Tony Raven wrote:

It doesn't need all the paraphernalia you suggest of license plates on
bikes. First I am not sure where I could find to put one on mine and
second its been an abject failure with cars. What it needs is police or
wardens on the ground with a zero tolerance approach. However we all
know how likely that is to happen.

But when the police do stop a cyclist for either of these matters
(riding on the pavement or failing to stop at a red traffic light)
-- which in the case of those cyclists who really don't want to
stop is easier said than done -- they quite often get a torrent
of abuse along the lines of "why don't you go and catch some
real criminals?". This sometimes comes from passing motorists
or pedestrians as well as the cyclist.

(Of course, if you've just gone through a red traffic light, you
*are* a "real criminal" because you have just committed a real
crime.)


Matt Ashby

www.mattashby.com

(Silas Denyer) wrote:

I have never, ever, seen a cyclist stopped for running a red light or
riding on a pavement.

Conversely, I've seen cyclists stopped for both of these offences in
the past week, and for both the week before that. Just because you
haven't *seen* it happen doesn't mean it *doesn't* happen.


Matt Ashby

www.mattashby.com

On 19 Oct 2004 05:45:31 -0700, (Matt Ashby)
wrote:

But when the police do stop a cyclist for either of these matters
(riding on the pavement or failing to stop at a red traffic light)
-- which in the case of those cyclists who really don't want to
stop is easier said than done -- they quite often get a torrent
of abuse along the lines of "why don't you go and catch some
real criminals?"

It's OK, they are already quite used to that from when they hand out
speeding tickets ;-)

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

Pyromancer wrote:


Anyone who deliberately rides through a red light in anything other than
a dire emergency is a complete moron and should be put off the road.

I ride through red lights all the time. If you want to get worked up
about something, why not make it something really important, like
Hawaiian shirts or milk-in-first versus tea-in-first.

James
--
If I have seen further than others, it is
by treading on the toes of giants.
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/julesandjames/home/

James Annan ) gurgled happily, sounding
much like they were saying :

I ride through red lights all the time.

Can I ask why?

On 19/10/04 10:40 pm, in article
, "Adrian"
wrote:

James Annan ) gurgled happily, sounding
much like they were saying :

I ride through red lights all the time.

Can I ask why?

They make a lovely tinkling sound as the glass shatters..

You might also ask where?

David Hansen wrote in message . ..
On 17 Oct 2004 10:10:54 -0700 someone who may be
(Silas Denyer) wrote this:-

I have
actually been stopped for speeding on my bicycle, for instance,

Have you really?

Since motor vehicle speed limits don't apply to bikes perhaps you
could explain the circumstances.

Yes, near Ambleside in Cumbria in 1986. I was clocked at over 30mph by
a police officer and stopped and "let off with a warning" for
exceeding the speed limit. I wasn't aware that the offense didn't
exist, and neither - clearly - was the office concerned.

For reference, I was coming down Kirkstone pass, and was undoubtedly
riding "furiously" and not being altogether sensible, but the offense
offered by the officer was definitely that of exceeding the speed
limit.

Your "analysis" has several flaws. Here are two.

Firstly "official" figures tend to underestimate distances travelled
on foot and by bike. Journeys under one mile are frequently excluded
and often a figure is only recorded for the "main" part of the
journey. Walk to the bus stop, travel by bus and walk to your
destination and the walking part frequently is not recorded by
"official" figures.

Agreed, but I was trying to get a sense of the scale of the problem
(to the nearest order of magnitude), not be totally detailed. I think
I achieved the former.

Secondly you assume that the pedestrians, cyclists and motorists are
using the same roads. That is not the case. Much of the motor
distance is covered on roads where pedestrians and cyclists are not
permitted or have been driven off.

Agreed entirely, but again I was just trying to get a sense of the
scale of the problem, since nobody else seemed able to offer anything
other than "gut instinct" to justify a suggestion that bikes aren't
dangerous.

Silas

"Just zis Guy, you know?" wrote in message . ..
What I don't support is the idea that enforcement of these offences
should be prioritised over and above other mass lawbreaking. I also
take issue with the idea that mass lawbreaking is in some way
restricted to cyclists. Even the offences you name, pavements and red
light jumping, are not unique to cyclists - you are around 200 times
as likely to be killed by a motorist on the footway than by a cyclist,
and we have all seen people jump red lights in cars. Tony Raven's
thoughts on this are cogent and valid.

I'm sorry, but on my (admittedly flawed) analysis of the available
data, pedestrians are (to the nearest order of magnitude) JUST AS
LIKELY to be killed by a cyclist as by motorists running red lights.

I am not suggesting that all pedestrians killed by bikes are not at
fault, nor that apples and apples are being compared. But enforcement
of red lights for cars IS BEING PRIORITISED and I'm arguing that
cyclists should be treated equally according to the threat posed.

Had you looked at the history of urc you would see that your exactly
the same spurious reasoning has been used many times before, quite
often with exactly the same ridiculous proposed "solution".

You have in common with those other posters a failure to consider the
reasons why successive Governments have never taken up this solution.

No, I understand the nature of the debate. My "solution" is not the
only one, nor is it the best one. In fact I think it would be a great
shame to register bikes (although compulsory insurance for cyclists
makes a lot of sense). But I'm sorry, I simply don't agree that the
antisocial behaviour being perpetrate by many cyclists (even if they
are not in these groups) is a sufficient cause for concern to debate.

By the way, I am also a cyclist as well as a motorist and a
pedestrian. In my experience of cycling, cyclists are (on average)
far, far more likely to routinely ignore all or most traffic laws than
the average motorist. Volumes make the difference here in terms of
risk (more car miles, less bike miles).

Cyclists on their own can be far worse by the way - cycle accidents on
dedicated cycle paths are twice as likely as cycle accidents on road
(per cycle mile travelled)!

Can I drive my car on the pavement if I like, along your street
whilst your children are playing?

Can you explain how come you are nearly two hundred times as likely to
be killed by a motor vehicle on the footway than by a bike, despite
what you claim to be widespread use of bikes on footways?

Yes, car miles outweigh bike miles by a similar or much larger margin.
When you remove that weighting (i.e. normalise the results) you'd be
surprised how similar they are.

Blah blah blah. When was the last time you saw a BMW use indicators?
When was the last time you exceeded the speed limit in your car? When
was the last time you saw a car illegally parked? Road users will
break whatever laws they feel they can get away with. I have no
problem with zero-tolerance, but singling out for priority the group
which is (a) behaving illegally partly in response to the illegal
behaviour of others and (b) responsible for an almost unmeasurably
small proportion of the danger out there, is simply absurd.

I have at no time suggested singling out anyone. I'm asking for
even-handed policing and enforcement, that's all. When the Police in
London start routinely riding their bikes on the pavement and the
wrong way up one-way streets then that is clearly not happening.

You need to check your sources more carefully. The proposed EU Fifth
Insurance Directive covers both cyclists and pedestrians, the group
you are championing, and does so despite the fact that pedestrians are
far more likely to be the authors of their own demise (in about half
of all cases, for cyclists it's less than one in five). On the other
hand, 90% of injury crashes are directly attributable to driver error,
according to the police, so again it looks as if you are pinning the
blame on the wrong target.

No, you have erred in logic. Merely because I was arguing that
cyclists are dangerous does not imply that I supported the converse
proposition, i.e. that pedestrians are blameless. See my other post
about stats and pedestrian culpability.

Where do you get your stats from? According to, for instance,
http://www.ringroad.org.uk/wmrar2000.htm 57% of all crashes resulting
in pedestrian injury were due to pedestrians stepping, walking or
running from the footpath. 1.75% were due to pedestrian inebriation -
THREE TIMES the number caused by drunk drivers, but when was the last
time you saw drunken pedestrians vilified in the press?

No, it's simply that these are very far from being original views and
have already been discussed ad nauseam.

Fair point, taken.

So, cyclists responsible for 0.4% of deaths. Better start with the
99.6% cause, don't you think?

Well, 60% or so were caused by the pedestrians themselves, so why
aren't we concentrating on them?

Now, for some context. The West Midlands Road Accident Review 2000
concluded that, of 34 pedestrian fatalities in that sample, 0 were
caused by vehicle failure to accord precedence at a pedestrian
crossing, 1 was caused by a vehicle failing to conform to a traffic
signal/sign. 21 of 34 (62%) were caused by pedestrians randomly
stepping, walking or running from the footpath (source: [3]). So if we
exclude those factors from the equation, we're looking at only 38% of
pedestrian fatalities being caused by motorists.

So 62% of fatalities are caused by the ped running out into the road
(as reported by the driver, obviously, who clearly has no incentive to
lie). An obvious case for compulsory licensing of pedestrians.

No disagreement on the licencing of pedestrians. 57% of all INJURIES
(as reported by the pedestrians themselves) were caused by them
stepping out into the road, etc., so the figures seem consistent to
me...

You also have to remember that fatalities are sufficiently rare that
they do not form a sound basis for statistical analysis, which is why
KSI is more usually used. And of course you ignore the fact that you
are, as I have said before, nearly 200 times as likely to be killed by
a motor vehicle on the footway than by a bike.

But if cars drive 200 times more miles than bikes (not unreasonable
assumption based on figures) then bikes are no safer than cars, QED.

This implies (on linear scaling, with all the caveats that implies)

First among which being that the sample quoted is statistically
insignificant. You seem to be going to great lengths to build your
straw man, though.

I think I clearly accepted the limitations of the figures I was able
to find. All along what I'm trying to do is to find a measure of the
order of magnitude of the problem using the available figures.

Furthermore, the percentages for bikes are no more or less
statistically insignificant than those for cars running red lights,
but considerable time and effort is spent on policing that offence, so
I think I am OK to deal in these numbers to contextualise the
absurdity of policing one group and not the other.

Now let's consider miles driven / ridden to get some further
statistical context.

Oops! The figures quotes are also inaccurate because of sampling
methodology. They don't include cycle paths, and mixed-mode journeys
are counted solely by the majority mode by distance, so cycling (and
walking) are both under-represented. Other figures discussed on urc
recently put the risk from cycling as between one and two orders of
magnitude less than driving, per unit distance.

Again, I was only looking for the nearest order of magnitude. I don't
actually believe the cycle figures are any more or less accurate than
those for cars, since the sampling methodology is flawed in all
regards. But they are at least comparably flawed.

And even that is not the full picture, if you assume (as you clearly
do) that a large proportion of cyclist mileage is on the pavement.
Drivers kill pedestrians on the pavement all the time, yet they rarely
drive on it (except to park illegally) so the risk per unit of
pavement travel is clearly massively more for cars.

No, I don't assume that at all. I've been trying to evaluate risk from
cyclists compared with risk from cars. I think it is reasonable for me
to hypothesise, however, that widespread cycling on pavement and a
greater vehicle - pedestrian interface are unlikely to cause the
figures for cycle-produced injury and death to actually decrease,
don't you?

So it looks like pedestrians are something like 60 times more likely
(per billion kilometre cycle-miles travelled) to be killed by a
bicycle hitting them than, say, by a car failing to head a sign or
signal.

Which assumes that failing to obey a sign or signal is the only reason
why cars kill pedestrians. That is not true.

I don't believe I said it was. I suggested this comparison precisely
to point up the inconsistency in rabidly policing red lights with
cameras for cars compared with not policing bikes at all.

Of course, you can decide to arbitrarily exclude the offences drivers
commit and include the offences cyclists commit, but that is not a
very honest way of making a case.

I haven't done that at all!

Much more honest to look at the figures. Cyclists kill one or two
people in a bad year. Drivers kill several thousand /every/ year, to
the point where more people have died in motor crashes since the
invention of the car than in all the wars fought in the same period
put together. I think Bush is trying to change that, but he's not
managed it yet.

I am very familiar with the figures. However, for instance, we are
quite happy as a society to ban, say, drink-driving, when the figures
show that this is also a very, very small proportion of all pedestrian
deaths caused by vehicles.

I also don't accept that drivers kill all of these people. People are
killed, but they are not all (in fact the vast majority are not)
killed by the drivers but by themselves.

- the average bike is far more likely to kill you than the average car
running a red light!

You are more likely to be killed by a cyclist throwing his bike at you
than by a motorist picking up his car and throwing it at you. Is that
a particularly good reason to ignore the fact that motorists kill
hundreds of times more pedestrians than cyclists do?

For the love of all things statistical, I have at no time made a
comparison between the number of deaths from each cause. Since it
seems to have escaped you, I have stated the following in various
posts:

1. Many bikes ride on pavements and run red lights, etc. routinely
2. My single statistical sample suggests that the majority of London
cyclists run red lights
3. Approximately 1% of all pedestrian deaths are caused by bicycles
4. Approximately 1% of all pedestrian detahs are caused by cars
running red lights
5. Red light infringement by cars is being actively policed
6. Red light infringement by bikes is not being actively policed
7. Bikes are not intrinsically safer for pedestrians per mile covered
than cars

I believe that 3,4,5,6 are the salient points here. If we police one
as being "a menace" then we should police the other. No comparison of
modes, just a comparison of statistics.

What you have done is:

- cherry-pick the offence drivers are least likely to commit, not
least because they are constrained by other traffic

I have chosen one for comparison, one which is actively policed (at
least in London with a lot of traffic-light cameras), and one which
people think of as "a killer", and which is statistically as
significant.

- extrapolate data from a tiny data set without looking into the
underlying detail or the national picture

Agreed, and I caveated that heavily. I've actually found this all
quite interesting, and will go looking for more stats, and will accept
the consequences if they are different.

- apportion blame to that offence without noting the documented fact
that many tens of people are killed by cars on pedestrian crossing
every year so clearly your data is misleading in some important
respect

No, you are straying from the facts here. Those figures that I have
seen for pedestrian crossings do not apportion blame (did driver run
red light), only give overall figures. If you know of a breakdown then
I would like to look at it.

From http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/group...505588-07.hcsp
in London in 1995 the factors which contributed to pedestrian
fatalities were primarily:
crossing road heedless of traffic elsewhere - 45 per cent
crossing road masked by parked vehicle - 14 per cent
crossing road heedless of traffic at pedestrian crossing - 9 per
cent

This implies, once again, that the vast majority of the pedestrian
deaths were caused by the pedestrians, not cars (or anyone else)
running red lights. If we therefore strip away the pedestrian-caused
fatalities then bikes look significant. I'm sorry, but those are the
facts.

- ignore the effect of all other offences, including those most likely
to be fatal and most likely to be committed other than by your chosen
scapegoat, in order to make a case.

No, I'm not making a case for anything other than a comparison of
modes. The bike isn't a scapegoat here. What I'm trying to illustrate
is that cycles do pose an appreciable danger when compared with
classes of motoring offences that the public consider dangerous.

It's an extraordinarily weak argument, and marks you out as a chippy
petrolhead rather than a pedestrian. Genuine pedestrians - those who
are not simply people who have found somewhere to park the car - are
if anything more concerned about motor danger than cyclists are.

I am a pedestrian, a cyclist and a motorist, depending upon the
journey, and frankly resent the suggestion that just because I hold a
view counter to yours that I must by definition be pigeon-holed into
some arbitrary category. I don't have an axe to grind, other than the
breakdown of society. If cars drove on pavements *routinely*, etc.
then I would be against that.

Most "genuine pedestrians" are (statistically) not very concerned with
danger from any traffic, given the number who cause their own demise
each year.

What you seem to fail to recognise is that there is plenty of evidence
(and we can continue the statistical debate for years if you like)
that bicycles pose a danger to pedestrians, and that the danger is of
a similar order to that posed by cars doing things which are heavily
vilified. I am only asking for even treatment, not "singling out"
cycles for anything special.

Silas

Adrian wrote:

James Annan ) gurgled happily, sounding
much like they were saying :


I ride through red lights all the time.


Can I ask why?

Of course you can.

James
--
If I have seen further than others, it is
by treading on the toes of giants.
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/julesandjames/home/

Silas Denyer opined the following...
3. Approximately 1% of all pedestrian deaths are caused by bicycles
4. Approximately 1% of all pedestrian detahs are caused by cars
running red lights

I know that you have admitted that your analysis is flawed, that the
data is inaccurate etc. but you still seem to expect people to accept it
as a way of forwarding your argument.

Given that you're not comparing like-with-like at all above (What
percentage of pedestrian deaths were caused by bicycles running red
lights?) what hope do you have of convincing anyone that the policy of
penalising drivers for running reds, but not cyclists, is wrong?

The stats do _not_ show that you as a pedestrian are as likely to be
killed by a bike as by a car. They do _not_ show that you are likely to
be killed by a bike running a red. They do show that as a threat to your
life as a pedestrian, your biggest concern should be a car. Do I then
find it surprising that the police concentrate on cars? Not really.

Jon