Calls to ban lorries from Wiltshire village where seven-year-old was killed while riding her bike

PRSboy wrote:

How horrific, I can't imagine what that family have gone through.  I recall my own daughter getting out of control and falling from her bicycle off the pavement of our village into the path of a car, whose driver thankfully was not speeding and easily able to take avoiding action.  My blood runs cold to this day 17 yrs later, I can still picture it.

Onto the topic in hand, I have noticed on little lanes around where we live an increasing number of HGVs.  Such small roads are inappropriate for them and they should find better routes, particularly as some are weight restricted.

My son went barreling downhill on the pavement once at age ten or so with me behind him admonishing him to slow down. Just as he was rolling past a driveway, a driver in a car started to back out and he went behind it, missing it by maybe a second. The driver stopped, but was nearly all the way across the pavement.

The driver of the car was the minister at our church. That would have been awkward.

And yes, I had flashbacks of that moment for years.

What is a lorry but an inefficient pile of blindspots?
I suspect that it would still be safer to replace them with several smaller vehicles.

Of course the safest and greenest thing would be to replace them with freight rail as much as possible.

Bin Lorries? Dumper Trucks? Recovery Vehicles? Agricultural vehicles? Fire Engines? Food delivery wagons? Not sure you can split these down or move to rolling stock. Road transport is still the most efficient means of mass haulage. Look how much of a mess the rail network is on beofre you start pushing more cargo on the line aswell. 

There should be much bigger restrictions on their movement. No entry into towns or villages in peak commuting times or when children are likely to be going to and from school. No movenent on major road networks on weekends (works in Germany where HGV must be off the roads from 10pm Friday until 10pm Sunday)  

I never said that every large road vehicle should be banned and replaced with a train..

By what metric is road haulage the most efficient? Rubber on road has more resistance than steel on steel, you can't cheat physics.
Massive improvements to the rail network, after generations of neglect, are necessary before road haulage can be replaced with rail.

I agree with everything in your last paragraph.

Sure, whatever, but that is not the point at issue, which is; would it have prevented this tragic outcome had HGVs been banned?

Actually that's exactly what I'm getting at. If HGVs had been banned and replaced by other means this may not have happened as, even though there may be a greater number of vehicles on the road (or not if it shifts to rail), the vehicles left on the road would be far less dangerous.

Large vehicles like HGVs are disproportionately more likely to kill cyclists, despite being driven by "professional" drivers. They should be kept away from vulnerable road users in urban and suburban environments.

That's a generalisation, and a glib one at that. I was thinking about the particulars of this case. The professionalism of the driver was not an issue, so I'm not sure what the quote marks imply. Unless the pavement was inadequate or the vehicle mounted the pavement then talk of separation from vulnerable road users is of little relevance. Even the fact that it was an HGV rather than any other sort of vehicle is not particularly in the frame, other than the sharper emotional response it might provoke.

I'm in no way trying to dismiss the tragedy of the events, quite the opposite, the more reason not to be taken hostage by knee jerk responses which serve only to muddy the water.

Sriracha wrote:

I'm in no way trying to dismiss the tragedy of the events, quite the opposite, the more reason no to be taken hostage by knee jerk responses which serve only to muddy the water.

Well said. Given the news reports and the experience of kids on runaway bikes listed above (I have a similar story), this has all the hallmarks of a tragic accident. 

Sriracha wrote:

That's a generalisation, and a glib one at that. I was thinking about the particulars of this case. The professionalism of the driver was not an issue, so I'm not sure what the quote marks imply. Unless the pavement was inadequate or the vehicle mounted the pavement then talk of separation from vulnerable road users is of little relevance. Even the fact that it was an HGV rather than any other sort of vehicle is not particularly in the frame, other than the sharper emotional response it might provoke. I'm in no way trying to dismiss the tragedy of the events, quite the opposite, the more reason not to be taken hostage by knee jerk responses which serve only to muddy the water.

It's not a generalisation though. Trucks, especially HGVs, are time and again demonstrated to be the most dangerous vehicles on the road. The UK does seem to publish quite detailed statistics, but I can't lay my hands on a decent summary. There is this study from Spain https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Probability-of-cyclist-KSI-risk-asso... (section 3.2 in the paper) shows that involvement of a truck in a collision is over twice as likely to result in KSI as a car. Yes, there are fewer of them in proportion, but the lobbying of the road haulage industry to avoid cyclops mirrors not being mandatory, and the manufacturers to push back regulations requiring HGVs to not be the shape (and have all the aerodynamic properties - but that's a separate argument) of a breeze block should mean that they shouldn't be let anywhere near environments where they are likely to come in close contact with VRUs - or at least be subject to severe restrictions on a case by case basis.

We drove from Normandy to the Alps in the summer, and having spotted a truck as a service station with full cyclops mirrors (bravo that Croation driver/firm) I kept a rough tally of the trucks similarly equipped on the road. We're talking not much more than the fingers of 2 hands over about 1600km