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@stevel
The photos are there as I always carry a camera on my commute, normally they end up on Bristol Traffic as some of its satire. However, on this day, having just negotiated what is about the only hazardous junction on my 6 mile commute, I hear this awful screaming and turn back to find this woman has had one of her legs go under a lorry turning left.
The paramedics and ambulances were there in 3 minutes; the central hospital is just nearby, the local PCSOs comforting her until then. There was nothing else to do but document this, with photos that ended up on the local paper (evening post) and local TV news, in an article which worried about the whole problem of bike safety in the city. Because if Bristol is to become a "Cycling City", and the percentage of people cycling doubles, then without a 50% reduction in the risk of death/injury per journey, more people are going to get killed and injured.
Those photographs -awful that the incident was- have brought home what a terrible week it was in Bristol for left-turning Lorry/Cyclist collisions. I think it's a shame it took the photographs to for this to make the local TV, I think it is even more awful that one of our university lecturers died on his commute. Something needs to be done to stop this. We need to look at the root cause, and a key one is that lorries are driving round cities that weren't designed for them, with underpaid and half-asleep lorry drivers being directed by satnav systems with central monitoring making sure that they are on schedule. Better cyclist training -which I support, my seven year old got his level one proficiency last week- is not enough. The Bristol Cycling Campaign and Living Streets would both like 20mph speed limits, then there might be less pressure for bikes to get out the way of fast moving cars, and we stopped being pushed into bike lanes that are a fast route to A&E.
SteveL, Bristol Traffic