Wednesday 24 March 2010

Our Roads Are Safe!

The Guardian Bike Blog today had the sub heading "Many roads may be accident free but they are safe only for car drivers, not for more vulnerable users such as children, pedestrians and cyclists."
His view as "a cyclist who wants to feel safe on the road" is just propagating the myth that our roads are dangerous. Some of them are. I wouldn't recommend one of the local trunk roads. It's fast and narrow and bumpy and bendy. But every morning and every evening a very mature cyclist cycles steadily and deliberately all the way from Ashford to Faversham and back. I'm sure he hasn't got a death wish. He just does it because he can and clearly he feels safe. And as of this morning he was still alive and well. We have millions of miles worth of roads that are perfectly safe for cyclists. If you stop thinking about traditional motorised vehicle routes and have a good look at your maps and at your neighbourhood you will discover plenty of safe roads to enable you to get around on a bike. And no cyclist has the right to criticise another road user unless they have taken the trouble to actually learn how to ride safely on the road in the first place. Every other road user (even most pedestrians!) has been trained to use their vehicle safely on the road. Cyclists are not blameless as many pro-cycling "safety" campaigns such as the recent CTC SMIDSY campaign would have us believe. Very few cyclists position themselves well in the road and at junctions. Even fewer bother to be aware of what's going on around them. And even fewer can communicate effectively on the road. We don't need another bunch of consultants draining even more funds from real cycling advocacy work by producing a rubbish piece of research telling us what we already know. What we need is planners to follow the latest street design guidance from the Department for Transport and we need people claiming to be "the voice of the cyclist" to "grow some".