This road has a psychlepath which it is proposed should be
fenced off with safety barriers. A young cyclist was killed
on this road last year (predictably much was made of the
fact that he wasn't wearing his helmet and very little of
the fact that the white Jaguar which killed him should not
have been on the psychlepath in the first place).
The local coucil recently voted not to reduce the speed of
traffic along this road.
Letter to the Reading Chronic below.
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I was tempted to write a bitterly ironic letter about the
Lower Earley Way, but experience indicates that many people
are impervious to irony when it concerns cars. The idea that
cyclists need not only to be segregated, but protected by
safety barriers, beggars belief.
What is the leading cause child death in the UK? Road
traffic crashes. Yet they account for only one in ten child
hospital admissions: the chances of dying are massively
higher in any incident where a motor vehicle is involved. If
we want to allow independent mobility for children, the
elderly, the disabled, or even those who don't drive by
choice (making one less car in the jam in front of us), then
we should stop deferring to those whose desire to drive fast
overrides any consideration for the communities through
which they move.
There exists in the UK a significant movement dedicated to
pushing the pernicious fiction that speed does not kill. As
an exercise in the study of logical fallacies their campaign
makes amusing reading. Speed is, of course, a primary cause
of one in three serious crashes (and yes, one TRL report on
crash reporting methodologies has been misrepresented as
contradicting this, but TRL have repeatedly shown that
overall it actually supports the one in three figure). Ye
canna' change the laws of physics!
More importantly, speed is also the single largest factor
determining the severity of a crash. Joksch calculated that
the probability of fatality rises with the fourth power of
speed - in other words, the chance of a crash on the Lower
Early Way being fatal would reduce by more than half if
drivers were doing 40 rather than 60. Is shaving ten seconds
off the journey to work really a matter of life and death?
Even if the death is someone else's?
The fundamental problem, of course, is that so many people
now drive even short distances that congestion has removed
even the theoretical possibility of fast driving on many of
the region's roads. That is not an excuse for exercising pent-
up speed cravings on the Lower Earley Way, or any other road
which is shared by foot and cycle traffic. Lower Earley Way
is used as a route to school. Who could possibly object to
moderating their speed in such a place?
--
Guy
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May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
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88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University