Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

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Bonefishblues
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by Bonefishblues »

I think familiarity with routes is a big issue, and can (does) often mean people exceed safe speeds. I frequently do the school run with my daughter and I wince at some of the speeds where people are unsighted. In particular I fear for Mae, who is a lady in her late 70s who, whilst she can no longer run, goes out for her morning speed walk along these local roads. The health benefits for her are unquestionable, but it only takes one...
Pete Owens
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by Pete Owens »

mjr wrote: 2 Dec 2021, 1:26pm
Pete Owens wrote: 2 Dec 2021, 12:48pm
ANTONISH wrote: 1 Dec 2021, 5:26pm IMO juggling with speed limits ( many of which are dangerously high) will achieve nothing without enforcement.
Thing is nowadays we do have enforcement, so by and large speed limits are now complied with, which wasn't the case 20 years ago.
Sorry but that's not so. Half of car drivers currently break the speed limits on motorways and 30mph roads:
"In July to September 2021, 48% of cars in free-flowing conditions exceeded the speed limit on motorways. On National Speed Limit (NSL) single carriageways with a car speed limit of 60 mph, 9% of cars exceeded the speed limit, while on 30 mph roads, 52% of cars exceeded the speed limit."
Yes, but not by huge margins - as used to be the case.

That is what I meant by "by and large". They know that their speedo is probably overeading by a few percent. They know that the police apply a margin so they may exceed limits by a little bit.

Twenty years ago, if you drove along a motorway at 70mph you would regularly be overtaken by drivers flying past at 100. In an urban area if you drove at the speed limit at a quiet time the car in fron would disapear up the road you would be agressively tailgated by the one behind. The situation has improved enourmously since then and there was a big drop in casualties - although progress stalled with the change of government in 2010.

And the important thing in complying with speed limits is social acceptability rather than enforcement - though the latter is key to achieving the former. Before speed cameras became wide spread speeding was seen as socially acceptable. The dawdling drivers holding up the traffic were seen to be the problem, rather than the speeders. There were loud campaigns against the cameras, and people who got caught would feel hard done by. You would find collegues coming in to work and getting a sympathetic hearing at their hard luck stories about being unfairly penalised while driving "perfectly safely". You don't get that any more; people feel embarassed if they caught rather than aggrieved.

The same happened with drink driving 30 years earlier. It used to be the case at pub closing time or at the end of parties drivers would be offered "another one for the road". When breathalisers were introduced you heard all the same complaints that would later be heard about speed cameras - that drink made you drive better as you were more relaxed - that the police were unfairly stalking pub car parks. If someone got caught drink driving there would be a great deal of sympathy - they were just unlucky to get caught doing what everybody else did. The Mr Loopholes of the time got people off on technicalities (such as a policeman not wearing a helmet not being in proper uniform).

But as the reality that you could get caught and lose your licence dawned then most people started to comply - albeit reluctantly. At first they would try to avoid getting blind drunk by limiting their consumption to 2 or 3 pints - in the same way that drivers first responded to the cameras by attempting to brake just when they saw them.

As this strategy often failed they would then limit themselves to one drink for the evening. This kept them legal - though they were still drinking and driving. I think this is the stage we reached a few years ago with speeding - people aiming to keep more or less within the limit - if not to a religeous level of compliance. And this is where the social unacceptability starts to kick in. Once most people were complying with the drink drive limit they loose sympathy with those who get caught. It is no longer a case of bad luck to get caught doing what everyone else is doing, when nobody else is doing it.

And it doesn't stop there. When people started losing sympathy for drink drivers they start to consider drink driving as inherntly wrong. (I think we are just beginning to reach this stage with speeding). Nowadays if a group goes to a pub or a party there will be a nominated driver who will not drink at all. If it looks like someone who has been drinking then others will not offer one from the road, but will confiscate their keys and order a taxi. And this is not due to a great deal of enforcement - I have never been asked to blow into a bag in decades of driving. The possibility of enforcement was needed to trigger the change in social acceptability.
Pete Owens
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by Pete Owens »

basingstoke123 wrote: 1 Dec 2021, 6:26pm What counts as a rural road? Does this include A roads and dual carriageways outside of urban areas? Or some A roads but not others, perhaps not those part of the trunk network?
It just means all roads outside built up areas - everything from country lanes to multilane dual carriageways.

Crashes on these roads have always been more serious due the higher speeds. There are fewer hazards, junctions, other road users and so on so collisions are less frequent, but when they do happen the consequences are much more likely to be deadly. The stats show nothing remarkable at all other than a continuing trend for cycling to become safer.

During lockdown there was a large overall increase in the amount of cycling, but in more detail there was big decrease in cycle trips to work and a big increase in leisure cycling. Given that work places tend to be in urban areas and we tend to cycle for fun in the countryside this has caused shift from safer to less safe roads. If there is a greater incidence of cycling - and a shift towards less safe roads then you would expect to see an increase in the number of dead cyclists.
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mjr
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by mjr »

Pete Owens wrote: 2 Dec 2021, 5:06pm
mjr wrote: 2 Dec 2021, 1:26pm
Pete Owens wrote: 2 Dec 2021, 12:48pm
Thing is nowadays we do have enforcement, so by and large speed limits are now complied with, which wasn't the case 20 years ago.
Sorry but that's not so. Half of car drivers currently break the speed limits on motorways and 30mph roads:
"In July to September 2021, 48% of cars in free-flowing conditions exceeded the speed limit on motorways. On National Speed Limit (NSL) single carriageways with a car speed limit of 60 mph, 9% of cars exceeded the speed limit, while on 30 mph roads, 52% of cars exceeded the speed limit."
Yes, but not by huge margins - as used to be the case.

That is what I meant by "by and large". They know that their speedo is probably overeading by a few percent. They know that the police apply a margin so they may exceed limits by a little bit.
Crikey, that's a meaning I don't remember seeing before. I am pretty sure that most people would understand "by and large" to mean "mostly" or "generally" rather than "almost" or "nearly".
Twenty years ago, if you drove along a motorway at 70mph you would regularly be overtaken by drivers flying past at 100.
I think that's more due to fuel prices and a greater awareness of how fuel economy drops off rapidly above 70mph than anything else, though.
And the important thing in complying with speed limits is social acceptability rather than enforcement - though the latter is key to achieving the former. [...] You don't get that any more; people feel embarassed if they caught rather than aggrieved.
I'm not convinced. We still have posters even on here who proudly admit exceeding the speed limit when motoring and the frothing petrolheads are in the comments on every newspaper article about a new speed camera, which get vandalised with depressing frequency.
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Bonefishblues
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by Bonefishblues »

It's absolutely ages since I saw a camera vandalised. I think it happens way less frequently than when they were first introduced.
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mjr
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by mjr »

Bonefishblues wrote: 2 Dec 2021, 7:12pm It's absolutely ages since I saw a camera vandalised. I think it happens way less frequently than when they were first introduced.
Around here, they still tend to shoot them, which is a lot less noticeable than the burning tyres seen on the news.

Of course it happens less than when they were first introduced. That idiot Cameron and his mate Pickles got rid of lots of them, indirectly, by their "bonfire of the quangos" abolishing loads of the organisations that used to manage them and the move of the money which used to fund cameras to unaccountable organisations with no safety mission, such as the unelected Local Transport Boards.
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Bonefishblues
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by Bonefishblues »

mjr wrote: 2 Dec 2021, 7:23pm
Bonefishblues wrote: 2 Dec 2021, 7:12pm It's absolutely ages since I saw a camera vandalised. I think it happens way less frequently than when they were first introduced.
Around here, they still tend to shoot them, which is a lot less noticeable than the burning tyres seen on the news.

Of course it happens less than when they were first introduced. That idiot Cameron and his mate Pickles got rid of lots of them, indirectly, by their "bonfire of the quangos" abolishing loads of the organisations that used to manage them and the move of the money which used to fund cameras to unaccountable organisations with no safety mission, such as the unelected Local Transport Boards.
Thing is, they only catch the terminally dim, given they're all on every mapping system commonly used. But OTOH if correctly sited, they do modify behaviour at critical points.
pwa
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by pwa »

My local cycling is done mostly on rural roads and during the twenty odd years we have lived here it has been my feeling that the threat to me from motorised traffic has not increased. As already pointed out, rural roads vary from fast and busy dual carriageways and B roads, to single track roads with passing places. Around here the latter feel the safest, with traffic speeds already kept low by the twists and turns. The cycling fatalities / serious injuries that I can remember hearing about within a roughly ten mile radius are few over that two decades, and none have been on roads I would describe as "country lanes".

In fact, the two incidents that come most readily to mind were on a fast rural A road, the A48, a road that I have always avoided on the bike. I do the odd couple of hundred metres on it now and again just to join up one lane to another. It is a prime example of a road that lacks cycle lanes and badly needs them.

A paralympic cyclist, out training, was mowed down and badly injured by an elderly driver who had poor eyesight and nothing to correct it, while going up this hill:
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4785742 ... 6?hl=en-GB
The driver was also over the limit for alcohol.
Another cyclist was killed on the same bit of road last year: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-52852437
That road could easily take a cycle lane on each side, but hasn't got them. And people (not me if I can help it) do cycle along it. If you take away incidents on that road, cycle deaths and serious injuries on the rural roads around here are very rare. In fact, if I look at a two mile radius around my village I can think of no serious incidents involving cyclists, but only last year we had someone attacked by cattle while walking across a field. So walking across fields might be statistically more dangerous than cycling on the roads near our village.
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by mattheus »

Pete Owens wrote: 2 Dec 2021, 5:06pm
mjr wrote: 2 Dec 2021, 1:26pm
Pete Owens wrote: 2 Dec 2021, 12:48pm
Thing is nowadays we do have enforcement, so by and large speed limits are now complied with, which wasn't the case 20 years ago.
Sorry but that's not so. Half of car drivers currently break the speed limits on motorways and 30mph roads:
"In July to September 2021, 48% of cars in free-flowing conditions exceeded the speed limit on motorways. On National Speed Limit (NSL) single carriageways with a car speed limit of 60 mph, 9% of cars exceeded the speed limit, while on 30 mph roads, 52% of cars exceeded the speed limit."
Yes, but not by huge margins - as used to be the case.

That is what I meant by "by and large". They know that their speedo is probably overeading by a few percent. They know that the police apply a margin so they may exceed limits by a little bit.

Twenty years ago, if you drove along a motorway at 70mph you would regularly be overtaken by drivers flying past at 100. In an urban area if you drove at the speed limit at a quiet time the car in fron would disapear up the road you would be agressively tailgated by the one behind. The situation has improved enourmously since then and there was a big drop in casualties - although progress stalled with the change of government in 2010.

And the important thing in complying with speed limits is social acceptability rather than enforcement - though the latter is key to achieving the former. Before speed cameras became wide spread speeding was seen as socially acceptable. The dawdling drivers holding up the traffic were seen to be the problem, rather than the speeders. There were loud campaigns against the cameras, and people who got caught would feel hard done by. You would find collegues coming in to work and getting a sympathetic hearing at their hard luck stories about being unfairly penalised while driving "perfectly safely". You don't get that any more; people feel embarassed if they caught rather than aggrieved.

The same happened with drink driving 30 years earlier. It used to be the case at pub closing time or at the end of parties drivers would be offered "another one for the road". When breathalisers were introduced you heard all the same complaints that would later be heard about speed cameras - that drink made you drive better as you were more relaxed - that the police were unfairly stalking pub car parks. If someone got caught drink driving there would be a great deal of sympathy - they were just unlucky to get caught doing what everybody else did. The Mr Loopholes of the time got people off on technicalities (such as a policeman not wearing a helmet not being in proper uniform).

But as the reality that you could get caught and lose your licence dawned then most people started to comply - albeit reluctantly. At first they would try to avoid getting blind drunk by limiting their consumption to 2 or 3 pints - in the same way that drivers first responded to the cameras by attempting to brake just when they saw them.

As this strategy often failed they would then limit themselves to one drink for the evening. This kept them legal - though they were still drinking and driving. I think this is the stage we reached a few years ago with speeding - people aiming to keep more or less within the limit - if not to a religeous level of compliance. And this is where the social unacceptability starts to kick in. Once most people were complying with the drink drive limit they loose sympathy with those who get caught. It is no longer a case of bad luck to get caught doing what everyone else is doing, when nobody else is doing it.

And it doesn't stop there. When people started losing sympathy for drink drivers they start to consider drink driving as inherntly wrong. (I think we are just beginning to reach this stage with speeding). Nowadays if a group goes to a pub or a party there will be a nominated driver who will not drink at all. If it looks like someone who has been drinking then others will not offer one from the road, but will confiscate their keys and order a taxi. And this is not due to a great deal of enforcement - I have never been asked to blow into a bag in decades of driving. The possibility of enforcement was needed to trigger the change in social acceptability.
Agreed. (and *I* knew what you meant about the level of compliance!)
mattsccm
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by mattsccm »

And just what is a rural road? To me that's every road without a 30mph limit as villages and towns have those limits. Country single tracks lanes are I believe the safest place to ride whereas the big A roads, which undoubtedly are rural, are dodgy. 60 or 70 mph speed limits with lorries everywhere are tonice to cycle with. All things being equal being hit at 60 is more likely to kill than being hit at 30.
Clickbait and shoddy journalism.
pwa
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by pwa »

Exactly. Rural roads come in very different varieties. Some feel (and probably are) quite hostile places to be. And at the other end of the spectrum some feel very safe. To lump them all together in a class called "rural roads" is meaningless and makes analysis impossible. Knowing my region's roads quite well, I can get on the bike and cycle a nice safe circuit of lanes for around 30 miles and be very unlikely to have any worrying encounters with other road users. But if I chose to I could go to a particular rural main road where I would not feel safe, or a particular rural lane that acts as a short cut between two main roads, and that doesn't feel safe either. To deal with the problems of "rural roads" we need to focus in on the specific roads where problems are common.
Pete Owens
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by Pete Owens »

But that is conflating pleasantness with safety.

The distinction between urban and rural is significant in that rural roads (whether A roads or country lanes) see higher and speed limits and actual speeds than towns. That urban roads are safer than rural roads has long been known and is entirely uncontroversial.

Now, cycling is not a remotely dangerous activity - wherever you ride (despite what the press and many here would have you believe). There is a certain level of risk that is far outweighed by the health benefits - and while it is desirable to work to reduce the level of risk it is important not to overstate it and keep it in proportion. When people ride for leisure (thus have a choice of which roads to use) they tend to go to the countryside because it is more pleasant there. There would be a lower risk in riding on lower speed urban roads, it just isn't as much fun.

All that happened last year during lockdown was a large decrease in commuting (thus a decrease in safer urban cycling) and a large increase in recreational cycling (thus a corresponding increase in cyclists on less safe rural roads - resulting in an increase in deaths of cyclists on rural roads).
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mjr
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by mjr »

Pete Owens wrote: 7 Dec 2021, 10:38am All that happened last year during lockdown was a large decrease in commuting (thus a decrease in safer urban cycling) and a large increase in recreational cycling (thus a corresponding increase in cyclists on less safe rural roads - resulting in an increase in deaths of cyclists on rural roads).
Only a 20% decrease in utility cycling (which includes commuting), but a 75% increase in leisure cycling, according to the Active Lives Survey for 2020. Where are you getting the large decrease in commuting from?

I suspect there may be urban/rural numbers somewhere in the Road Traffic Estimates but I did not find them yet.
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pwa
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by pwa »

Pete Owens wrote: 7 Dec 2021, 10:38am But that is conflating pleasantness with safety.

The distinction between urban and rural is significant in that rural roads (whether A roads or country lanes) see higher and speed limits and actual speeds than towns. That urban roads are safer than rural roads has long been known and is entirely uncontroversial.

Now, cycling is not a remotely dangerous activity - wherever you ride (despite what the press and many here would have you believe). There is a certain level of risk that is far outweighed by the health benefits - and while it is desirable to work to reduce the level of risk it is important not to overstate it and keep it in proportion. When people ride for leisure (thus have a choice of which roads to use) they tend to go to the countryside because it is more pleasant there. There would be a lower risk in riding on lower speed urban roads, it just isn't as much fun.

All that happened last year during lockdown was a large decrease in commuting (thus a decrease in safer urban cycling) and a large increase in recreational cycling (thus a corresponding increase in cyclists on less safe rural roads - resulting in an increase in deaths of cyclists on rural roads).
I used to commute over a route that was 50% urban and 50% rural, and the urban bit was where the incidents happened. It was even where I got knocked off and my bike finished under a van. But I chose safe lanes for my rural section. I have never been passed by a fast moving vehicle on that section of road because it does not lend itself to fast driving. The main road alternative is more attractive to drivers who want to go fast. That lane was the safest part of my commute. There are lots of lanes like that around here, where the few drivers you encounter are not going fast. I regard those as relatively safe. There are other rural roads I avoid because I know they will have drivers coming round corners too fast. In my mind, I categorise those into another group. I distinguish between safe rural and dangerous rural. I think that is more useful, because you can then look at the problem roads and think about why they are a problem.
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Re: Cyclist deaths soar on rural roads in England

Post by peetee »

Speed, or rather excessive speed is not always the danger with rural roads. It’s what I would call lazy chancers. Those that drive assuming that there won’t be anything that gets in their way or just not making the best of a potentially difficult situation. For example; the cyclist is struggling up a winding hill at 10mph, the driver is approaching from behind at 30mph, sees the cyclist then, trying to minimise their inconvenience and with the overriding voice of experience convincing them that it’s a quiet lane with not much traffic they overtake with precious little time for observation and without changing down gear. There is questionable amount of clear road visible ahead and they are taking forever to get past in a labouring car.
More often than not the scenario locally is a narrow lane with short sight lines and a vehicle behind whose driver just gets fed up of being stuck behind you. When they do overtake and meet that car coming the other way both vehicles might only be doing 30mph but it’s a potentially fatal collision that’s due to impatience not outright speed.
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