2009-03-20 - Rider Down, Uxbridge Road + Askew Road

Agreed Oliver but there is no way you can effect the standard of lorry driving throughout europe, with fewer haulage firms and more long journeys to make their margins across EU we will always suffer. You can also only effect new drivers if a change is ever in place, all those who have passed this year will be out on the roads for the next 40.

It needs to be improved but i'd rather focus all efforts in to one achievable goal, do not pass stickers must be easier and could be turned around quicker. no amount of driver education will help them if someone drives in under there real wheels in the blind spot

Of course we're not aiming to affect all of Europe at once. But we'll do what we can over here. Training needs to be CPD and not all be dependent on the one licence people get when they're young.

They are solely responsible for their own safety though? you do have to assume the worst when you are one day right then 9 times out of 10 it will be terrible luck or lapse in concentration. no amount of training can negate that.

No road user is 'solely responsible for their own safety'. That's not the right way of understanding traffic, which is a social environment with plenty of interaction that follows pretty much universally understood norms of human behaviour. It's not a free for all in which everybody is on their own. It is only by increasing the degree of collaboration between different road users that actual safety and perceived safety can be improved.

Of course no-one's saying that it's absolutely perfect, but cycle training demonstrably reduces conflict and collision rates. It is all about interacting, communicating well, making eye contact, projecting confidence in traffic, etc. So, no-one's an island, but for some people, who are in lorries, it's more difficult to see what's going on and they also have a real need for training. (I don't think you're disagreeing, I really just wanted to make the point about not considering everybody on their own.)

And people, remember, there are a large number of foreign-registered lorries in London at the moment. Bloody huge things, left hand drive, some with extra trailers, and possibly not subject to the same laws about mirrors. Take extreme care around these, which ever side of them you are.

Standards of training of drivers of foreign-registered HGVs vary considerably. There are also very poorly-trained, stressed, and hassled drivers driving UK-registered HGVs. Reinforcing your point: Pay attention to them all.

Erm, don't you need an additional special license to drive HGV's. What kind of license do you need to ride a bicycle? How can you possibly say they are poorly trained .. is this some anecdotal shit or something.

You don't need a special licence to ride a pedal cycle, but there is still a skill involved. We recommend cycle training to the National Standard for Cycle Training/Bikeability very highly. There's loads about it on the forum already, so I won't re-iterate that. But yes, if a cyclist hasn't been cycle trained and/or hasn't read 'Cyclecraft' by John Franklin, then unless they are a prodigy or have picked it all up from somewhere else, I would consider them poorly trained. If we're going to enable cycling to acquire a higher status, we need to ram home the message that it's not a skill-less activity for the poor and unskilled with their low social status.

I think if what you're saying is true there would be a shitload more accidents involving lorries.

Not completely sure what you're saying here, but I would say that I consider the collision rates involving HGVs far too high as it is. I consider the existing rate to be in part the product of poor training of HGV drivers. Many cyclists, likewise, are poorly trained, as above.

I bet the accident rate is coming down even though there is more heavy traffic and more riders than there ever has been.

That's absolutely right. Cycling is getting progressively safer in London (much as the risk inherent in cycling in London was low to begin with), and that is very much due to increased presence of cyclists on the streets. One thing that cycle training incorporates, incidentally, is for cyclists to learn to assert their presence rather than riding in a way that suggests to motorists that they aren't really there and that they can be overtaken closely, etc.

Dunno if there is more hgv traffic, or what its impact would be, but it is generally thought that increased cycling traffic brings accident rates down rather than up. So a decrease in accident rates would not mean that hgv's were less dangerous . The interesting change would be in the percentage of accidents involving hgvs - if this has gone up or down.

I could believe (with oliver) that many hgv drivers are poorly trained if they do not need to renew their licences regularly. So it could be plausible that the training someone received 30 odd years ago would not be sufficient today. But this is just wild interweb speculation as I have no idea if they need to renew or not.

Yes, the key here is collision rates, not absolute numbers.