horizon wrote:My feeling on this is that we are heading down a blind alley on the sentencing (much as I approve of the whole way it was handled from perpetrator, victim and judge).
This incident to me is about pavement cycling and that to me is about a cultural shift from road to pavement. I cycle a lot in Plymouth where pavement cycling is tolerated, the city centre roads are hell on earth for any but the bravest and a foreign and student population has been nurtured on cycling on the pavement - it's normal.
And pavement cycling is indeed the new normal: shared paths, segregated cycleways, zero movement towards making roads safer in most towns and cities, huge reluctance by the motoring class to allow roads to be safer, a political class talking up roads and cars. The result is people voting with their feet (on pedals) and heading for the pavements.
Bikes and pedestrians don't mix (4 mph on the flat isn't my idea of making the most of a bicycle) so bike users are forming a new under-class of semi-legal, semi-safe, semi-polite and ultimately dangerous citizens operating in the twilight and loved by no-one but themselves.
Yes, you can prosecute fairly when the inevitable accidents happen but happen they will in increasing numbers until the crackdown. And so it goes on: we have created a new semi-criminal class in society - through cycling and through our inability as a society to dislodge the motorist from his privileged position.
So yes, another criminal record, another broken hip.
I think you're absolutely spot on.
The frustration is as you say the inability or political will in dislodging the motorists from their privileged and unreasonable position,whilst at the same time demonising the use of an overwhelmingly benign form of transport .
EDITED for clarity