A short introductory piece about the dangers of traffic on the road by a chap from the CTC, can't remember his name and another lass, talking as they tried to cross 4 lanes of traffic and nearly getting run down by a coach
.
Then Paul Clark, Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Transport, MP for Gillingham and Rainham, was asked by Robin Lustig why cyclists are 3x more likely to be killed in UK than in DK or NL?
Why cyclists cannot have a proper physical barrier or segregted area as in DK and NL? A single white line is just not sufficient. Why is it that this can be done in DK and NL but not in the UK? Even studs or a physical barrier would be better then the current situation on many roads.
Paul Clark said not always possible due to traffic, he tried not to mention cost, topography of the UK then side stepped quickly safety issues, to talk about improving cycle training implying cyclists killed lacked training. He gleefully reeled of mesmerisingly huge figures of £140million here £140 million there. Mentioning cycling cities and
safety in numbers campaign which is a charter for doing nothing about improving cycling safety
.
Robin Lustig pulled him up on the Governments initiatives to combat obseity, improve health of people and reduce traffic volumes so why wasn't the Government doing more to increase cycling safety to allay peoples' fear of cycling?
Paul Clark waffled more, basically laoding all the responsibility on cyclists again, to get properly trained, thus implying those killed this year and in previous years have lacked training. Didn't mention any initiatives of driver training, weak police and CPS failing to prosecute, aggressive, dangerous drivers and lack of any serious penalties. He very much gave the impression that many more bums on saddles would mean that proportionately fewer cyclists would be killed as since the 1990s he said there are now 31% fewer cycling fatalities. I don't think so.
The piece was all too short and should have been accorded much more time as I think it really could have become interesting. Alas ............
I bet Paul Clark has never even ridden a bicycle. His picture suggests this might be the case.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qtl3
http://www.paulclarkmp.com/
