An alarming headline on The Times website today: Women cyclists ‘risk death’ by obeying traffic lights. I think this first should be read against the stats, not contained in the article, that young male cyclists — who tend to take often gasp-induucing risks — are far more in danger, statistically speaking.
Nonetheless, I think there is such a thing as being too law-abiding as a cyclist, as the article says:
The Times has obtained a copy of the study, which says that 86 per cent of the women cyclists killed in London between 1999 and 2004 collided with a lorry. By contrast, lorries were involved in 47 per cent of deaths of male cyclists…In more than half the fatal crashes, the lorry was turning left. Cyclists may be deceived by a lorry swinging out to the right to give itself room to make a left turn.
The study states that cycle “feeder†lanes, which allow cyclists to overtake vehicles along the nearside kerb to get to the front of queues, may “exacerbate the problemâ€.
It also says that pedestrian guard railings may have contributed to three of the deaths because cyclists became trapped between the railings and the lorry, leaving them no escape route.
All of which does make perfect sense – and is one more argument in favour of far, far better road design. As I was only saying this afternoon to one of Camden’s Green Party councillors, with reference to a letter of mine in this week’s Camden New Journal (not yet on the web), far too often the cycle lane has obviously just been jammed in as an after-thought, with no real attention paid to the realities of the road.
And in the meantime, I’ll be remaining a law-abiding cyclist most of the time, except when it looks too dangerous to be so…
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