http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/24/cycling-near-miss-close-pass-road-rage
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Cycling News
Cycling near misses: ‘You need ceaseless vigilance if you want to stay alive’
(9 posts)-
Posted 9 years ago #
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Excellent. Saw this before I started work and thought about posting up.
That stuff is really powerful. It would be interesting to have an Edinburgh-specific version which we could hit councillors and officials over the head with from time to time.
It might also encourage some of "our own" to lighten up on cyclists who bend the rules. Dial back the clock a few years and I was horrendously militant about norm enforcement, but that mellowed fast when I got involved with real people trying to get around by bike (and thus having these kind of experiences).
Posted 9 years ago # -
"It would be interesting to have an Edinburgh-specific version"
Is that not just the rubbish driving thread?
Posted 9 years ago # -
Excellent report.
Toxic UK road culture... its ugly, its dysfunctional, its dangerous, and its the norm.
Apparently its an economic necessity, that it should remain within the gift of the average domestic sociopath to motor around recklessly putting vulnerable lives in danger.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Well we do live in a country where over a million people signed a petition to support a presenter on a motoring programme who punched a colleague for not providing the correct type of food. Mere cyclists are way way lower on the food chain than BBC producers.
Really good article though. Sums it all up pretty well.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Makes my blood boil. The rubbish driving thread fills up daily and I'm sure everybody else, like me, doesn't mention half the stuff that happens on the road. I never have a camera to hand when there's an idiot there.
Posted 9 years ago # -
"I never have a camera to hand when there's an idiot there"
Me neither, but to be fair it wouldn't last as it would get thrown at some chump within a week !
Posted 9 years ago # -
There is a scheme called Opewrator Compliance Risk Score (OCRS) which is operated by DVSA for the Traffic Commissioner - for Scotland the feisty Ms Aitken with the wagging finger and threat to revoke the LGV/PCV licence of any driver nabbed using a mobile device for 6 months (in addition to the fine and points on their basic licence)
Insurers do have a limited version of this in the green box option for high risk young drivers to monitor their use of the car. I'm just wondering if a version of the system used by fillthathole to record potholes might be possible.
In the vacuum of no official action this clearly needs to be filled and perhaps, starting at a low key limited area project (say Central Scotland) there is a Driver-Vehicle risk scoring project. Reports would be logged against vehicles and locations, and for O Licence holders an accumulator function would file their vehicles as a second level of group total.
There is a substantial advantage for the limited resources of Police & Courts, to being able to target enforcement. Most drivers are habitual in their core journey patterns, and you may well pick up a pattern of reports that indicate a driver delivering the same bad driving on the same road at the same times. Thus a targetted action, with a history of reports (and video evidence) builds a far better case than a single event.
I'd be interested to debate the use of ANPR gates for this intelligent Policing. The ANPR gates can 1) pick out vehicles which consistently pass over a stretch of road in a time that would not be possible for a driver observing the speed limit AND 2) they can also identify the type of vehicle. Thus persistent use of a residential street as an HGV cut-through would show up as vehicles (identified by the computer as HGV), entering and leaving the monitored road faster than a delivery being made.
ANPR also builds up the cross-check on untaxed vehicles and those without an MOT. If only the Insurance payment might include payment/refund of VED, do that when a car is sold the claimed back or transferred insurance policy also cancels the VED validity. Then we might avoid the debacle of the recent Birmingham fatal crash where the keeper's details were months out of date, because the new owner or driver had not provides new details.
I predict a lot more car crushing going on....
Posted 9 years ago # -
From my limited experience observing vehicles using Cammo as a shortcut avoiding Barnton Junction. HGV's are generally quite good at using the junction while TNT and Royal Mail Lutons almost exclusively use the rat run.
I wonder if some Cammo resident has contacted them in the past regarding HGVs and complained.
Posted 9 years ago #
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