Every day about 480,000 cycle journeys are made in London, TfL said.
Truck driver Geoff Sales said: "What tends to happen is that they come on the inside of you and they get lost in the blind spot...Your side mirrors don't pick them up and your rear view mirrors don't pick them up."
In 2007, nine out of 16 cyclists who died in the city's roads were involved in a collision with a HGV. In 2006, the death toll stood at nine out of 19, TfL said.
Elsewhere:
Traffic calming measures in a village which led to an 80% reduction in accidents involving children and 100% reduction in accidents involving pedestrians upset some drivers who complained about the number of humps.
Now A total of 20 speed humps in a village are to be removed or modified after a six-year campaign.
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Meanwhile
A motorcyclist who stuck two fingers up at a camera as he raced by at up to three times the speed limit has not been banned from driving. Patrick Sheehan-Dinler, 29, from Hertfordshire, was captured 65 times by the same 30mph speed camera as he reached speeds of up to 88mph. He managed to evade capture through false names, Luton Crown Court heard.
And
A speeding driver caught doing more than 100mph while children without seatbelts dangled out of the car window has been banned from driving for just 28 days. Goodall was branded a "disgrace" by safety campaigners, as the 37-year-old was banned from the roads for just one month and fined £200.
On the other side of the pond, there is hostility to congestion charging in the Big Apple. Adam Federman lays into the anti- brigade:
Opponents of the plan, led by Keep NYC Congestion Tax Free, have seized on the argument that congestion pricing is a “tax” on the poor and therefore unfair and that Manhattan will become a playground for the rich, a golden ghetto (they forget that, in many ways, it already is). The automobile is for everyone, they say, and why should residents in the Bronx or Queens have to pay $8 to enter Manhattan. They neglect to mention, however, that most commuters do not drive (roughly 5 percent of the workforce) and that those who do drive earn considerably more on average than bus or subway riders.
A study by the city’s Independent Budget Office found that the median annual income of those who drive private cars to work exceeds the earnings of other commuters by 30 percent. According to the study, “these findings largely counter concerns that congestion pricing would disproportionately affect workers less able to afford additional commuting costs.” Thus it would be more accurate to say that congestion pricing imposes a fee on upper middle class and wealthy drivers in an effort to improve public transit, especially buses.
