Having nearly lost one childhood friend and one adult friend to left-turning lorries that caught them in the blind spot and left them with nowhere to go but, almost, under their wheels, the first thing I taught my kids (now teenagers) about riding a bike in the city is: never get caught on the inside of a large vehicle, especially near a junction.
Commuting cyclists have generally had to rely on this indoctrination or self-education to stay safe from the menace – as my colleague Peter Walker reports, the left-turning lorry is disproportionately involved in collisions fatal for cyclists. I follow my own mantra as a first line of defence, but I’d be the first to concede that it’s not enough: cyclists are still getting killed this way. And why should the responsibility all lie with the more vulnerable road-user, anyway?
To be fair, this has been a campaigning issue for cyclists for so long that all kind of initiatives have been tried: better training for drivers; education for cyclists; and even the fitting of additional mirrors on goods vehicles in an attempt to mitigate the driver’s blind spot. And now, the latest version of the technical fix is to redesign the vehicles themselves – placing drivers lower, closer to the road, and surrounding them with glass panels, especially on the near side.
This has to help. But like so many well-intentioned technical fixes, it can only go so far. It could be years, decades even, before substantial portions of the UK’s heavy goods vehicle fleet would be replaced with the new-style, goldfish-bowl cab. Drivers may resist them (a higher cab gives them better visibility and probably greater personal safety on faster roads); industry almost certainly will, just on cost grounds. Is any government soon going to mandate the changeover by comprehensive regulation?
This sounds like a churlish counsel of despair, then, right? That’s not what I mean. The HGV blind spot is potentially deadly, yes, but what turns it from moderate risk to outright menace is human behaviour, not the vehicle’s physical design. Of the left-turning lorry danger, construction vehicles and skip lorries account for a large number of fatal collisions.
I suspect – it is just a thesis – that the economic pressures and level of regulation for drivers of this type of vehicle are different from those of licensed haulage lorries, buses and coaches. A blind spot is low-risk if a driver takes the time to check mirrors and make measured manoeuvres; it’s the guy in a tearing hurry – literally, cutting corners – who becomes an unwitting cyclist-killer.
If my hunch is even half-right about this issue – and please tell me what yours is – then we have a problem that mere design can’t fix. It’s about a culture of carelessness reinforced by low wages, bad attitudes and poor training. And cultural change is always infinitely harder to bring about: a long slog of education, campaigning, and more education.
But isn’t it better to know what we’re really dealing with, rather than pat ourselves on the back for a cool-looking but cosmetic pseudo-solution?
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Walking the Brexit tightrope at Labour conference – Politics Weekly
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and listen https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2018/09/26-51111-gdn.pol.180926.podcast.mp3
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