not our fault innit

The Independent has started a campaign for safer cycling with some grim stories and statistics about deaths on the roads involving HGVs and bikes. It ends with this

Nine steps towards safer cycling

The London Cycling Campaign, which promotes safer cycling in the capital, has produced a nine-point-plan for reducing the toll of death and injury among cyclists:

* Enforce speed limits and clamp down on drivers who use mobile phones.

* Crack down on hit-and-run drivers, who account for a large portion of serious road injuries.

* Introduce 20mph speed limits in all built-up and shopping areas of Britain's towns and cities.

* Require all lorries to carry full safety equipment to help them avoid collisions with cyclists: six mirrors, sensors and safety guards.

* Require organisations which run lorries and other large vehicles to provide their drivers with cyclist awareness training, as already practised in four London boroughs.

* Include a "cycle awareness" section in the driving theory and practical tests

* Allocate more road space to cycling, as has been done in The Netherlands and Denmark, among other places.

* Provide all children with access to Bikeability cycle training, the current version of the Cycling Proficiency test

* Encourage less car use and more. cycling so that, as in The Netherlands and Denmark, collision rates for cyclists are reduced.

I read that and laughed. Only one of those nine points is aimed at cyclists and, as I have previously commented, locally to me at least they seem more interested in clipboard box-checking rather than actually teaching the kids life saving road skills for the Bikeability training.

The other eight points fall into the "it's never our fault" category. Not for a moment am I going to suggest that in any example of a cyclist's death that the Indy uses that it was their own fault because that would be churlish. However surely the best way to make cycling safer is to offer good training and good advice, to bring in measures for those people who are involved in cycling?

Why no call for a crackdown on cyclists who flout the law? I've seen riders deliberately pass through red traffic lights, ride at night without any lights wearing all black clothes, not be able to stop without using their feet as brakes. These people are a danger to all road users, just as drink-drivers, reckless drivers, are a danger to all road users.

Why no call for a riding test, licensing, regular MOT test, compulsory insurance for bikes and riders? These things that motorists are subjected to must be reducing road deaths (unless there is another reason for them?) so why not demand that cyclists prove they and their vehicle are road safe?

If a militant cyclist reads this their instant mental response may well be "but we have more to lose out of a collision than the car driver" and they would be right. A cyclist does have more chance of death if they collide with a car or HGV than the driver but why should every HGV owner be forced to fit devices to their vehicles for the benefit of cyclists, when we aren't prepared to subject ourselves to the same restrictions and costs that other road users are forced to pay especially when we have more to lose, when things go wrong? Because it's not our fault innit.