Fuel tanker driver receives six-month suspended sentence for causing death of cyclist by careless driving

How many cyclists need to be killed before enough is enough?

Well, according to the Panorama Road Rage episode, 2 per week is clearly not enough

With all these drivers furiously demanding cyclists to pay road taxes, are you sure that no drivers haven't been killed by cyclists? Judging by their zeal, there must be at least a few hundreds of drivers killed by cyclists and many thousands of destroyed cars per year, so you should check again your stats.

Not point even bringing back hanging 'em for turnip stealing if there are no police in the fields...  It's the consequences AND the chance of them happening - latter is very low ATM.

hirsute wrote:

24 seconds is a very long time on the road not to have noticed or checked for the cyclist. Longer ban needed.

That's a short sentence for an offence that has consequences that will last a very, very long time.

RIP to the victim and my sympathies to the family and friends.

Who is Jayz and when did he kill a cyclist?

I understand he is a "wrapper" - so presumably he only killed a cyclist metaphorically?  Possibly to rhyme with "Diss" or "slap on the wris'"?

Flintshire also confused me with an apparent extreme change of position with "the logic of the UK's judicial approach to assaulting or killing cyclists" - making "them" culpable and the judicary complicit.  Until I re-read it.

The only good thing in this is "driver plans not to drive HGVs" - of course, that's down to him.  2 years licence suspension.  Sounds like (more of) those slightly safer roundabout designs there are needed.  Plus - sadly - time for drivers to learn them by trial and error, given our inefficient communication of changes to drivers.

chrisonatrike wrote:

I Sounds like (more of) those slightly safer roundabout designs there are needed.

If the driver was behind the cyclist then the problem is not the roads, it is just the driver.  HGV drivers need to pay a lot more attention.  How to achieve that?

How to make HGV drivers better people - get them to read scripture more often?  Make them wear hair shirts (to stop them dozing off)?

I'm normally a bit suspicious of "just make the humans do it better" as it sounds easy but getting specific behavioural changes by large groups is not a trivial task.  "Professional driver" though so there are fewer of them, someone should be checking them and someone's paying.  So there's more of a chance.

Low hanging fruit - given some of the recent stories here about drivers who had no licence at all and were high at the time I'd say just doing a modicum of checks under existing laws / some more policing would be a start.

At the end of the day though why take a chance and leave the safety up to the driver?  Just separate the heavy traffic from the light traffic entirely.  Where they must still interact bring the speed of the heavy vehicles down as low as possible.  Hence the safer junction design.  Tight curves and camber slow the vehicles.  Vehicles and cyclists interact at right angles for maxium mutual visibility.  Cyclists don't have to look behind them and still hope the driver has seen them.  Everyone can deal with one interaction at a time and cyclists can watch a vehicle and see if it's slowing or not.

I think I mentioned in the original court case that looking at the island approach for her, the bike path markings actually actively put cyclists in danger from left turning vehicles  also assume the cyclist is probably only going left if they stay within the lane onto it as it pushes them that way. 

Not defending driver as it was his assumption that killed her.  

On a related note, that particular roundabout now has a 'Thank You NHS' message painted on the road! Whilst I absolutely do not deny that we have a lot to thank them for, I am not sure that painting an extra distraction for drivers in that location is what we really need!

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.1768143,0.1457692,3a,53.1y,179.29h,74.24t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sxGfz00763ZGuuUzvM-RDDw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

Private Eye had a good photo of such a tribute - in the window of a Co-op Funeral Home...

Is the white bike on google maps for her or was there another cyclist death there ?.

That just looks a really horrible roundabout to navigate on a bike, none of that infra is there helping a cyclist and its putting you in positions where drivers can put you in massive danger and make the wrong assumptions about where you are going.

The saddest thing is you can instantly see how that crash came about just from a static photo, doesnt even need traffic modelling or a survey of how the traffic flows, yet a cyclist pays for it with their life,a driver gets a suspended sentence (ok we can debate if that's appropriate) but the roundabout stays the same, the crappy infra stays the same, the near misses dont get reported so how long till another cyclist loses their life there?

The date of the streetview further on is the same month of the incident so the flowers are probably her tribute and I also expect the Ghost bike was as well. (It doesn't show on the April2021 picture.)

They might have changed the layout in the year since (I doubt it) but you can see from the cyclist here that he has to cut across the flow of traffic at about 30 degrees to "carry on straight" if following the cycle lane to the end. In his case there were no vehicles behind him so he was alright. 

It looks like the current setup is the "improved" setup, as the marked lane used to go all the way around the corner which probably made it even harder to go straight on and now theyve put in a toucan crossing on the Hills Rd exit and a narrow shared pavement to get to it, which is basically an admission the roundabout is too dangerous for cycling in it's current configuration.