James May rubbishes "nonsense" ideas to regulate cyclists in response to fatal collision

No, definitely not - but sadly pedestrians being hit my cars isn't often very newsworthy. There's an element of 'man bites dog' about this, as well as being easy 'culture war' clickbait. Not to mention 'rich banker' kills 'harmless old lady'. It gets more points because the cyclists were riding above the motor speed limit and in a way many people might consider racing. The fact the speed limit didn't apply and the riding didn't meet the definition of racing probably feeds prejudices that cyclists are 'above the law'. And quite a lot of London cyclists ride as if they are (although, ironically, not in this case).

Bicycles are not required to have speedometers, and do not unless they are fitted voluntarily by the riders as 'aftermarket' devices. But riding 'with due care and attention' might be a consideration in this case. 

That is a key point for both drivers and cyclists.

Riding with due care and attention is surely always a consideration when riding in public spaces, even for wannabe racer types "making a statement" with their top-of-the-range consumer stuff.  Riding without due care and attention, though, is as commonplace as driving without due care and attention, perhaps because nearly all those who ride a bike also drive a car?

Same self-centred little skinbags in/on their different transport technologies.

On the other hand, there's a growing number who ride bikes but don't drive, mostly because they can't afford to but also out of a choice. As cycling on a public road makes the rider a lot more vulnerable to lack of care and attention than when in a car, perhaps more care is taken than is taken by most drivers? 

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The argument that cyclists can ride as fast as they like because they have no speedometer is a rather stupid argument, then. If a cyclist has no idea of the possible consequences of riding too fast for the conditions - and no ability or inclination to make cogent judgements about taking due care and paying attention - they shouldn't be riding.

Yes, this applies in spades and with knobs on to motorists.  But that doesn't absolve cyclists from riding like loons, even if the consequences of their crash might be only a scaled down version of car loon crash. And sometimes the scale is the same (maiming and death).

Which comes back to the question I raised when the reports of the coroners case started to gain media attention.

Why was a careless cycling charge not considered?

Only the police/cps can answer that, but no ones asking them the question, and back we go round the loop of but speed limits don't apply to cyclists.

There was definitely an elitist banker angle to the report I read. They practically had a picture of the guy laughing with horns on his head.

Maybe not the fuss, but a prosection would have been more likely.

Sadly no, and its the rarity of such cases involving cyclists, combined with the something must be done group of bored MPs, agitators and media to create something far larger out of it.

That doesn't mean we should treat it as, ah but motorists.

Here's the response you'll likely get down the pub:

Yeah-but, no-but, yeah-but, I'm a good driver (I rate myself above average just like 80% of all motorists) so none of the thousands of injuries per year involving cars apply to me. Plus, I have literally no choice but to drive (not counting the choices I made on where to live and whether maintain a healthy lifestyle, which by societal convention are not treated as choices.) Whereas, all cyclists are scofflaws (as evidenced by their not paying road tax and not having insurance) and in my mind they are all about 12 years old (and only riding their bikes to annoy me personally) so the handful of injuries per year involving bicycles are tragedies that require immediate legislation. Statistics be damned.

How does it look if you take the total distances covered rather than the numbers of journeys?

KSI accidents are a per-journey issue. You don't get to kill or seriously injure people on multiple occasions on a single journey.

Also, normalizing on per-mile start to assume that car and vehicle journeys are equivalent, which they've not. For example, cars can use motorways where you can't injure a pedestrian, because there aren't any.

Per journey makes no sense as an objective measure of risk because a journey is not a fixed unit.

A cyclist on a 100 mile journey around multiple loops of Richmond Park does not represent the same risk to pedestrians as an identical cyclist riding the loop once.

Agree re motorways but you can exclude them from per mile analysis.

It's not really a statistics designed to carry great accuracy or authority, it just makes a general point.

The two issues are so far apart that there really no great way to objectively measure the risk given the gulf between car and cycle use hiding any number of confounding factors.

Somewhere like the Netherlands might give better comparison, but there are clearly significant cultural differences that you would need to account for.

I'd suggest that a cyclist on a 100 mile loop around Richmond Park would be a bit of a behavioral outlier. Maybe you could run a granny vs 'that guy' Monti Carlo simulation on that one.

Most cyclists complete a journey from A to B or A to A.

Unsure how the statistics from London Transport capture sports rather than commuter cycling.

Maybe best not to get into a SIWOTI frenzy about it.

The 100 mile journey was just an example to demonstrate the fallacy of the per journey measurement.

I'd agree that car journeys and bicycle journeys can be different but urban journeys are more similar. Many short journeys by both modes.

Overall per mile gives us the best comparison once you've removed motorways etc.

Rich_cb wrote:

Per journey makes no sense as an objective measure of risk because a journey is not a fixed unit. A cyclist on a 100 mile journey around multiple loops of Richmond Park does not represent the same risk to pedestrians as an identical cyclist riding the loop once. Agree re motorways but you can exclude them from per mile analysis.

I would have thought travelling time, rather than travelling distance, makes more sense, as that is the amount of time that pedestrians are potentially at risk. 

I reckon it depends on what you are cycling for. If you were looking at monetary cost rather than the cost in lives, would you be interested in £/mile or £/hour? A commuter (cyclist or motorist) would probably be more interested in the former, someone who just wanted to be outside might be more interested in the later.

That would only work if speeds were uniform.

A mile driven through town at 100mph would take far less time than the same journey at 20mph but I'm not sure that would translate to a reduced risk to pedestrians.

"KSI accidents are a per-journey issue. You don't get to kill or seriously injure people on multiple occasions on a single journey."

But the likelihood of your hitting another road user in the course of a journey is generally going to increase as the length of the journey increases.

If I do 1000 trips of 1 mile and injure someone on each of them, and you do one trip of 1000 miles and injure one person, by your reasoning we would presumably pose an equal threat to other road users, since we each injured one person per trip. That seems a bit off to me.

espressodan wrote:

KSI accidents are a per-journey issue. You don't get to kill or seriously injure people on multiple occasions on a single journey. Also, normalizing on per-mile start to assume that car and vehicle journeys are equivalent, which they've not. For example, cars can use motorways where you can't injure a pedestrian, because there aren't any.

But you do need to think about journey length with that statistic, particularly in London where there are virtually no motorways. Simplistically, imagine that cars and bicycles both injured a pedestrian every 100 miles, but cyclists made twenty 5 mile journeys to ride 100 miles whereas motorists only made one, that wouldn't make cycling 20 times safer for pedestrians.

In 2022 in London there were 19 billion motor-vehicle miles driven and around 600 million bicycle miles ridden. So there were roughly 35 times more motor-vehicle miles and 120 times more motor-vehicle KSIs, which makes cycling around four times safer from a pedestrian safety perspective rather than the fourteen times you mentioned.

I think the bad bit was that the cyclist was overtaking the car by going the wrong side of the pedestrian island

I hadn't picked this up- if true, it changes things entirely.

If true I would agree.   I would actually want a dangerous cycling charge, though if we were going for car-law parity would probably only be careless.

If you go for car law and punishment parity you could ride along with bodecia style wheel swords cutting the legs out from under pedestrians deliberately and get asked (firmly) to please try harder next time to not do that if at all possible please. 

Maybe the DM would like to station a reporter in the village I live in and see how many drivers break the 30 mph speed limit ! 

My village has had a 20 mph speed limit for nearly two years.

The parish council put a sign up on the village information board, reporting the results of their having one of those smily face speed detectors up at various points around the village for a couple of months last summer.

The overall average speed was 23 mph.  For every 250 vehicles, 222 were travelling under 30mph, 27 were travelling at 30-40 mph and 1 was travelling over 40mph.

I recently put this up (mostly as a wind up tbf). You'll be shocked and stunned (not!) at how many excused a 25 mph overtake in a 20 mph.

https://twitter.com/secret_squidgle/status/1785965196076265815?t=4N9mCgX...