To make the roads safer - first remove the regulation

[david143]

Personally, whenever I come across peds on the pavement, I automatically adopt primary wherever possible.

I always assume a ped will walk out on me.

So on a busy urban road with plenty of pedestrians on the pavement and cars on the carriageway, you would adopt the primary position?

Putting the onus on the vehicle driver to avoid colliding with pedestrians is a good idea in spaces defined as shared. E.g. shared pedestrian/cyclist ways, homezone streets, but typically urban main roads need to have space reserved for pedestrians and space reserved for vehicles. Pedestrians should be expected to exercise care before entering the vehicle space.

One point about drivers on British roads. Many British roads are crowded. The authorities have squeezed too many lanes on many of them making it impossible for drivers to overtake cyclists, allowing an adequate 150cm clearance, without encroaching significantly into another lane full of traffic.

Please see wherever possible bit I did write. When it is not possible, the only other options are to slow down and to make your presence known by ringing your bell (or shouting).

[CJ]

OK so would you apply the same principle to cyclists and pedestrians? ie a cyclist runs into a pedestrian it's automatically the cyclist's fault?

No, I didn't think so.

Don't be so hasty. YES I would.

I think it's right and proper that anyone who wishes to operate a piece of equipment in a public place, be that a motorised or human-powered, has an automatic responsibilty for any damage this equipment may inflict upon others.

If a chap mowing the verge accidentally slices the foot of a passerby, I don't think it reduces his liability if he did it with a scythe rather than a strimmer!

Likewise if a pedestrian is run into. It is simiarly incumbent upon motorists and cyclists, because they exercise the priviledge of moving faster than pedestrians, to anticipate the likely movements of pedestrians in the vicinity and take responsibility for injuries suffered by any person they run into. It's obviously more difficult to do that the faster you ride/drive. The rider/driver receives all of the benefit of going faster, so it's socially just that they should increase their own vigilance in proportion to their own speed, manouvrability etc., and take full responsibility for any damages that may result from their own failure to avoid, or stop before hitting, anyone who moves into their path relatively slowly.

Talk of hebeas corpus is a red herring. The fact of the injury and who was driving the car (or riding the bike) is seldom at issue - except in a hit and run. In that case it surely does apply, until the identity of the vehicle and driver can be proved.

[fatboy]

I've been thinking about roads recently and if you think about it the fact that the car is dominant is actually quite strange. In the last 50 years cars have gone from being a minority item only owned by the rich to being King. People have both wanted this to happen and let it happen. People in towns are now seen as secondary to the needs of people travelling through the town. And any attempt to rebalance this is considered to be anti-car/anti-progress/NIMBY etc. Wanting speed limits that might allow children to play out in the streets again is similarily derided as 20 is So Slow (which of course is the point).

Somehow we do need to redress this balance soon. These sort of junctions seem very worth of trying. Motorists also need to be educated that 20mph is about the upper average speed in towns (how many times do you overtake and re-overtake cars when you traverse a town by bike - quite a lot I bet).

Will we get any bold schemes like that, will we heck but they might paint some lines on the pavement and we must be grateful to them for it!

Oh well when petrol hits £5 a litre then maybe the balance will change to a more sensible transport system.

[George Riches]

Personally, whenever I come across peds on the pavement, I automatically adopt primary wherever possible.

I always assume a ped will walk out on me.

So on a busy urban road with plenty of pedestrians on the pavement and cars on the carriageway, you would adopt the primary position?

Please see wherever possible bit I did write. When it is not possible, the only other options are to slow down and to make your presence known by ringing your bell (or shouting).

So on a busy urban road with lots of pedestrians on the pavement, cyclists (on the carriageway of course) should continually ring their bells? I assume that you are not suggesting that they must also cycle more slowly than the motorists drive?

[kwackers]

So on a busy urban road with lots of pedestrians on the pavement, cyclists (on the carriageway of course) should continually ring their bells? I assume that you are not suggesting that they must also cycle more slowly than the motorists drive?

From the highway code:-

Cyclist should be proceeded by a man wearing reflective gear and walking at no more than 3 mph, he should be ringing a bell and/or blowing a whistle.
Behind the cyclist should be another man wearing a 'keep right' sign on his back.

[david143]

Personally, whenever I come across peds on the pavement, I automatically adopt primary wherever possible.

I always assume a ped will walk out on me.

So on a busy urban road with plenty of pedestrians on the pavement and cars on the carriageway, you would adopt the primary position?

Please see wherever possible bit I did write. When it is not possible, the only other options are to slow down and to make your presence known by ringing your bell (or shouting).

So on a busy urban road with lots of pedestrians on the pavement, cyclists (on the carriageway of course) should continually ring their bells? I assume that you are not suggesting that they must also cycle more slowly than the motorists drive?

Please note, I did write these as options. I made no suggestion as you wrote though, but you do appear to be trying to avoid the fact that as a cyclist on the road there are very few times when you can not adopt primary where there are many peds on pavements.....

and if you can't, it is not going to be safe for anyone being in the gutter riding quickly is it? Even if you can legally do it.

[Sares]

I think a good part of our problem is that we tend to see the road as 'my space' and the pavement as 'their space' with regard to people on foot. This isn't really true. While vehicles are prohibited from travelling on the pavement, people are not prohibited from walking on the road- the Queen's Highway has been used this way for centuries! In many cases, where there are no pavements, it's necessary to use the road itself, and even if there was a pavement, no reason why people couldn't walk on the road anyway.

So, I think that all vehicle users do have a significant responsibility to walkers even if they should be on the road, which is no less their space than it is yours. The Shared Space designs emphasise this concept, and safety (and amenity, I would strongly suspect) improves as a result.

[workhard]

Please see wherever possible bit I did write. When it is not possible, the only other options are to slow down and to make your presence known by ringing your bell (or shouting).

Aw c'mon David I couldn't have cycled down the Wandsworth Road twice a day shouting and ringing my bell (though I did have budgie bells on my front hub), wall to wall traffic and wall to wall peds and cyclists squeezed in between the two.

Maintaining 'primary' position in those crowded circumstances will put you at the end of a drivers wrath in rather less than 10 seconds I have seen a frustrated car driver stop behind a bike at the next ASL, get out of his car, and punch the cyclist, knocking him to the ground... "get out of our 'flippin' way" or some such.

I've also had cars pull alongside and try to squeeze me back over to the left. 'Cyclecraft' and the HWC are great if everyone else drives according to Roadcraft and the HWC. If they don't then you have to improvise. and they don't publish 'pedocraft' yet do they?

[hubgearfreak]

The authorities have squeezed too many lanes on many of them making it impossible for drivers to overtake cyclists, allowing an adequate 150cm clearance, without encroaching significantly into another lane full of traffic.

it's quite possible to overtake with 1.5m clearance if the motorist is willing to wait until it is safe to do so.

if you're equating waiting until safe with impossible, then there's really no hope

[david143]

Please see wherever possible bit I did write. When it is not possible, the only other options are to slow down and to make your presence known by ringing your bell (or shouting).

Aw c'mon David I couldn't have cycled down the Wandsworth Road twice a day shouting and ringing my bell (though I did have budgie bells on my front hub), wall to wall traffic and wall to wall peds and cyclists squeezed in between the two.

Maintaining 'primary' position in those crowded circumstances will put you at the end of a drivers wrath in rather less than 10 seconds I have seen a frustrated car driver stop behind a bike at the next ASL, get out of his car, and punch the cyclist, knocking him to the ground... "get out of our 'flippin' way" or some such.

I've also had cars pull alongside and try to squeeze me back over to the left. 'Cyclecraft' and the HWC are great if everyone else drives according to Roadcraft and the HWC. If they don't then you have to improvise. and they don't publish 'pedocraft' yet do they?

I don't see you saying how to do it?

and it is funny that you too seem to think an option means you must do it all the time, ie. ring bell so others know you are there (exactly what it is for), but never said you should be pinging it all the time.

Where there is wall to wall peds on the pavement and roads packed with motors, do you think it is safe to cycle in the gutter? If not, where? not primary (it would appear), and it would appear secondary is just a temptation for being squeezed in to the gutter, so where?

Personally, I would choose primary and ensure I held my position. If others fail to see why I am there, I would have to wonder if they have a license......

and possible attacks is one of the reasons why cyclists are starting to record rides with cameras.

[glueman]

Lots of points to chew on here. I agree an onus of driver responsibility would make have the biggest impact on cyclist - and pedestrian - safety. The OPs point is still a good one and its something I've been banging on about for at least twenty years. Drivers are conditioned to keep momentum beyond the level of absolute safety, indeed it's embedded in their training under the heading of 'maintaining progress'.

They feel able to do so because highway engineering is complicit in their behaviour, the agency does everything it can to speed the motorists passage in the way of smoothing out the radius of bends, providing a plethora of signs, putting chevrons on corners, lights and road paint everywhere and hopes to ameliorate their effect by sticking up an occasional 30 or 40 sign. Which are you gonna believe?!?
Removing the visual nonsense and un-doing sight lines would defamilarise drivers with their environment, promote (much) lower speeds and make our towns and cities better to look at.

On the point about cyclist responsibilty for mowing down peds I agree it's incumbent on the rider not to make contact, in just the same way that motor traffic speeds should lessen the impact of stray children and animals wandering onto the highway. Pedestrians do stupid things but the roads are not a race track - for drivers or cyclists. The kerb shouldn't need to carry skull and cross bones images, in fact I'd do away with kerbs altogether and simply change the colour of the road surface. A few inches of concrete won't stop a stray car from mounting the pavement but it does send out all the wrong signals.

[George Riches]

The authorities have squeezed too many lanes on many of them making it impossible for drivers to overtake cyclists, allowing an adequate 150cm clearance, without encroaching significantly into another lane full of traffic.

it's quite possible to overtake with 1.5m clearance if the motorist is willing to wait until it is safe to do so.

if you're equating waiting until safe with impossible, then there's really no hope

At peak times, on most A and B roads between towns in most of SE / midlands of England the motorist would have to wait for miles. How many commuting motorists expecting to travel 50 mph would be willing to sit behind a cyclist doing 12/15 mph for miles?

In some countries (e.g. Netherlands, Germany) they get around this problem by having a track with a good quality surface in parallel to the main carriageway. In the UK the cyclist is simply terrorised off such roads at peak times.

[hubgearfreak]

At peak times, on most A and B roads between towns in most of SE / midlands of England the motorist would have to wait for miles. How many commuting motorists expecting to travel 50 mph would be willing to sit behind a cyclist doing 12/15 mph for miles?.

being delayed, having to wait, etc. is simply not the same as impossible

i'm also a motorist, and i don't find it at all difficult to wait until it is safe to overtake

[Sares]

Even at peak times in the central Midlands where I am, drivers do not have to wait very long to overtake safely, and if it is really that busy and narrow a road, they are usually travelling very slowly and it isn't me who is holding them up. So if they are very impatient, it is usually unreasonable. I can't comment on London, but if a driver was really waiting for miles (have never come across a situation where this was neceassary) I would pull over and let them by.

[Lawrie9]

Ive heard that betting rid of street clutter ie railings, signs, road markings and traffic lights has made the urban environment much safer where it has been trialled across Europe.