CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 16years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
Meanwhile the government War on Pedestrians and Cyclists has been very successful with an increase in road deaths, particularly for pedestrians.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18881049
This is what happens when you make an extra special effort to prioritise motoring in the way this government has been doing.
I thought this paragraph of the report was a bit odd:
"Road deaths might have gone up but - with the exception of last year - the number of people killed or seriously hurt on our roads still remains the lowest since national records began. "
So it's alright then (apart from last year of course)?
So road deaths are the biggest killer of 16-24 year olds? That is frankly shocking - I've said before that things like heart disease get referred to as the biggest 'preventable' cause of death. Well deaths on the road must be pretty high up on the 'preventable' scale as well.
It's not that shocking. Apart from suicide and knife crime, there's not that many single things that 16-24 year olds die of. And, less shocking still, the road deaths of 16-24 year olds tend to be a combination of high speed single vehicle incidents, where a car leaves the road on a bend and hits a tree (often killing three or four 16-24 year olds) or a head-on collision with another vehicle (a botched high speed overtaking manoeuvre) that kills the young people and (often) a pensioner couple. Sometimes they die racing a train to a level crossing (and the level crossing gets the blame).
That will sound callous but the only sense in which this is preventable is to stop 16-24 year olds driving cars (which I wouldn't entirely oppose). It's a world away from the ways in which pedestrians and cyclists are being killed in increasing numbers.
Sorry, I didn't phrase well. 'Shocking' as in 'you're right, not really a surprise, but shicking that so little is done about it or even released about it'.
I did wonder after I typed it, because I wasn't surprised by the fact. But was too lazy to edit.
p.s. 'preventable' could take loads of forms (restrictions on engine sizes; more stringent application of the laws of the road; etc). If the only way to stop people dying on the roads is to stop people driving we might as well give up now.
Surely the answer is the same as the answer to bad cycling - proper enforcement of the rules and stricter penaltys?
The insurance companies are doing a fair bit to stop 16-24 years olds driving, at least legally.
Interestingly (to me, anyway) the Dutch reckon if they could get more young men cycling, then overall road deaths would go down (unlike for any other demographic group) presumably because it's quite hard to ride your bike at great speed into a tree
I just mean that the much greater propensity for young people to pass their test and soon after, take a car and smash it, has been well known for a long time. It may have been the main cause of 16-24 year old deaths for a long time. They have certainly been a focus of road safety strategies for a long time. The Scottish Road Safety Campaign's 'Crash Magnets' was designed around them.
I imagine the committee have picked up on it because it has that capacity to catch people out and generate a reaction. It seems counter-intuitive when, as you say, cancers and heart attacks have been seen as the main cause of death and the people who are perceived to die on the road are children. If it's the main cause of death for 16-24 year olds there must be something badly wrong. It's no bad thing that people start taking it seriously but really, the most striking aspect of the recent increase in road deaths is the way that overall, the number of car occupants killed or seriously injured continues to decline but the numbers for pedestrians and cyclists is increasing.
Surely the answer is the same as the answer to bad cycling - proper enforcement of the rules and stricter penaltys?
Partly, but you can also do a lot to make people drive more safely by redesigning the roads, so that people are guided into safe behaviour.
Perhaps we could get rid of some of those supposedly campaigning on our behalf, like the numpties in Parliament asking for cyclists to be allowed to use the Olympic Roads Network in London ie share the outside lane on lots of very busy roads with coaches and buses...
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