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Cyclist hits granny in pavement crash in Brighton
On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:11:50 -0000, "pk" said
in : A cyclist was clearly at fault and injures pedestrian and the gist of the thread is to defend cyclists. Up to a point, Lord Copper. What actually happened was that a mission poster trolled the group, causing some people (for perfectly good reasons) to become defensive. The original case is a simple matter of the fallacy of "false vividness" - one of a tiny number of cases picked up on by those desperate to find a stick with which to beat cyclists, in order to "prove" how dangerous pavement cycling is. In reality, of course, pavement cycling is mainly dangerous to the cyclist - a fact which is not known to change with the application of Magic White Paint (TM). The fact that you are at vastly greater risk from motor vehicles on the footway than from cyclists *even though* it is asserted that pavement cycling is a plague of epidemic proportions, is a perfect indication that these few cases are essentially ignorable at the public policy level. They are as rare as the falling boulder that flattened some poor woman's shed last week. Do we run around crying for action to end the shed boulder menace? The leading cause of injury to pedestrians on the footway is trips and falls, which account for half of all injury hospitalisations in the UK; and the leading recorded cause of fatal injury to pedestrians, be it on the footway or elsewhere, is motor traffic. Other causes are orders of magnitude less numerous, despite the assertion that pavement cycling is endemic. The level of fatalities per mile travelled on the footway is surely many hundreds of times greater in the case of motor traffic - and yes, motor vehicles do habitually trespass on the footway, which is why so many places need to install bollards to prevent this. A final piece of irony: those trips and falls are usually caused by broken paving slabs, and guess what is the leading cause of broken paving slabs? It seems to be our old friend the motor vehicle. Usually goods vehicles. That *does not* make pavement cycling right. It does not make it risk-free, for us or for the pedestrians. It*does* mean that it is not the huge problem that some people make it out to be, and that is reflected in the prosecution guidelines, which also explicitly acknowledge that pavement cycling is largely a response to the perceived danger of motor traffic. So we could make pedestrians safer from the major source of danger (motor traffic) and the nearly insignificant source of danger (cyclists) by controlling the source of major danger. Shared space and other measures designed to drastically reduce motor traffic danger in places where people live, walk and go about their business, would have a double bonus value: it would remove the major source of danger, and it would remove the perceived danger which is the cause of the nearly insignificant danger. I guess the mission posters will be looking for unequivocal condemnation of the cyclist, in isolation. They can **** off. I am reminded of the Israeli government demanding unequivocal condemnation of attacks by Hamas - sure, Hamas should not launch rockets at Israel, but there is a difference in character between shooting home-made rockets knocked up in garden sheds at someone who is occupying your country, and using some of the most advanced weapons that modern industrialised warfare has to offer against people who are struggling even to reach subsistence levels on the land you have left them after stealing the bits you want. Well, perhaps that is a contentious way of stating the example, but I think you see what I mean. Anyone who comes to this group and expects us to condemn pavement cycling, red light jumping or any of the other transgressions of the cyclist, with absolutely no strings attached, is basically trolling and should simply be ignored. Do we support these things? Of course not. Should we stand together as fellow-members of that "out group" and firmly reject being targeted? Hell yes. Is that "us" v "them"? Well, yes. Even if the "us" in question does not cycle illegally on the footway (note illegally; it's quite legal in a lot of places) and rather wishes others would not. And we may well wish that "chav on a BMX" did not translate into "cyclist" on the way between Planet Reality and the Daily Mail, and believe me that one really does **** me off because most of those types I would cheerfully consign to National Service at least until they have learned to pull their ****ing trousers up, but it is hardly a surprise to find that people who love cycling and consider being a cyclist as some kind of defining characteristic become just a /teensy/ bit defensive when someone comes to uk.rec.cycling, the cycling newsgroup where cyclists talk about cycling and hope to get away from the insane petrolhead-dominated nonsense that prevails in most places, and try to make out that All Cyclist Are Evil because This Bad Thing Happened QED IDT INDT. You want people to condemn pavement cycling? I will happily condemn it, and the councils that encourage it, and most especially the drivers who scare people into doing it, and I will happily stand up for measures that will plausibly fix the problem at source, provided that they are sane and proportionate. And that should be good enough, I would have thought. Guy -- May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting. http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk 85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound GPG sig #3FA3BCDE http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk/pgp-public-key.txt |
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