Monday 2 November 2009

Coroner warns cyclists ‘how difficult it is for other traffic to see them’

Recording the death was the result of a road traffic accident, Mr Cotter said: "Cyclists need to be very, very careful. They need to understand just how vulnerable they are and how difficult it is for other traffic to see them.”

The killer driver

was travelling within the speed limit.

Whatever that was (30 mph? 40 mph?), it was irrelevant. It is plain that the driver was going at a speed too great to allow her to stop if there was anything in the road ahead – a fairly obvious case of reckless driving, to my mind. Her view was restricted. She hit and killed a child on a bicycle. The child was doing nothing wrong.

A child died in an urban landscape designed not for safe cycling but to accommodate on-street vehicle parking, irrespective of the vehicle, and to permit car drivers to travel at speeds wholly inappropriate for a residential area. And the entire system – the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the Coroner – is on the side of the killer driver, not the innocent child.