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I watched a bit of Top Gear last night as I was channel surfing... and they were racing lorries. Dead hard it was.
So I'm going to go with Elguapo's pub view, that even if you see them, assume they never ever see you, and just stay the hell away from them, and if you have to pass go on the outside or wait.
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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
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Of course you're right that many cyclists need better training, too, but let's not imply that they are solely responsible for lack of understanding that different road users have for the requirements of others.
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.
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So I'm going to go with Elguapo's pub view, that even if you see them, assume they never ever see you, and just stay the hell away from them, and if you have to pass go on the outside or wait.
This is the view I have had ever since I read about Sebastian Lukomski on MT. Can't remember why or how I found the article, but I'd recently started riding to work.
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Transport for London have just re-printed a small leaflet we worked on about 5 years ago. If you read it from one side it starts "Ignorant lorry drivers" ... but if you pick it up the other way it starts "Ignorant cyclists!" I'll see if I can find the pdf and post it up here .. but not tonight. We don't have any in the office but I'm sure TfL will send some out.
I was given one of these leaflets by the police in Bishopsgate a few months ago. They invited people into a parked lorry to give a sense of what a lorry driver can actually see on the road. A bit geeky perhaps, but I kind of appreciate the effort they made.
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I was given one of these leaflets by the police in Bishopsgate a few months ago. They invited people into a parked lorry to give a sense of what a lorry driver can actually see on the road. A bit geeky perhaps, but I kind of appreciate the effort they made.
"Two sides" leaflet uploaded - turn it upside down to read the second half.
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Left hook lorries can see you better up the left side but they tend to leave less space. They cannot see so well on the right side but probably look more often to make up. Almost all of them will have similar mirrors to UK lorries.
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Pip, this is simply not true. A lot of HGV drivers are very poorly trained. We have long been calling for better driver training, as well as cycle training for all HGV drivers so that they understand the risks better.
Of course you're right that many cyclists need better training, too, but let's not imply that they are solely responsible for lack of understanding that different road users have for the requirements of others.
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.
I think if what you're saying is true there would be a shitload more accidents involving lorries. I bet the accident rate is coming down even though there is more heavy traffic and more riders than there ever has been.
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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.
I think if what you're saying is true there would be a shitload more accidents involving lorries. I bet the accident rate is coming down even though there is more heavy traffic and more riders than there ever has been.
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.
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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.
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Yes but proportionally, how many cyclists have 'training' and how many lorry drivers have 'training'?? It must be 9999:1 or something! So what exactly are you advocating, that the HGV license should be harder to obtain? What exactly are you basing this poorly trained thing on..
Whilst I agree training can only be a good thing, I think it's best left to the very inexperienced who don't feel safe on the roads. To get everyone trained would be a logistical nightmare .. there are 20 million bikes in this country, how many resources would it for all riders to be trained? And even then, how many lives will be saved because of it? Do you really think it's worth it?
I think, for the amount of HGV traffic that is in the UK, the accident rate is pretty good. It could be far far higher. And, as you said, it's on a downwards trend (something i think you'd find hard to link to an increase in cycle training). If you're choosing to travel on 2 wheels, you're choosing to travel by more vulnerable means. That isn't to say that bigger vehicles don't have a duty of care to other road users, but accidents will happen, there are inherent dangers and you will always come off worse when bad shit happens.
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As far as we can tell the number of cyclist x hgv crashes has stayed about the same for the past 10 years while the number of cyclists has more or less doubled. So that is an improvement in the rate of crashes but it is not as good as the improvement in other sorts of crashes. As lpg says the rate of hgv crashes is very low, probably lower than with cars, but the consequences of a hgv crash are usually gruesome. A very high proportion of the crashes are with tipper/skip/concrete lorries. These are the ones rushing around to get as many trips per day as they possibly can.
It's true that HGV drivers need a special licence but they don't get training about how to drive where there are a lot of cyclists and pedestrians. This used to happen naturally when there were more cyclists on the road and when lorries spent a lot of time on urban streets. Now they mostly rush up and down motorways or fast dual carriageways, and most of the training happens on roads like that. Lorries are more dangerous than they used to be because they are easier to drive, are much more powerful, wider and some of them are higher off the ground. It used to be the case that most cyclists could out accelerate a loaded lorry and avoid getting hit. With high horsepower and power steering the drivers can throw their lorries about like a white van man. It would be really good if all lorry drivers got cycle training so that they understood what it is like down here. Lambeth council have recently had their drivers cycle trained - as in current issue of London Cyclist.
Bikeability training is really good, level three is about understanding and surviving in traffic. My final lesson was a ride from Kingsland rd to Bermondsey in rush hour, stopping several times to talk through the rider tactics. You might be able to get free, or nearly free, training through the local council where you live or work. The best trainers for experienced riders are CycleTrainingUK or London School of Cycling (no one can spend an hour with Patrick of LSC without learning more about cycling.)
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A very high proportion of the crashes are with tipper/skip/concrete lorries. These are the ones rushing around to get as many trips per day as they possibly can.
This implies that it could be worthwhile targeting training at these lorry drivers. They probably stay working in one area for longer than other types of lorry drivers too.
You might expect that the rate at which different lorry types crash with cyclists would be proportional to the time they spend around cyclists. Is that all there is to it, or do any lorry types show crash rates that deviate from that?
(Deviation would imply that there is something good or bad about particular lorry types that could be copied or fixed.)
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There are lots of construction industry lorries rushing around central London, there is no reliable measurement of what proportion of traffic they make up. They are the hardest section of the industy to contact about training, often they are run by owner drivers who don't belong to trade associations and are scraping around for the next job (like messengers and cab drivers).
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http://www.movingtargetzine.com/article/city-of-london-police-road-safety-forum
Operation Mermaid (google it) is a national road safety initiative to check the road-worthiness of lorries. Carried out in September last year, all 12 lorries stopped in London were found to be defective.
Fifty lorries were stopped in Hampshire and 39 were defective.
50% of lorries in Cambridgeshire were issued with prohibition and defect notices (requiring them to rectify defects).Anyone who thinks lorry operators are somehow knights of the road needs to take the rosy glasses off and have a good hard look at what's going on.
Lorry operators have tried for years to delay safety measures which could potentially have saved cyclist's lives, claiming it would be too expensive to retrofit additional mirrors.
We are paying the price at the moment and it has to stop! -
The low emissions zone might affect the number of older, mirror-less, lorries, because the registration dates for retro-fitting mirrors tie in quite closely with the emissions requirements. I guess it is yet to be seen.
As a motorcyclist I was taught that professional truck drivers are usually very good, but scaffolders, builders, rentals and other occasional drivers were to be avoided.
The other thing about lorries that makes them an unusual hazard is that they are so rarely driven by people who know where they are going - so at some point, the driver's attention is focussed on finding out the way somewhere, looking for a street or a building, etc. I think that's half the reason minicabs are so dangerous too.
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No road user is 'solely responsible for their own safety'. That's not the right way of understanding traffic,
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?
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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.
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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.
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?
We should hope that everyone is responisible for their own actions. In practice people try to avoid full responsiblity if they can get away with it. On the road the importance of this responsibility should be related to the capability to harm other people. We should expect a much higher degree of care from lorry drivers because the capability to harm is much higher than car drivers or cyclists. We could construct a scale of care, with lorry and bus drivers at the top and pedestrians at the bottom.
I can't see the point on trying to work out who is to blame after a crash, that involves simplifying what are quite complex processes often with incomplete evidence, particularly if one of the witnesses is missing. The real question is how could the crash have been avoided, because of the huge capacity for harm we should expect lorry drivers to put more effort into avoiding crashes and as professionals they should have better training and be expected to perform better than amateurs. Similarly we should expect cyclists to take more care about hitting pedestrians than pedestrians should take care to avoid being hit. Under British law pedestrians have the right to wander wherever they want on the streets. I think it is great that some choose to do it while plugged into an ipod and texting. -
I just dont think the majority of cyclists are aware of the dangers, and dont have exposure to the sort of info that would make them aware - having been in several HGV's there is simply no way no matter how good a driver is at the wheel, that they can see cyclists in the majority of positions on the inside, especialy when you take into account the speeds each is moving at.
I still think there are more cyclists out there riding without much of an idea as to how much danger they put themselves in, than there are bad HGV drivers.
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2009-03-20 - Rider Down, Uxbridge Road + Askew Road
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Pip, this is simply not true. A lot of HGV drivers are very poorly trained. We have long been calling for better driver training, as well as cycle training for all HGV drivers so that they understand the risks better.
Of course you're right that many cyclists need better training, too, but let's not imply that they are solely responsible for lack of understanding that different road users have for the requirements of others.