (during which time there were two red lights and the vehicle at the head of the queue on each occasion totally ignored the ASL).

I'm all for fines for bikes who jump red lights, in the same way I am for fines for cars, buses, lorries driving over the ASL. It's the law. It's there to protect you and others. Get on with it. Same for those who whinge when they are caught speeding - there's a speed camera sign and the damn things are painted bright yellow. What more do you want?

Move on.

First car that appears on the video jumps the red light

I mean, I disliked our car-centric culture back when I was a pedestrian and public-transport user. Now I have discovered (late in the day) that cycling is a better way to get around (and offers hope for getting more people out of cars).

Yet somehow, by merely taking to two wheels, I have apparently taken on responsibility for policing the behaviour of everyone else in the country who has a bike! And now, apparently, I have to get every one of them to behave perfectly at all times before I can return to asking for less car-centred cities! Even though the worst cyclist behaviour is less lethal than the average motorist behaviour.

I feel puzzled by this.

Very dangerous comments at the moment wasn't me was him type of thing car drivers hate cyclists etc etc what they got to realise that cyclists are just as entitled to the road as they are ,safety should be their priority not moaning about cyclists on the road etc.. Try crossing the road if your old or injured and see if cars slow down to let you cross etc..

Back in the day only cyclists rode bikes, now too many non cyclists are riding bikes.

Cherry-picked for dramatic effect, discard, forget.

"But we counted a total of 750 cyclists riding through the junction along Hackney Road toward the city centre. Of 243 who arrived when the light was red, 131 stopped."

I was never that good at maths, but that's really A Really Bad Thing isn't it? You're making out it's nothing. Nearly half didn't stop? I often now sit at reds watching f#ckwits ride through reds (normally the same mob - NuFreds, girls pootling along at 10mph listening to music - without lights) and hoping guiltily they get sided.

I think the main question raised by these videos is why at a time when a "share the road" type of campaign should be promoted, to try and help road safety, is an organisation for professional drivers deliberately trying to antagonise a single section of road users. The videos are of no real help to anyone. Seeing as the LTDA have found 2 junctions that have a large number of traffic violations (not just cyclists), the responsible thing for them to have done would surely be to inform the met police so they could do one of their advice blitzes. Not to put a camera there and then try to vilify cyclists.

When those bastards learn to drive safely then they can criticise, until then they can STFU.

I had one of those shitheads riding a little over a foot from my back wheel whilst I was trying to overtake another cyclist, the c**t nearly caused an accident and when I remonstrated with him, he threatened to take me out and I dont think he had a restaurant in mind.

Their standard of driving is appauling, I will admit that they're not all bad, just most of them.

I like to see a new law passed - cyclists can vandalise cabs whenever they are wronged.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulykRPjzUjQ

Call me cynical but I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that the Standard chose to use the most reckless scary looking screen capture they could to illustrate their story - note the caption:

Cyclists whizz past as a woman pushes a buggy across when the green man is showing

Actually the woman is quite a distance away from any cyclists, and doesn't look in least bit bothered by them*.

Of course I don't mean it's generally OK to jump red lights, especially not on busy pedestrian crossings, but if that's the worst incident in two hours of filming I'm going to suggest it's not as big a deal as it would be if that many drivers were jumping red lights... Maybe we could compare it to drivers going over 70mph on the motorway for instance.

*Please let me know if there are any bits where women and children run screaming from the two-wheeled menace only to be ruthlessly mown down before they can reach the safety of the kerb. I can't be bothered to watch it all on the offchance.

Are there any habitual RLJers out there who can tell me what goes on in your heads when the lights have been red for a while and you approach the junction and ignore them? (Like the stream of RLJers at about 24 mins). I'm not talking about getting a couple of seconds ahead of a light that's about to go green, it's when other people are sitting there and you just breeze past them.

To me it's: "The law doesn't apply to me" but maybe there's something else going on up there?