Road rage van driver chased emergency ambulance

A furious van driver trapped a dying heart attack patient inside an ambulance after it clipped his wing mirror because he'd refused to move to let it through.

Dale Barker, 46, had pursued the emergency vehicle for more than a mile to Bradford Royal Infirmary and pulled up so close to the rear doors that paramedics could not open them to get the patient out.

Bradford Crown Court heard that the patient, a 42-year-old man, later died. Electrician Barker, of Bradford, pleaded guilty to dangerous driving last September. During the pursuit, which went on for 1.6 miles, Barker was also said to have followed the ambulance through a red light.

The Honorary Recorder of Bradford, Judge James Stewart QC, told Barker that he had made a stupid mistake. 'I accept that what you did was a momentary lapse,' the judge told him. 'You reacted angrily to the ambulance having struck your wing mirror.'

Barker was made the subject of a 12-month community order, including a requirement to do 150 hours' unpaid work. He was also banned from driving for a year.

Are the Metropolitan Police institutionally anti-cyclist?

You might well draw that conclusion from the scandalous response of the Met to a violent assault on a cyclist.

But then people who report a stolen bike to the Met also aren’t overjoyed by the response.

And let’s not forget the case of the black cab driver who attacked Jared Kelly

The incident was recorded on Westminster council's CCTV cameras but was subsequently deleted, while the police say they have no details of one man who came to Mr Kelly's aid and who offered to be a witness.

Despite the best efforts of the Met and the CPS the cyclist was cleared.

Jenny Jones is a very cogent critic of the Metropolitan Police’s reluctance to enforce road traffic laws in the capital.

Historically, the Met has long incubated petrolhead’s policing.

Incidentally when women were finally allowed to join the Metropolitan Police, this was bitterly resented by the boys in blue. The Met didn’t believe that women should be involved in dealing with real crime so had to find something for these unwanted women to do. This was at the time when only the very rich owned cars, and when cars had running boards. The rich in London were annoyed because street urchins used to have fun jumping on to running boards and hitching a free ride, so the task of the first WPCs was allocated as cracking down on this serious anti-social behaviour which upset drivers.

Not everybody knows that.

Clear remorse

the defendant showed 'clear remorse'

A road rage driver who throttled a cyclist in rush-hour traffic was snared by a video camera on the victim's helmet.

Fuming Michael Stewart, 47, jumped out of his black BMW and grabbed the biker - unaware he was being filmed.

Stewart - of Daven Road, Congleton - pleaded guilty to common assault and driving without due care and attention.

Stewart was ordered to pay a £200 fine and £200 court costs. His licence was endorsed with five penalty points.

He was also given a six-week community order with a four-week evening curfew.

Cycling’s image

Cycling's image is so different from when it was seen as a sweet-natured pursuit of children and maids around village greens. So if children's stories from back then were updated they'd go "Mrs Mablethorpe was cycling to Picklewitch Farm with Beryl Badger in her basket to pick up some delicious eggs.

'Ding-a-ling' went her bell as she passed Mr Jiffybag the postman.

'GET OUT THE FUCKING WAY, MABLETHORPE', yelled Mr Jiffybag, and threw a lovely round juicy orange at her head."

Two attacks on cyclists

The curious common factor in these two assaults is presumably just a coincidence…

Police investigating the shooting of a cyclist with a BB or pellet gun in Hampshire have released a CCTV image of a man they want to trace.

Two men were cycling down Bramshill Road in Eversley when the passenger of a silver Ford Focus leaned out of the window and fired at them, police said.

and

A cyclist attempting to pedal the length of Ireland for charity says he was left badly shaken after someone in a passing car deliberately pushed him off his bike on the outskirts of Derry.

English cyclist Ian Mayhew and his girlfriend were cycling along the Culmore Road late on Saturday afternoon when he says a passenger in a silver Ford Focus leaned out the window and struck him.

“It was most certainly deliberate,” Ian told the ‘Journal’ yesterday. “The driver of the vehicle pulled his car alongside me as I pedalled and closed the gap between me, the kerb at the edge of the road. The rear seat passenger leaned out of the car and deliberately hit me causing me to fall off, hitting the kerb and pavement.”

Meanwhile in Oldham County:

On May 28, Schmidt was riding through Oldham County with three other cyclists. Everything was fine until they got into a Pewee Valley neighborhood.

"First I thought it was just a pebble thrown by a car tire that had hit me and then I heard a popping again," said Schmidt. "That's when I realized, that sounded like a BB gun."

The riders tried avoid the main roads to stay out of the way of traffic, but that didn't seem to help.
"All the sudden it made a loud pop and immediately I felt some sharp pain in the left side of my chest," said Schmidt.

Schmidt thinks the shots came from a white Ford Ranger pickup truck.

Drivers have tantrums when road closed

POLICE have criticised “rude and impatient” motorists who complained to officers investigating the cause of major road accident in Poole yesterday that has left a pedal cyclist in hospital with serious leg injuries.

Officers closed the road for two hours and 20 minutes to investigate the scene of the accident. A Dorset Police spokesman said the closure had been for the minimum possible period.

Sgt Steve Quill of the Ferndown Traffic Unit said that while most motorists had shown understanding, some local drivers had taken out their frustration on officers.

Thought for the Day

I would like the DVLA database of vehicle keepers posted on the web, so that all of us – whether busybodies, neighbourhood campaigners or even intrepid boy reporters – can link every registered vehicle on our roads to a name and address.

An infringement to privacy? I don't think so. Operating a motor vehicle involves responsibilities as well as rights, and one of the longest established responsibilities is that a vehicle should be traceable back to its operator. I'm merely arguing that citizens, as well as the state, should have access to this information.

Driver targets cyclists

Cyclists are being targeted by a driver who Oldham County Police say is trying to run riders off the road intentionally.

The latest incident was reported to police Monday evening. Investigators said it's not a game of chicken, it is serious.

Oldham County Police describe the driver as a white man about 30 years old. The truck is described as a red Dodge Ram with a specialized license plate called a farm tag.

‘Cycling, Safety and Sharing the Road’: new DfT report

Cyclists and drivers ‘Sharing the road’ in London (A503, Walthamstow) and ‘cyclists not sharing the road’ (Netherlands, pic: Judy Hembrow).

A new report published by the Department for Transport examines the views of cyclists and drivers about each others’ behaviour and considers them in the context of ‘road safety’:

Qualitative research was carried out with cyclists, other road users and the parents of young cyclists to explore views on the positives and negatives of cycling, accounts of stress and risk on the road, views on the potential problems in interactions between cyclists and other vehicles, as well as strategies for dealing with and managing risk - including the use of safety gear.

It’s a seriously flawed but nevertheless interesting report. The interpretation put upon it by the Daily Telegraph is:

Cyclists and motorists do not want to share road, report finds

Attempts to make cyclists and motorists share the road are doomed to failure, Government research has found.

An embarrassing conclusion both for the Department for Transport, which has no interest in promoting successful, segregated cycling on the Dutch model, but also for the Cyclists’ Touring Club, which remains wedded to vehicular cycling.

The report’s authors assert

our focus throughout the design, delivery and reporting of the research has been on issues of road safety

But some very large ‘issues’ are evaded, not least that ‘road safety’ is an ideological construction invented by the motor lobby to resist effective action against their weapons of mass destruction. The ‘road safety’ industry is institutionally designed to avoid engagement with the core issues of high speed vehicle manufacture, lawless driving, inadequate road traffic law enforcement, and inadequate penalties for criminal behaviour. Instead ‘road safety’ focuses on education and telling pedestrians, and cyclists to adjust their behaviour to the risks posed by the behaviour of reckless drivers. For the definitive hatchet job on the road safety industry, see Robert Davies’s book Death on the Streets: Cars and the mythology of road safety (1993).

This new DfT report is itself contaminated by this ideology. It ignores exposure to risk on the part of cyclists, just as it ignores risk compensation on the part of drivers (make a bad driver safe from the consequences of recklessness by supplying air bags etc and they will be reckless). Instead it limits itself to conclusions drawn from road injury figures, which are both notoriously unreliable and provide no adequate index of exposure to danger.

This report introduces the topic of cycle helmets and concludes:

Opportunities may exist to: encourage inconsistent wearers to extend existing habits into new settings; and tackling the image of the helmet as something for children only.

This assumes that cycle helmets are a good thing. This assumption is not tested within the report; it simply emerges as road safety ‘common sense’.

Likewise

There was widespread agreement that cyclists should do more to make themselves visible on the road

Oh really? In what way do the laws of optics not apply to cyclists? The toxic sub-text of that sentence is ‘because many drivers are not concentrating on controlling a ton of machinery in motion – they are chatting on the phone, reading a text message, changing a CD, finding a new radio station, looking at their SatNav etc – cyclists have a special obligation to draw attention to themselves in order not to be run down.’

That toxic logic even applies to pedestrians. It is now acceptable for a driver to execute a pedestrian on a zebra crossing if the pedestrian was wearing ‘dark clothing’. Road safety is a victim-blaming ideology and the conspicuity red herring is one of its most striking achievements. Indeed

High-visibility clothing was seen as important by many cyclists

(Yes, even sheep can sometimes be persuaded that the wolf is their friend)

though very few actually wore it.

Well, yes. Why should they?

The report asserts that

Better sharing of the road by cyclists and other road users (ORUs) remains… a fundamental issue for road safety.

In a vehicular cycling society there is a sense in which that is true. But what the report reveals are the levels of hostility and aggression felt towards cyclists by ‘Other Road Users’. The report notes that

no stereotype of car drivers in general exists… By contrast, a stereotype of cyclists in general does appear to exist among ORUs. This stereotype is characterised by:
serious failures of attitude, including a generalised disregard for the law and a more specific lack of concern for the needs of other drivers; and serious failures of competence and knowledge of the rules of the road

It’s worth asking where this stereotype comes from, and the answer is the mass media – another relevant aspect which is excluded from consideration by this report.

Britain’s national and local newspapers depend heavily on car advertising, and are often owned by corporations which also publish motoring magazines. The mass media invented the term ‘war on the motorist’ and established the stereotype of drivers as victims, bled dry by the state and mercilessly persecuted by traffic calming, parking wardens and speed cameras. This is the same mass media which excludes daily road carnage from its news pages. Needless to say there is no balancing perspective to show that bad behaviour by cyclists is (i) not greater than that by drivers (ii) has only a fraction of the serious consequences which results from bad behaviour by drivers (iii) occurs as an adaptation to roads designed to benefit the flow and parking of motor vehicles, not the convenience and safety of cyclists or pedestrians, and as a response to the failure to enforce laws protecting such vehicular cycling infrastructure as exists.

But if some drivers feel hostile to cyclists on the basis of a stereotype (cyclists are lawless spongers), the report shows that cyclists are hostile to drivers, and intimidated by motor traffic:

the most important barriers to road cycling are related to ORUs:
• the behaviour of ORUs; and
• the volume and speed of traffic.

This chimes with the reason why most people in Britain have no interest in cycling. Every survey ever taken demonstrates that non-cyclists cite road danger as the number one reason why they won’t get on a bike. The response of the CTC to this situation is to cite statistics supposed to show that cycling is safe, and to attempt to get people to dispel their fears through cycle training. This has never worked as a strategy and it will never work. What is interesting about this report is that it now shows that even among vehicular cyclists there is significant hostility to vehicular cycling, based on personal experience:

Over and above any specific bad behaviours, it was clear that most, if not all, participants experience increased levels of stress when the volume and speed of traffic increased.

Interestingly, Section 7 of the report references Amsterdam as a successful city for road sharing. The authors appear wholly ignorant of what Dutch cycling infrastructure consists of, and why Amsterdam, though infinitely better for cycling than anywhere in the UK, ought not to be the template. The report rhetorically asks if it is necessary to change the infrastructure, then flinches from the Dutch option by blathering that ‘the scale of what can be done in practice is constrained by the space of most urban roads’. That, of course, is garbage, and it is interesting that the transport professionals involved in producing this report are astonishingly ignorant of Dutch practice.

Having backed-off from the one thing that will bring about mass cycling in Britain, the authors then bluster about conspicuity as a solution:

Promoting better visibility would be easier than promoting helmets. Moreover, it could be incorporated into a wider programme to promote better road sharing, since making yourself visible was widely conceived, by cyclists and ORUs, as something that cyclists can do for ORUs.

To which my reply would be that I am not remotely interested in ‘winning respect’ from drivers by dressing up in a manner which would please petrolheads.

Amazingly, even the narrow and limiting possibility of improving the vehicular cycling infrastructure is abandoned:

Infrastructure has a role to play in improving the culture of road sharing. The scale of what can be done in practice is constrained; and any serious attempt to change the culture of road sharing would require a range of coordinated interventions, such as marketing, education, legislation and enforcement.

Ah, yes, marketing and education, those old chestnuts which can be rolled out as a substitute for action. As for more legislation… When the laws which are supposed to protect cyclists and pedestrians are already cynically ignored by Britain’s sleazy car supremacist cops, the last thing we need is more laws.

What we need is not what this report proposes. What we need is safe, segregated cycling on the Dutch model. Everything else is a worthless substitute which will guarantee the continuing stagnation of cycling in Britain. But then if this report has one value, it is that it demonstrates that perhaps the biggest obstacles of all to mass cycling in Britain are that diseased limb of the state known as the Department for Transport and the culture of car-centric transport professionals which it nourishes.

Access the full report here.

Apparently

The report was released last Thursday with little attendant publicity indeed road.cc understands that a draft copy was prepared over a year ago, perhaps the DfT's reticence on the matter is because the report does paint such a depressing picture of the interface between cyclists and what it terms other road users (ORUs).

Aggressive van driver throws bottle at cyclist

For more about this incident check out I Pay Road Tax.

Classically dangerous cycling infrastructure

I’ve blogged before about the danger to cyclists posed by pinch points . My concerns are shared by other cyclists.

The problem is exacerbated when the local authority puts in a cycle lane beside the pinch point, because the road markings may simply put the cyclist and the driver on a collision course. This is what happens on Markhouse Road (A1006) in Walthamstow. My photograph shows the traffic island near the junction with Boundary Road E17. There are half a dozen similar islands further along this road and the problem affects cyclists travelling in either direction.




























































The correct approach to this traffic island for the cyclist is to pull out into the road and make it physically impossible for the driver to overtake you. However, cyclists without cycle training or defensive awareness are unlikely to be aware of this strategy and will happily keep to the cycle lane, only to have the terrifying experience of a driver speeding past an inch from their right handlebar.

Cyclists who ‘take the road’ are, however, likely to be perceived by some drivers as being deliberately obstructive and can expect the blowing of horns and advice about correct cycling procedure (such as ‘Stay in the cycle lane, you cunt!’).

For both the novice and the experienced cyclist the end result is exposure to motor terror and aggression and an unpleasant and stressful cycling experience. This kind of design only serves to suppress cycling, in a borough where modal share has long flatlined at one per cent.

Both the cycle lane and the traffic islands on Markhouse Road are an impediment to cycling. Much better to get rid of the cycle lane altogether and put in a zebra crossing for pedestrians. Even better (and the only thing which is going to raise modal share) segregate cyclists from motor vehicles on the successful Dutch model.

Sadly, vehicular cycling organisations perceive cycle lanes as an end in themselves and intrinsically A Good Thing:

Waltham Forest was declared the winner for its innovative and extensive cycling facilities, which includes a 40-mile network of cycle lanes and quiet routes in the Borough.

The Council regards cycling as an important mode of transport and almost all main roads in the borough now have cycle lanes.

My CTC goody bag from the Redbridge Sky Ride contained a last year's copy of the CTC’s glossy magazine Cycle. On the letters page, Nick Coleman writes to complain of exactly the same problem which I have outlined in this post. As he points out, “drivers try to accelerate past the cyclist to get to the refuge first then suddenly cut in to get through the gap forcing one to swerve into the gutter or worse” or “one is in the gap and the vehicles behind actually have to slow down resulting in a blaring of horns, various verbal abuse and gestures or in one case something thrown at me”.

And the CTC response?

They are a problem. However, cycling assertively and ‘taking the lane’ (riding further out into the road, rather than in the gutter) can be a huge help.

A classic CTC response. The CTC hasn’t listened to a word of Nick Coleman’s complaint. As a committed vehicular cycling organisation its only message is that cyclists must adjust their behaviour both to dangerous infrastructure and dangerous drivers, and that all cyclists require is training, confidence and eye contact with drivers. The CTC has no interest in campaigning for safe segregated cycling infrastructure on the Dutch template, it has an arrogant disregard for the reasons why the majority of people won’t cycle and it has no interest in considering its own complicity in the continuing decline of cycling. It is in denial about the parlous state of cycling in Britain, preferring to pretend that all's well. It makes the absurd claim that London has seen a 91% increase in cycling since 2000.

That’s simply not true. That statistic originates with Transport for London, and when I asked TfL for its definition of ‘London’ it turned out to mean counts taken on just 29 streets in Greater London.

If there had really been a 91 per cent increase in cycling since 2000 then this would have been reflected in a surge in modal share. It hasn’t happened. In one London borough (Enfield) modal share for cycling is zero, and in another (Newham) it flickers between zero and one per cent. Cycling is in its death throes in some parts of London but you’d never know it from the smiley propaganda of the CTC and the LCC. And naturally no one is interested in measuring cycling on roads like Markhouse Road (A1006) in Walthamstow, because the results would probably be an embarrassment and no one in the transport or cycling establishment is interested in measuring the reality of cycling’s stagnation or decline.

Teenage girl on bike harassed by youths in car

Another case of cyclophobia.

The harassment of women cyclists

Dawn Foster writes about the aggression and abuse which she receives as a woman cyclist, which she now blogs about:

Hundreds of women wrote me emails, responded to my blog and spoke to me on Twitter and told me they'd had identical experiences. They didn't tell me of every incident – they were too numerous – but they told me about their worst ones.

I told people about the time a pedestrian pulled my top down at a traffic light; they told me of people spitting at them and throwing building braces at them as they drove by. A dozen women told me they'd had their backsides slapped by drivers and passengers. I'd opened the flood gates by daring to speak out and say that enough was enough.

One example:

He hit his horn whilst behind me, whilst I was waiting in the cycle box at the traffic lights. As he turned at the junction alongside me, he continued to use his horn. At the next traffic lights, he rolled his window down to shout “You stupid fucking slut, get off the road and onto the pavement, you stupid bitch”. He was in his company vehicle, so rather than rise to his bait, I took my iPhone out and openly took a photo of his registration plate. For some reason this shut him up.

The company in question is Cannon Hygiene. I’ve written to them to tell them about their driver, and will update if they get back to me.

The company’s website is coy about supplying contact information but fortunately it can be found elsewhere. Wouldn’t it be just awful if senior staff at Cannon Hygiene were deluged with emails from cyclists?

Meanwhile Gutter Bunny writes

My friend Julia and her friends have also started blog Hollaback London with motto "If you can't slap them, snap them!" where girls are encouraged to take photos of drivers and their registration plates and openly ridicule them on internet and calling up their companies (more often than not, the attackers would be van drivers) to complain. If you have a story to share, send it to Julia