Cyclist-HGV incidents

[meic]

It is bad for the environment to stop and start 44 tonnes, lots of CO2.
Think of the planet

[pdapat]

I've just realised what the problem is with cyclists.
It's that huge chip they carry around on their shoulders and the attitude they have displayed on this thread almost without exception.

Until you can change that nothing will change for you

Pat

[Gisen]

I cycle and have passed the HGV test (in 2003).

Technically - skills wise- HGV drivers are top notch. In terms of attitude to other road users 90% of them give the rest a bad name. Conor, earlier in this thread, was a great example of this; claiming that it's the cyclists fault when he overtakes them in a dangerous manner, not giving enough space.

I'm sorry, can you show where I said that?

3) They have a tendency to pull out round parked vehicles without bothering to look behind them to see if anything is overtaking them. The HC states to give way to overtaking vehicles BUT YOU HAVE TO CHECK IF THEY'RE THERE FIRST.

You are in the wrong. You're claiming it's the cyclists fault when you try to overtake them in a stupid place. N.B. you have not overtaken something just because your cab has passed them. You are a dangerous driver.

[meic]

The chip on the shoulder remark has been covered already elsewhere.
It does of course say more about the person who uses it than the person it is aimed at.

[pdapat]

Exactly

It says that I am a rational and intelligent Professional driver who can recognise others who haven't that ability

Go back and read your own threads.

Some of you say you are not vehicles
Some of you say you are
Some of you ignore the basic rules of the road and berate others for doing the same.
Some of you admit to speeding but again berate other road users for doing so.

From the very start of this thread it has been about THEM and US.

No middle ground, no learning from each others rational veiws. It has degenerated to a toddlers tantrum and bears no resemblance to any debate.
The Moderator, sooner than do his job and moderate the thread to keep it on topic, is every bit as bad.

So what has been achieved?
Where do we go from here?

Youwill all go out tomorrow convinced that you are invincible and have a 'right' to cause every other road user as much inconvenience as possible.
And we'll all go out tomorrow branding every cyclist we see as juvenile idiots who defend their 'right' regardless of their own safety.

Well Done CTC

Pat

[meic]

Amazing!

I really couldnt be that wrong and illogical if I tried.

[thirdcrank]

Stand on any motorway bridge and watch the carriageway. Not a bicycle in sight. At busy times, many, perhaps a majority of drivers will be so close to the vehicle in front that they will have no chance of stopping safely if it is necessary. Now, you will notice that many of those highly trained lorry drivers are as bad as the car drivers.

I'm sure there are all sorts of reasons for this -

THe main one being that you can see over the top of the cars and can see the cars braking for up to a good half mile or so ahead so have plenty of time to plan for it.

And most lorry drivers on motorways are at least 60ft from the vehicle in front whereas when it's busy, most car drivers are no more than 30ft even though they can't see as far and are travelling faster.

That's not a reason, it's an excuse and a pretty poor one when you think of the devastating effects of being shunted by a lorry. I'd not suggest that tailgating by anybody is acceptable but the implication that tailgating by car drivers somehow justifies lorry drivers is bizarre. Of course, you do not quote a speed for your 60 ft - at 10 mph it would be a huge distance - but if we take 60 mph as a typical motorway speed (partly because I know that 60mph = 88 ft/second) then, if we accept the widely quoted two second rule, the minimum safe distance is 176 ft or almost three times your 60 feet.

[kwackers]

So what has been achieved?
Where do we go from here?

Youwill all go out tomorrow convinced that you are invincible and have a 'right' to cause every other road user as much inconvenience as possible.
And we'll all go out tomorrow branding every cyclist we see as juvenile idiots who defend their 'right' regardless of their own safety.

Well Done CTC

Pat

From where I'm standing it looks exactly the same looking the other way - the truckers defending their stance take the view that they're professionals and do no wrong - yet a quick BBC website search show a fair number of truck accidents causing death that have occurred recently.

Someone's either telling porkies or simply distancing themselves from such things.

Nobodies saying cyclists are without sin, but I suspect most of the cyclists on this forum are probably not the one's you have issue with on the roads.
So if you guys can distance yourselves from the idiots in your midst why can't we distance ourselves from the idiots in ours?

And regardless of the crap that's been spouted, driving a lorry carries massively more responsibility than riding a cycle, so we can expect nothing less than professionalism and when it doesn't happen then we (and the general public) have the right to shout about it and demand better - as should you guys.

[meic]

To be fair if an individual tried to leave that gap it would soon be filled by other vehicles. An overtaking vehicle on the motorway tends to come in at less than 30 feet even if there are only 2 vehicles on the whole road.
However as a group it is wrong.

[Simon L6]

I've just realised what the problem is with cyclists.
It's that huge chip they carry around on their shoulders and the attitude they have displayed on this thread almost without exception.

Until you can change that nothing will change for you

Pat

there's a wealth of ignorance in that post. The fact is that things are changing, and for the better. We get around town far faster than anything on four wheels. Our bikes, even by the standard of those of fifteen years ago, are miracles of reliability and efficiency. Our travelling is relatively carefree, and unhindered by congestion.

Add to that the demographics - we're healthier, generally better off, generally better educated, and generally more content with life, and you begin to see the real basis for the underlying hostility that, in pdapat's post masquerades as condescension. Cycling has the future stamped all over it. That gets to people. They infer a certain smugness, and, to be fair, they're right....we're on to something, (as thousands of posts on this forum testify), that enlivens us, and transcends the dull boundaries of everyday life - particularly the everyday life lived out behind a windscreen. Very few of us can deny ourselves a smile of contentment as we crest a hill, or marvel at how rapidly our relatively feeble bodies can propel themselves over such remarkable distances.

From time to time people pay this, and other cycling forums, little visits. If you're sufficiently interested to follow them back to their source, you usually find souls who are marginalised and exhibit a strange kind of paranoia - the paranoia exemplified by Clarkson and Greer, and that wierd man who used to be an MP and now keeps llamas - the paranoia of people who see cyclists as a threat. Not in a physical sense, but in the sense that cycling slicing through the boundary between the human body and the public realm, disrupts the mechanisms of control that most of the citizenry imbibe on a daily basis. Overtaking a cyclist is seen as a means of control - the exertion of a vast physical force to put the cyclist into his or her place at the side of the road. 'Know your place', Mr Pdapat tells us, 'or it won't go well for you'.

This forum, like others, is about sharing knowledge and joy. I reckon it does a pretty decent job of it. Where else can one encounter a man of a certain age offering his services as an escort in Cornwall? Where else do you find heart-warming accounts of physical liberation from, lets be honest, a pretty unlikely bunch of customers? This forum isn't about miseryguts interlopers telling us that a collective wisdom, gained over decades and millions of miles, counts for nothing.

So, Mr. Pdapat, soyanara. Please leave.

[kwackers]

<snip>

Well said!

P.S. You available for after dinner doodahs?

[meic]

I think he wants to be poet Laureatte and I cant even spell it.

[Coffee]

The 'blind spot' seems to be a major killer in cycle/lorry 'collision' (the inquests I've read seem to accept that it happens and no ones fault)

No, people placing themselves deliberately in the blind spot of trucks seems to be a major killer.

I wonder if the sensors down the side of the truck would help alert the driver to check before pulling off or while driving along and more education in a campaign about cyclists at least giving themselves a fighting chance by being in a visible position to the driver's mirrors. 'If you can't see my mirrors I have no chance of seeing you'

You mean the type of stickers that many lorries already have on the rear along with "I make wide left turns"? It's a complete waste of time.

I've never driven a HGV so I don't know and I'm asking....when you pull away from a junction is it possible to physically look out the window and check what else is in that space you are about to pull out into? I can appreciate it's probably a limited view.

On the passenger side, no because the window is on the other side of the cab, 8ft away from you with a great big hump in the middle of the cab you'd have to climb across. On the drivers side, you're taught to check and the mirrors are such that you don't need to. Down directly in front of the vehicle, you'd have to stand up to see. Newer lorries have mirrors fitted to combat that however it gives yet another thing to check and it's quite possible that in the time it's taken to check all your mirrors and then the drivers side one one last time before setting off that someone has come down your inside.

Maybe if both sensors and a campaign about how lorry drivers move off at junctions, blind spots, how cyclists should position themselves, Mel wouldn't have been killed.

Sadly such a thing existed. Quite a few police forces ran a scheme offering newly qualified car drivers, cyclists and older schoolkids the chance to be taken out in a truck on private land and shown the blindspots. It died the death due to lack of interest. Occassionally a force will run one for a week but takeup is low.
The problem is though that Joe Public sees their safety as totally our responsibility and that even though there's numerous mentions of reduced visibility, blind spots, trailer cut in and wider turning circles for HGVs in the Highway Code as well as stickers on wagons and numerous stories in the press, they still place themselves in danger.

No one would deliberately put themselves in blind spots of HGV's, it's got to be down to lack of knowledge or a simple human mistake that day, EVERYONE makes those at some point, on both all sides, hopefully if everyone is doing what they can you can make up for human error. Same with not checking the blind spots that you can. This should be more about helping each other out rather than a blame game.

I haven't seen the stickers on every lorry, I found the 'if you can't see my mirrors I can't see you' stickers more helpful as a motorcyclist and I can see why 'I make wide left turns' is a bit vague to a cyclist that hasn't really noticed how HGV's take corners.

Any chance a group of HGV drivers might want to visit schools and give a talk on the dangers of blind spots and where they are? Trucks signal left but pull out right etc etc. Help the next generation to co-habit the road safer?

[meic]

Good to be back to the sensible conversation we were having before page 3.

It appears to be agreed that the two most concerning HGV-cyclist incidents are
Cyclists partially overtaking on the left and being squashed by the side of a truck when it sets off or manouveres to the left.
HGVs trying to overtake cyclists and coming in before they are past.

Now the film that was suggested by the original poster would do a very good job in highlighting the fact to potential cyclists and HGV drivers.
It does not take a major training exercise and the message is clear and simple, dont know how it will fill their time slot

A short documentary with some camera footage from both viewpoints should be very effective in getting the message home.

This will not address the people who know the risk they take but take it anyway. Nothing but certainty of penalties will do that.

[2Tubs]

It couldn't have come at a better time.

Well it could've. It would have been nice it it had never happened.

Tonight, while cycling home I noticed that the shadow being cast of myself was straight ahead and not pointing towards the kerb slightly.

Experience told me to move left quick.

I mount the kerb to allow a car transported to carry on up the cycle lane.

I wasn't defending my right to the road regardless of my own safety (I don't know any cyclist that does). It was compromised by a highly trained driver.

Gazza