Month: April 2011

I really don’t like "podcasts" but this might be worthwhile if you have "anger management" issues and the very typical "one finger salute." I found it interesting that "just don’t do it" advice Bob considers an "Olympic event" and has suggestions for starting before that point. My personal advice is to empower you with this response: "If you think my riding is illegal call the police. If you take the law into your own hands, I call the police and you go to jail." No need for anger, no need to argue where cyclists should be riding, just a understandable "don’t act out with your car message."
He also goes into some details about the value of vulnerable user laws. Imagine if there was a new third vehicle type that could instantly cut cars in half in an accident. Do you really think society would not invoke stricter penalties for accidents cause by such vehicles? (Or do you think standard speeding ticket fine would be enough?)
Continue reading “Keeping Your Cool, Bob Mionske”

B’ Spokes: This case in the U.K. is frightfully similar to John Yates death here in Baltimore and Alice Swanson’s death in D.C. Too much emphases on faulting cyclists for riding in truck drivers “blind” spot and not on why the heck are we building trucks with blind spots that target bicyclists and pedestrians?

Worst still, Paula has become a statistic. On London roads alone, cyclists die at a rate of about one a month and a disproportionate amount of those fatalities are women struck by left-turning lorries. The sides of a heavy goods vehicle, articulated or not, quickly form a lengthy blind spot that extends behind the cabin like a shroud. Despite their drivers’ best efforts (and a 2009 EU directive demanding a retrofit of mirrors on some vehicles) these enormous beasts have a lack of peripheral vision and an all-too-well documented reduced awareness of what is directly beyond them.

Worst of all is the possibility that Paula’s death might easily have been prevented by a more proactive attitude to road safety in a city that remains alarmingly ambivalent to its cyclists. In Camden borough, cycle lanes are scarce and at the junction where Paula died, only one connecting road has a cycle box. Despite the efforts of the London Cycling Campaign, the borough has not given its HGV drivers cycle-awareness training, and neither have most others.

Improvements are easy to do yet MVA refuses to add a page or two to the Commercial Drivers Licence manual for improved safety around cyclists insisting that horn tapping and labeling cyclists has hazards is sufficient. And there is no directive for improved mirrors in Maryland as if mirrors are really expensive and killing someone is really cheep.

But as long as the society keep blaming the victim any improvements on the truck drivers side seems like an impossibility.
Continue reading “Worst of all is the possibility that Paula’s death might easily have been prevented by a more proactive attitude to road safety”