"@Instography - what makes you say that?"
It just seemed obvious. Wasn't meant to be a criticism of any campaigning that is done. Just an observation of what seems like a mismatch between the concentration and focus of campaigning, which seems to be around cities (and around the middle class areas of cities, naturally, since that's where the cyclists tend to live) and where people are being killed.
It's a function of where activists live - in London, in Edinburgh but less so, it seems, in Birmingham and Glasgow. And less so still in small towns and villages connected to larger towns by A and B roads that force cyclists to join cars and lorries moving at 60mph rather an average of 10mph.
And of course, the funding, or lack of, is a reflection of all those people not dying at once either in big train crashes (like Ladbroke Grove) or in tragedies like the Herald of Free Enterprise or the Marchioness where causes can be identified as system and process failures, linked to excessive pursuit of profit or corporate laxity or indifference, that are relatively easily, if expensively, rectified. They don't fit into aspects of individual behaviour that are already populated by outsiders and attract opprobrium unlike, say, ecstasy or legal highs or handguns or air rifles which hardly ever (sometimes never) kill anyone yet attract legislation and enforcement (for all its inadequacies).
Cyclists each die individually, in individual "accidents", hit by individual vehicles at a particular place, each with their own specific causes. Nothing connects these people. And no one (other than some sad or angry activists) wants to connect them. Just as hardly anyone wants to connect all the people who die because they don't cycle (or otherwise engage in enough physical activity). To connect would be to admit to a problem than politicians certainly don't really want to deal with. Who would connect them and still do nothing? As long as they can be kept as private tragedies they lie beyond the scope of public policy.
And yet the mismatch matters more because it highlights how disjointed and incoherent the various local campaigns are and helps to explain why, in spite of local successes (for what they are) cycling seems relatively easy for politicians to ignore.
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