"Paul Boyd" <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:[email hidden]...
Quoted message said:
On 27/02/2006 23:52, Pyromancer said,
Quoted message said:
Car drivers doing it can be dealt with - install some cameras and it's soon "game over" for the offenders.
Yeah? Try telling my local council that, please! Mine basically told me that they have to wait for someone to be killed before they will do anything.
That's common. At a meeting about the upgrading of the A47, some villagers from a village which is split in two by the A47, asked for speed cameras to be installed, due to the fatalities that had alreasy occurred. They were told that it was not possible as not enough people had yet been killed to warrant a speed camera being placed at their village... Never let anything such as human life impede the flow of the traffic :-(
So, you think it's worth it if far fewer people cycle, with a consequent increase in pollution and risk to those few cyclists who remain, to address a very minor problem in the very complex mess of road incidents that happen each year?
"My crime is OK because it's not as bad as his crime" is not a sustainable argument.
Nor is it the argument I made.
Using a sledgehammer solution, which may well have disproportionate detrimental results to others, is not a good way of using limited resources to address what is a very small problem.
<<The "news" in that report is that for some reason that crossing has a higher than average level of cycle-pedestrian incidents than anywhere else... a better campaign would be for a cycle training course at the school.>>
As I said earlier, cars driving through red lights and over pedestrian phases at junctions is not news. Fact is that pedestrians often put up with motorised offenders as it's risky to put yourself in way of a car. Bikes of course are silent (sometimes!) so unless you look you wouldn't know they were there. No-one relies on green ped phase anymore because we know that it's sometimes ignored by important people in a hurry (and cyclists). Cycle training can sort this in the longer term as it improves all road use skills. BUT.. Is it possible that some people make a point of stepping out in front of bikes going through red lights (or pavement cycling) in a way they'd never do for anything else? Not ones going flat out of course but the ones that trickle through red lights. I can't believe that a cyclist running a red light has any more intent to hit anybody than a car driver. Less I would have thought as he or she is not in a steel box.
It's not *reporting* bad cycling behaviour that gives cyclists bad press, bad cycling behaviour does that all by itself. There is possibly noone here that cycles or drives in an urban who does not see bad practice each and every day, both by cyclists and by other road users. Of *course* it gets used as an excuse by motorists to lambast cyclists, much like it gets used practically every day on this here newsgroup by cyclists to pillory motorists.
Official indifference to traffic violations by all road users is part of the problem. At 9am this morning I saw two cyclists cross Googe Street heading east against the lights. Three rozzers on motorbikes waiting at the lights coming the other way must have seen them too but did nothing. Perhaps they had more important things to do like looking for people driving while black. One of the cyclists saw the rozzzers and dismounted halfway across, the other didn't bother.
Also posh areas tend not to get big fast roads built thru them to
let
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Quoted message said:
important people get to where they have to go.
Posh area houses are much more widely spaced so there are fewer
people per km.
and fewer destinations per km. also, thus making it less likely that people will find it easy to get to anywhere on foot. Contrast the modern affluent suburb with a town planned in the middle ages, with all plots deliberately designed to be long but narrow, to pack in the maximum number of properties per km. of street.
well, they seem to have counted cyclists, which is probably a first for people making a complaint about red light running.
60% does seem high to me, even for the kind of cyclists we get here in London. I wonder if there's some special reason. In the USA the Institute of Transportation Engineers's standards for traffic lights say that the detectors should detect motor vehicles, not that the detectors should detect all vehicles. Thus cyclists there get trained to not expect lights to turn green for them.
Whatever happens in the USA, and that Brit's scorn, always eventually happens in Britain in a more virulent form. The recent trend, here in Britain, even among some cyclists, to use "vehicular traffic" to mean "not bicycles" is a worrying straw in the wind.
