sore thumb wrote:Sorry but we don't need any new products to improve cycle safety.
Something that makes you look like you're a policeman on a bike might work.
That tends to improve driving ability.
Laws won't make any difference, not the least because they already exist but also because there are simply too many miles of road and millions of motorists to have them all policed to prevent accidents - and you can do what you like after someone's hit it, won't change the fact they were hit. "Safety" is not what happens after someone is killed, it's what's done to try and reduce or prevent things happening in the first place.
Sure, some aspect of that is changing the attitude of drivers, but I think it's a mistake to decide that bad drivers are like bank robbers in the sense that you believe if you lock up the few that are bad you've somehow made the roads safer. You'd have to lock up nigh on every driver to make the roads safer and half the cyclists too but, even if you did that, you're still acting after the fact. You're not making cycling safer, you're just hoping the police and state will give you a bit of retribution against a driver.
But as I've said numerous times, the solution is making the car drive itself - and a lot of work has been done on this by Stanford if not other universities - and google are taking it further. Perhaps there's room for a technology specifically for British roads that could improve upon where google are now - I'd talk to them about where they are. Obviously getting to the stage where these cars would be legal, let alone mandatory could takes decades, but some aspects of the technology itself are likely to be included in cars years before (in fact this is already happening and other manufacturers are developing systems to take over control from the driver to avoid accidents)
This is probably phd level research though, but like the others I feel you're making a mistake if you're looking at the bicycle and cyclist market and thinking of trying to sell them something to make it safer. What makes cycling dangerous, in the main, is obvious, the risk of being hit by cars and lorries being vehicles that travel at high speed that have considerable mass whilst you are balanced on 2 wheels on 12kg or less of recycled coke cans. At which point it's fairly moot whose fault it was, you're no less dead if you made the mistake or the driver of the car did. Most of the rest is our own misadventure causing us to fall off, but generally speaking that only results in cuts and bruises except in extreme cases.
Cars and other motor vehicles are what makes the roads the most dangerous - that's what you should be looking at.
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