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The scene of the crash (©Gary Jones via Instagram)Update: Arrest made following death of cyclist killed by A13 'street-racing' driver
Police have a arrested a man following the death of a 32-year-old cyclist after a hit-and-run crash on Monday night in East London involving a suspected joyrider racing along a major road
The 21 year old man was arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving and for and failing to stop at the scene of a collision - police confirmed that he was the driver of the car they believe was involved in the incident. He has been interviewed by police officers and bailed to a date in mid-January.
According to the police the driver of another car, who witnessed the collision, has also provided them with a detailed statement.
The male rider was hit near the junction of Commercial Road (the A13) and Cavell Street at about 10pm on Monday November 24.
He was taken to an east London hospital, but later died of his injuries.
The Evening Standard reports that the victim has been named locally as Asaad Ahmed, a primary school teacher and father of two.
Mr Ahmed was making his way home when he was hit by what is believed to be a white VW Golf. The driver then sped off.
Police are still hunting the driver of the car, who was seen racing another driver along the A13 moments before the collision.
A resident of the area told the Standard: “You get people racing each other all the time along here. It’s a really dangerous road at night.
“It was inevitable that something like this would happen.”
Nasher Ahmed, 52, a taxi driver, who lives nearby, saw the incident unfold.
He said: “He was trying to cross the road on his bike when he was hit by the car that was racing the other.
“He was a real nice guy and had two young children, it’s very sad. He was just on his way home.
“His wife and brother went to hospital with him in the ambulance.
“As soon as the driver hit the cyclist he just did a U-turn and drove away. He didn’t even stop.”
A Metropolitan police spokesman said: "A car that was suspected of being involved in the collision has been located but officers would still like to hear from any witnesses to the incident."
Anyone with information about the crash is asked to call the Serious Collision Investigation Unit at Chadwell Heath on 0208 597 4874 or call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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76 comments
to put it into context, the roads are very safe, the tragic event of the above is rare.
death from poor diet and the abundance of suger in diets will cause for more
"Today, two children woke up without a father because some prick thought that the A13 was a suitable place to drive like he was playing Grand Theft Auto."
No, GIZMO, he was allowed to drive like a prick, like thousands more. It is not an "accident". This society is simply not taking steps to prevent those things. One out of two driver is allowed to use a smartphone while driving for obvious reasons. First they use a car, Second they use a smartphone. It's a big business.
Id voluntarily fit a black box gps speed limiter if such thing existed, was affordable and gave me the possible advantage of an insurance discount..
Seems a sensible move for me for anyone concerned about road safety
so whats the answer?
Speed limits are not the answer. They reinforce the idea that if you're complying, you're safe. They're the reason why whenever it's foggy there's a pile-up on the motorway somewhere - they were doing 70, that's a safe speed, right?
The solution is better new driver training, periodic retesting, and draconian penalties for dangerous drivers. Cultural change can be achieved - everyone wears a seatbelt now, very few people (comparatively) drink-drive - but it takes time (decades!) and consistent reinforcement.
Well, CHEAPMONK, I choose to hold the person in the driver's seat responsible for what the car was doing. He CHOSE to drive like a prick. I drive many thousands of miles every year and I don't require a policeman on every corner to stop me driving on the wrong side of the road, at 100mph past schools, or anything else that I'm not 'allowed' to do.
RIP , hope there is some justice.
as for using gps and so on to limit speed, be careful what you wish for... limiting and issuing tickets for braking or accelerating hard, really?
how about gps on bikes, jump a red light, get automatic fine, do it 3 times, and your bike gets crushed ....
i ride bikes, but hate when drivers and riders both flout the law, if the gov bring in technology to "fix" this, it will be a blunt axe ...
Poor chap was just going about his business and now 2 kids will grow up without him. RIP
Sadly nothing will change, the prick that killed him will get a telling off and that's all. the law, or robust enforcement of the laws we have, will not change until someone with influence looses a child.
My gut feeling is that nothing will change, the death rate on the UK's roads is quite low, I am by no means saying this is right, please don't misunderstand. The electorate "accepts" that people die on the roads and as long as it isn't them or their families really aren't that interested. I think cyclists have more of an issue because it could be them who die through no fault of theirs. For a driver cocooned in their nice warm bubble....
I wish I knew how the UK could adopt the Dutch stop de kindermoord movement, I would argue it takes a society that actually cares about one another. From looking around there is a huge proportion who simply don't give a s*** about anyone but themselves and their immediate family.
I worked for a steel manufacturer and historically it was accepted that steel was dangerous and people died, just one of those facts, it took a lot of effort to get people to understand that accidents don't happen, that people don't have to die, that if someone does die something has gone drastically wrong and every effort needs to be taken to understand why and to stop It happening again.
On the roads, there simply isn't the effort, low sun, fog, ice, etc. shit happens people die, these are things that happen every year, that can be prevented, but no, nothing changes.
What a tragic waste of life, I feel for the family. I hope the person who caused this is locked away for a long time, especially as he sped off from the scene. This is what I find so concerning, the moral compass of some people and the lack of any care or thought in peoples actions seems to be getting worse. As a society we are in trouble.
Reflects how accustomed we've become.
Why isn't such a tragic death and all the others like it in the national news?
RIP
Quite. It took six people to die in quick succession for it to make the news last year. It takes a thousand people to sit in the street to get a mention.
Today, two children woke up without a father because some prick thought that the A13 was a suitable place to drive like he was playing Grand Theft Auto. But the breakfast news will have told them about video bloggers who don't declare when they're advertising. It's shameful.
There were 1713 recorded deaths on the roads of Great Britain in 2013. An average of 4.7 per day. They just wouldn't have the time to report them all. That's how bad it is. But of course the far bigger killer is the pollution caused by traffic, and that gets even less coverage. RIP indeed.
What i find most distasteful in this article is the fact that out of 54 comments there are only 4 who express there condolences towards the man and his family.
A family man with 2 children has passed away and all we seem to be able to do is have an arguement over speed limiters, such a shame.
RIP young man.
Really?
I find it hard to say what I find most "distasteful", although really it would be more apt to describe it as "upsetting". However at the moment it's split somehow between the following:
* Your post which, instead of simply stating what you feel about it, takes the opportunity to berate other forum posters for trying to come up with a way to avoid the problem in the future instead of posting anodyne formulae of condolence
* The conjunction of the story about the police pfaffing about with speedguns on the Bristol-Bath bikepath while cars are, according to the local residents in this tragedy, known to race regularly on the section of road
* The victim-blaming in the story attributed to the uninformed-but-not-afraid-to-voice-her-ignorant-opinion witness
* The inevitability that this horrible tragedy will contribute to the perception that cycling is dangerous
A man has now been arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.
If you are prepared to take a course of action, then you must be prepared to accept the consequences.
Someone who Is racing on the road, must say to themselves that what they are doing is so important, that If a child or an adult, a bike or another car gets in their way, they don't care.
The court should hit them hard.
It's almost as if this country believes in divine destiny at government level; it's your fate so It wasn't preventable. They don't really care when someone dies on the road, or they would do everything to prevent it and give appropriate sentences.
Someone famous has to die before they act.
In this case it was a criminal act, but we've been here before with 'accidental' deaths too.
Some days I ask myself what I'm doing. The truth be told, cycling is taking your life into your own hands...actually no, it's putting yourself at the mercy of idiot car drivers.
Given the ability for your satnav to know and communicate the local speed limit, it should be perfectly possible to fit intelligent speed limiters that react to local limits - with dynamic updating to allow for temporary or permanent changes. Add inertial or accelerometer-based navigation to cater for GPS signal loss, and a car so fitted could never exceed the speed limit. Self-driving cars will of necessity be fitted with such technology, so fitting it to cars with the 2015 eCall system should be straightforward. All earlier cars can be retrofitted with a GPS-based black box which can only be interrogated by the police or accident investigators. It can be done - if there's the political will, as mentioned by several above. In the meantime, I hope they get this little scrote. RIP Assad Ahmed.
Indeed. RIP... poor man. I hope your family sees justice one day.
What's this "society" i'm living in? It's not as if we weren't pouring billions into police and "Justice"; apparently, much easier to fine hundreds of cyclists in London for a total of 1,000,000 £ ...
Sometimes, i'm asking myself why cyclists are fined and harassed? because we don't drive a car ? We don't spend fortunes in insurance, fuel, maintenance ? Why these guys can drive at speed in London? Why all those drivers using their smartphones end tablets while driving?
There is a reason.
http://road.cc/content/news/136619-cyclists-fined-over-£1000000-london-police-crackdown
Just get rid of the cars. Price them fairly for the amount of damage they cause and they'll be out of the budget of most people.
void
great! how do i get to work? how can i take my sister out and about, as she is wheel chair bound? another nutty idea!
Cars have their place, and are useful in some situations. But I think Ush is talking about all the privately owned cars sitting in traffic jams into and out of cities during "rush hour" (wow, isn't that a misnomer nowawadays?) with just one person in them (the driver). Its not an efficient use of the apparently limited space we have in our urban areas. If someone really needs some form of motorised private transport to get around then fair play, but most people really don't.
(They are also very useful for going long distances).
When you're an old man and incompentent to drive how are you going to take your sister out and about? How are you going to get from wherever you live to wherever is important if you HAVE TO USE A CAR?
Or you could start planning on making cycling safe for those of us that are capable and willing and segregating the rest of you onto manageable, safe public transport.
Or you could just give up and continue the obviously stupid current situation while pointing to your own needs.
Lets not lose sight of the issues here. These morons appear to have been engaging in street racing, not just driving a little bit over the speed limit, but RACING which has claimed the life of some one who got in their way. If CCTV was in operation, any half competent operator should have been able to spot what was going on and got the police involved pretty damn quick. Just because a small minority of morons use the roads like their own race track doesn't mean the rest of us have to suffer. What is needed here is more traffic police, unmarked cars, targeting these morons making their lives really difficult. When they are caught they need to charged and prosecuted for very serious offences not let off with a slap on the wrists. Once convicted judges need to hand down severe sentences for such aggravated offences. 15 years minimum in prison and a life time driving ban and cars crushed. Also seize any assets the morons might have to give to the victims in addition to any civil claims.
It sounds like these drivers were out of control and destined to hit some one or something. It just happened to be this cyclist.
I would like to see the driver who did this put up agin a wall and shot but this is never going to happen. Films such as Fast and Furious glorify this sort of moronic dangerous behaviour, but the reality is people are killed, lives wrecked and families destroyed.
RIP.
I think that some sort of limiter on cars driven by people who have more than a certain number of points on their licence would be a good idea. Many people go crying to the court claiming hardship if they lose their licence. OK, but you get limited, remove the limiter, banned for life, sorted!
That's a really good suggestion. I would also suggest it would be useful with new drivers if they commit certain violations.
Yeah that's not a bad idea.
Also it would be pretty easy to fit a black box device that records "driving characteristics" (such a thing is offered by several insurance companies already so the technology already exists)
This could be checked for erratic driving (e.g. frequent harsh acceleration or braking, ABS activation, etc) which would then influence further sentencing.
Being honest it is probably easier and a better solution to have every car fitted with a black box. What you record and what the data dump would be? But if it is only recording the last hour it might assist in crash reconstruction, if it records erratic behaviour it provides evidence of the driver etc etc.
Tag GPS to it and the driver is free to do what they like but if they have an incident it provides a bit more evidence of what they were doing prior to the incident.
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