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news
Rhys Shepherd (Humberside Police) and Laceby Road, Grimsby (Google Maps)Teenage cyclist killed in collision with bus driver after parked cars blocked cycle lane – but coroner blames 16-year-old for cycling on pavement, not wearing a helmet or bright clothing, and being “distracted” by earphones
A forensic collision investigator examining the death of a teenage cyclist, who was forced to ride on the pavement due to parked cars blocking a cycle lane, pushing him into a bus driver’s “blind spot”, has concluded that “had he been travelling in the cycle lane, he would have been seen” and that the Highway Code states cyclists should not ride on pavements.
Meanwhile, the assistant coroner also told the inquest that the “importance of using a cycle lane cannot be understated”, while pointing out that the 16-year-old cyclist was “distracted” by his phone and earbuds at the time of the fatal collision, and was not wearing a helmet or bright clothing.
Rhys Shepherd was cycling to his first day at Franklin College in Grimsby on 11 September 2023, at around 8.50am, when he was struck by a bus driver on Laceby Road, at its junction with Norwich Avenue.
Laceby Road, Grimsby
The driver was turning left onto Norwich Avenue when he hit the 16-year-old, who was riding on the footpath and about to cross the junction, pulling him under the vehicle. Despite passers-by attempting first aid at the scene, Rhys died due to multiple chest injuries.
At an inquest at Grimsby Town Hall this week, forensic collision investigator Christopher Bell said that, as a result of Rhys cycling on the pavement, he was in the bus driver’s blind spot at the time of the crash.
The cyclist could have been seen if he had been using Laceby Road’s unprotected, painted cycle lane, and not the footpath, the officer said.
However, Rhys’ mum, Helen Barass, told the inquest that her son was riding on the pavement to college because the cycle lane in question is constantly filled with parked cars.
“There are always cars parked on Laceby Road,” she said. “A lot of the students going to college use the pavement because there are cars parked. It makes it more difficult to be on the road.
“It is a busy road. There are lots of teenagers. They all think they are invincible. The option of being in the cycle lane is more dangerous.”
Laceby Road and Norwich Avenue junction, Grimsby
In his conclusion, collision investigator Bell said that the Highway Code states that cyclists should not ride on pavements.
“There is a cycle lane, but there are no yellow lines to say it is illegal to park there. There are cars parked in the cycle lane and there is a bus stop in the cycle lane. The pavement was in the bus blind spot. Had he been travelling in the cycle lane, he would have been seen,” Bell concluded.
“At no point was Rhys ahead of the bus. The only way the driver would have seen him in his mirrors is if he had not been in his blind spot. He entered Norwich Avenue as the coach was making a left-hand turn. He would not have been visible to the driver.”
Assistant coroner Marianne Johnson told Grimsby Town Hall that the 16-year-old cyclist was forced to use the footpath to travel to college “because the cycle lane is more dangerous because there are cars parked on it”.
However, she also concluded that other factors, such as Rhys’ “inattention” and failure to wear a helmet or hi-vis gear, contributed to his death.
“There is likely to have been some element of distraction due to him wearing earphones and on his mobile phone, which is what you expect of a 16-year-old,” the coroner said.
“The driver would not have been able to see him. The inattention was there for Rhys. It is more than likely he was in the driver’s blind spot. At no point was he visible to the bus driver. The inattention or distraction cannot be discounted.
“The importance of using a cycle lane cannot be understated. The wearing of a safety helmet is important and being visible to others.
“Teenagers often do not want to look uncool. However, it is such an important measure. It is so important to be visible to others. We have all been 16 years old once and want to look good in front of friends.
“But without a safety helmet and bright clothing you are so vulnerable. Mobile phones are such a distraction. We have all seen people on their phones. How often do we bump into someone who is on their phone? It is a difficult situation for youngsters.”
Rhys Shepherd (Humberside Police)
In a statement read at the inquest, the bus driver who collided with Rhys, who was driving students to Franklin College for PC Coaches, said he had a “good, clear, unobstructed vision of the road” and was driving slowly due to the amount of traffic going eastbound into Grimsby.
However, he said he was running late and decided to turn left into Norwich Avenue to avoid congestion, when he heard a bang which he said sounded like he had “hit a tree branch”.
“It all happened so fast,” the bus driver said in his statement. “To my horror I saw a male laid on his back with a mobile phone on his chest and his earphones in his ears.
“I am absolutely devastated and not slept in days. I want to send my condolences to his family and say how sorry I am for what has happened.”
Two students who were on the coach at the time of the crash said they had seen the 16-year-old cycling on the pavement while holding his mobile phone, while a pedestrian who was about to cross Norwich Avenue said she saw the cyclist riding quickly, meaning he was unable to stop in time when the bus driver turned into his path.
At the time of his death last September, Rhys’ family paid tribute to him, saying he was “loved by many”.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
Latest Comments
- LeadenSkies 7 sec ago
The collision investigator needs a lesson in basic English. The bus driver COULD have seen the poor lad, not would have seen....
- hawkinspeter 13 min 27 sec ago
She's He's not my Queen King and certainly has no ownership of our language!
- bensynnock 1 hour 5 min ago
I see a car go through a red light at almost every single cycle at every single junction. ...
- chrisonabike 2 hours 3 min ago
Also don't forget - Sustrans are a charity *....
- chrisonabike 2 hours 15 min ago
Yes ... but (just due to the large numbers of people affected) this likely would only proceed in the UK at a very ... cautious ... pace....
- EK Spinner 2 hours 32 min ago
Arsehole in the van not with standing, how did they manage to get a risk assessment allowing a race (a group not a TT) group to be competing on ...
- RafaDy 2 hours 28 min ago
I think reviewer completely missed the point here trying to match bike's name with what it can do. Ribble is namin git's bike weirdly, the...
- Moist von Lipwig 5 hours 53 min ago
Bit of googling gone wrong in the article - the JAT is the Junction Assessment Tool, the Joint Approval Team appears to be a coutner terrorism...
- HKR 7 hours 8 min ago
Can't believe that child threw his bike on the floor at the end of that. Young people today have no respect... ;))
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18 comments
The collision investigator needs a lesson in basic English. The bus driver COULD have seen the poor lad, not would have seen.
He also, much more importantly, needs a lesson in basic collision investigation / forensics. Stick to facts supported by evidence, don't get drawn into the realms of what your own bias thinks might have happened. He has absolutely no way of knowing whether the bus driver would have seen the poor lad or not as he has no evidence as to whether or not he made the requisite observations before turning, just that it would have been possible if the lad had been in the cycle lane.
Some of the other stuff mentioned by the collision investigator is just irrelevant. If it was, as he suggests, impossible to see the lad on the pavement then he could have been lit up like Blackpool illuminations and it would still have been impossible to see him. And wearing a helmet correctly will do diddly squat to protect you from catastrophic chest trauma. IRRELEVANT!!!
No mention of the design process for the cycle lane being looked at? The lane not being usable was identifed as a contributing factor to a fatal accident, but no follow up on the designers HSE responsabilities in installing a non-mandatory lane at that location?
I see two issues here:
1) Inadequate safe cycling provision for everyone but especially children / more vulnerable people.
There are "advisory cycle lanes" (dashed lines) shown in the picture. These effectively mean absolutely nothing in the UK.
Even "mandatory cycle lanes" are pretty rubbish as we know, because not only is paint not protection, there is almost always no "buffer" zone between these and motor traffic. And as Cycling UK found in fact increasing numbers of these are entirely legal to drive and park in also! Of course, all that is irrelevant because there isn't sufficient enforcement (any?) to convince people they should not just drive, park or store their stuff in these.
Most important - in the UK we know the most dangerous places are junctions, and it is here were we have the least provision (and what little we do is rubbish like "bike boxes" / "ACLs"). Compare this with the safety and convenience that better places can offer [1] [2] [3].
2) Driving standards and vehicle safety.
The article says the driver suddenly decided to make a turn into a side road and clearly did not observe sufficiently e.g. what is on the pavement. There has been guidance in the Highway Code about this for some years (albeit itself wishy-washy). But apparently a professional driver trusted with the lives of others is not even held to that standard.
We are also far too accepting of "blind spots". At minimum drivers should be aware of these on any vehicle they're driving and be taking measures to compensate.
Sorry - issue 3 - massive space for motoring:
Look at the size of the "side road"! And despite being a residential area, all of this is potential through-routes for motor traffic.
The general solution to this (that other places have extensively used) is making residential areas non-through routes, and actual "side roads" should get the "continuous footway / cycle way" treatment. But that's moot here, this is all built to "car city" standards.
Apparently Grimsby (per previous appearances here) is not going to see an active travel revolution any time soon.
I would add to that, look at the curve of the junction. Why do we build junctions in such a way that it facilitates drivers being able to take them at speed? Many corners are designed like tight curves rather than turns. If we squared off the corners of junctions drivers would be forced to slow down and it would also reduce the distance pedestrians had to go in order to cross. If the driver in this instance had to slow right down in order to turn left there would've been considerably more chance for him to see Rhys or for Rhys to anticipate his manoeuvre.
Poor kid. And his family.
Obviously a number of factors in this (and any) incident. But FFS.
“There is a cycle lane, but there are no yellow lines to say it is illegal to park there. There are cars parked in the cycle lane and there is a bus stop in the cycle lane. The pavement was in the bus blind spot. Had he been travelling in the cycle lane, he would have been seen,” Bell concluded
So.....the parked vehicles (the ones preventing him from using the cycle lane that apparently he should have been using) ARE a problem. BUT.
“The importance of using a cycle lane cannot be understated."
Yet again, the fairly obvious elephant in the transport system is wilfully ignored. It's OK to park in an advisory cycle lane because who wants to walk further or pay to park (so cycle lanes are not that important). But cycle lanes are simultaneously so important & there to "protect" you as a cyclist, that it's your fault if you get killed because you didn't use it. Because it's full of cars.
Of course, depending on when it was created, it's also legal to park in a mandatory cycle lane! (not that people pay any attention to laws about not driving on to pavements and cycle lanes anyway).
If we accept that a major cause of the collision was due to the victim not using the cycle lane, then surely the motorists that prevented him from using the bike lane should be prosecuted for their part in this tragedy.
Or is this one of those occasions where just the victim is blamed?
Condolences to family and friends for this needless death.
"However, she [coroner] also concluded that other factors, such as Rhys’ “inattention” and failure to wear a helmet....."
and
"Rhys died due to multiple chest injuries."
Where do they get these coroners from? Are they not trained to examine the evidence and come to reasonable conclusions? Are they not supposed to be familiar with the data on things they pronounce on?
It appears that many of them are suffering from motonormativity and twist the evidence to suit their opinions.
I always wear a helmet, but know full well it won't protect me from every incident, and certainly won't protect me from chest injuries. If he really was in the blind spot - would hi-viz help? It's possible the driver would have spotted a bit of hi-viz at some point in the run up which would have encouraged them to take more care, but that's care they should have taken regardless.
I often wear hi-viz and a hard hat for work, and there's nothing we love more than a bad joke along the lines of how our hi-viz/hard-hat will protect us from all of the many dangers that they quite plainly cannot protect us from, such as a big concrete block landing on us, or falling into a big hole in the ground. But I feel an inquest into the death of a teenager isn't the pace for such hilarity.
Clearly not paying attention played a role - although the lack of attention of the bus driver to the highway code's expectation to give way when turning into a side street or to checking their blind spot was more pertinent.
What would have been helpful was for the coroner to point out the role of the drivers who abandoned their cars in the cycle path to making the supposed safe route impractical. And then gone one further and had a word on the role of those who designed the street in a way that lets drivers park in the bike lane without issue.
And demanding that the real issue, lack of safe cycling infrastructure is addressed immediately, not blaming the victim.
Hold on a minute - was the bus driver distracted by the teenager wearing earphones? Is that why they didn't bother to check their "blind spots"?
They were distracted because the cyclist wasn't wearing a helmet?
Distracted trying to figure out how a cycle helmet would help with chest injuries
Remind me again - if you are intending to turn into a side road and there are cyclists, or pedestrians, or f-ing penguins, crossing that side road, who has priority?
If the bus driver couldn't see the teenager on his bike 'because he was on the footpath and not in the cycle lane' then they wouldn't have seen him in the cycle lane either and certainly wouldn't have seen a pedestrian - not even the hypothetical person pushing a pram - on the footpath.
Saying, "but he was in their blind spot" just isn't good enough
Condolences to this young man's family.
I agree, but ... Presumably you're referring to the "new" rule H2?
Unfortunately there isn't really new "law" here - just "recommendation":
Sadly the legal position is presumably a) it is not legal to cycle here b) there were no "pedestrians crossing / waiting to cross" and c) even if this was that situation it's still not strict ("MUST")...
Of the many issues I have with the coroner's comments - this is the one that's most ridiculous. It might be argued (maybe they did, and it isn't mentioned) that bike was going faster than a pedestrian, and the driver would assume they'd have noticed pedestrians as they overtook them on the approach, but was the cyclist going faster than someone out for a run?
The teenager being (it's presumed) distracted by a phone and headphones is all very well, but isn't the point that those turning into a side-street are supposed to give way to the more vulnerable user - even if (and perhaps because) they might not be paying attention.
The article says that "At no point was Rhys ahead of the bus" so he must have been going faster than the bus, in that case rather than the occasional car that we can see in the pictures above perhaps the road was nose to tail with slow moving traffic. If that was the case then the bus driver may have arrived adjacent to the side road and suddenly decided to try a change of route without checking it was clear and without having recently checked his mirrors because the traffic was only moving slowly.