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

That may be true, but each road user at the end of the day, must take sole responsibility for their actions. This means they are the only ones in a position to ensure their safe passage without doing anything that will unnecessarily endanger themselves.For example, undertaking lorries is just plain wrong. Surely that should be common sense to everyone?

I agree to an extent--taking sole responsibility for your actions is of course a very different thing to taking sole responsibility for your safety. But even with taking responsibility for actions, it's not quite so simple. In the example of lorry drivers, many work under quite unacceptable conditions about which they can't challenge their employers without risking losing their job. Now, obviously, the morally upstanding thing they should do is to quit such a job, but it is not realistic to expect them to do that.

Your point that cyclists should not undertake lorries is, of course, common sense, but you know as well as I do how few people commonsensically adhere to this rule when they start riding. There are lots of things that I wish people understood commonsensically without needing to be prompted, but the truth is that in most such cases, people need education and training even for such seemingly simple things, which is why we push cycle training so heavily.

In an ideal world, children would be taught to cycle by their parents, not by professional trainers. But we have a large skill gap in cycling, and it'll take some time to train the parents so they can train the children again.

You always have some degree of unpredictability as to which ideas get widely accepted and which ones don't. A tabloid can spout some bile that suddenly everybody thinks is true. Urban myths erupt all the time. Disagreements are created on the basis of false premises. Etc. There's a constant need to improve (and renew) the stock of ideas that are considered common, and which influence what people consider common sense.