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@JDB
I'd like to congratulate the driver for having the balls to post on what can often be a rather militant style cycling website. There is a fair bit of hypocrisy in peoples responses to what he has said, fair enough someone was killed which is absolutely terrible, but to take the piss out of his writing is very petty. All these people saying that wearing headphones makes no difference to the situation, read any of the dumb pedestrian posts on here, the number one gripe is idiot pedestrian wandering out into the middle of the road on their phones or listening to music through headphones. If its hard for a cyclist to react in time in these sort of situations its going to be even harder for someone in a 20t truck. Not commenting on this case, as I don't know all the facts, but to bitch and moan about the behaviour from pedestrian in one thread and then say its fine for cyclists in another is hypocritical. Edit to satisfy BB: This does not and was never meant to imply that anyone person posting on this forum held these opposing views, it was an observation that any third party who had the time/interest to read all the posts on this forum would find that most accidents/near misses between peds and cyclists are caused by the former walking out blindly onto the road normally engaged in listening to music on a portable music devise or talking on a mobile phone whilst the posts on this topic and in the previous thread on this incident seemed to give the impression that in no way was a riders attention impeded by a music devise.
For the record I am of the opinion that listening to music whilst riding does impede your road awareness.
I think London does need more proper separated cycle lanes, never used to think like this but after seeing how many people just don't seem to have the ability to ride in traffic it seems like the only sensible solution. Of course this is going to piss off the "good" cyclists who can ride relatively safely and quickly in traffic especially as they would have to be mandatory to have any real impact but I'd rather be stuck behind some frumpy old lady riding walking pass on her Dutch shopper than have to keep hearing about cyclists dying.
I hope everyone understands that HGV's have got rather bad lines of site from the cabs, with lots of blind spots something the height of a cyclist can disappear into. Truck companies are trying to improve this by installing those convex mirrors, and even some side object detectors. Maybe we as cyclists we should do our bit to make ourselves more visible and install flags like recumbents use to make us more visible to other vehicles. Again I know this wouldn't be a popular move with cyclists because it would look stupid but it would help make riders a lot more visible to HGV truck drivers.
Oh and I also think that for major innercity projects like the Shard, where large numbers of haulage trucks are operating, they should have to stick to a certain route from their dump site, with the roads marked and signposted as HGV haulage road, kind of like a cycle path for trucks, where they have priority right of way, cyclists are discouraged from riding on unless necessary or their is a separated cyclepath etc. If you can limit the number of roads large numbers of trucks can use then its going to be easier for cyclists to avoid these roads and hence avoid a large part of the problem.