How lorries and busses should be labelled

Mr Sworld

See... Those Yank's have got the right idea!

Matt the Tester

for once they are actually helping the planet! bloody hell..

dondare

Blame the victim, then.

Agent57

I like it.

dondare

Does that photo show the left indicator on? If so then the humourous signs are a tad misleading.

EKE_38BPM

The Yanks getting something right?? What is the world coming to?!

I have to admit though, that I was impressed that the busses in Fort Lauderdale (Florida) have bike racks so that you can put your bike on the rack and take the bus. Seems a bit silly to have a bike and take public transport, but when the heavens open (you get really heavy and very sudden downpours there) or its just too hot to go on, I think I'd use it.

@Dondare - HGVs have blindspots, thats the way that it is. All cyclists have to learn not to go into them.

Sometimes, the victim is to blame. Not a nice thing to say, but its true.
Ever see BentMikey's video when he warns the cyclist not to go up the inside of a HGV at the lights at Vauxhall (can't find the link)? If something bad happened there, I don't think I could have blamed the HGV driver. If someone HAS to be blamed, in that situation, it would have been the victim in that situation.

dondare

Most of Britain's Cities, towns, villiages, hamlets &c. have street layouts that date back to medieval times. Even our straightest roads were, with very few exceptions, engineered before the industrial revolution.
Lorries are being used on roads that date back to a time when Britain was less crowded, people travelled less, most journeys were made on foot and nothing moved faster than a horse could pull it. They were not designed for lorries, and lorries can not use them safely.
These roads are public places that anyone and everyone has access to and a right to use. If, as a society, we are able to tolerate a certain attrition among cyclists so that building work can be done and white goods delivered to shops then we should at least admit where the blame really lies. It is not with the cyclist hugging the kerb (sometimes green-painted to encourage them to be there) because that's where they think they'll be safe.

desweller

dondare, that's almost the stupidest thing I've ever read. Bottom line: if it (the sign) stops riders going up the inside of HGVs then it's got to be a good thing. It doesn't blame anyone, it just points out that it's a dangerous area to place yourself when you're riding.

dondare

Can you fault my facts or my arguments?

As far as the signs on the lorry are concerned, they could be more informative if they weren't trying to be funny. Also, they don't help much when it's the lorry driver doing the overtaking just before the turn, which is just as likely as the cyclist filtering.

zanes

The way I look at it when this "cyclists can't be at fault, ever" thing comes up is this;

Would I walk down some places in various cities with my wallet, SLR, camera and car keys out at night? No. Is it against the law to do that? No. Does it make it my fault if I did that and get robbed? Perhaps, but I wouldn't do it anyway.*

Anyway, these signs/initiatives aren't about "blaming the victim" or whatever catchy phrase is used for that sort of thing now, it's about trying to prevent there being anymore future victims. Some people can't see the wood for the trees I think here.

*<waits for someone to use the short skirt argument>

suzyb

People in general don't take note of informative, they do take note of funny.

dondare

I was once hit from behind by a small van pulling a wide trailer. The driver pointed out the reflective tape on his trailer to prove that I should have seen him and kept out of his way as he passed me without giving me enough room.

Jokey signs on the backs of lorries do not make these things safe to be used on public roads. The fact is that they are used, and that cyclists will go on getting squished by them.

zanes

So how *should* we try and tackle this problem? Education? Legislation?

dondare

Look at the photo again. Is that a left indicator?

zanes

I see the point you're making, but I assume wrt my question it's a case of "I'll bitch about everyone elses ideas/suggestions/efforts, whilst having no solutions or ideas for solutions or making any effort myself"

Anonymous

Starting to see signs like this on lorries in the UK.

I don't know why they don't make these signs compulsory.

I also have no idea why they don't , make it law that all HGVs don't have this blind spot. Either extra mirrors if possible, or even CCTV covering the blind side wouldn't be massively impractical in this day and age.

It's easy to blame the drivers, and I'm not saying they're not at fault. But the truth is they just can't see and this seems madness to me.

dondare

zanes wrote:

So how *should* we try and tackle this problem? Education? Legislation?

It would cost a lot of time and money to make the transport of freight in towns a lot safer and it isn't going to happen soon. In short, it's a problem that isn't going to be solved.

What seems odd to me is that in all the accounts that I have read of this sort of accident, the cyclist is described as being experienced and usually has a professional job. It isn't the ones that you'd expect if it was down to bad cycling. We've all seen the rljers and pavement-hoppers and unlit ninjas but then we hear that a young professional woman who has been cycling in London for years has been "in collision with a lorry" and that "the driver was unhurt".

desweller

HGVs have blind spots that are extremely difficult to check. Driving these things is not like driving a car.

If we're not going to have compulsory training for cyclists, resulting in a qualification without which riders cannot take to the roads, anything that draws riders' attention to a hazard that is obviously not intuitive has got to be a good thing.

zanes

dondare wrote:

What seems odd to me is that in all the accounts that I have read of this sort of accident, the cyclist is described as being experienced and usually has a professional job. It isn't the ones that you'd expect if it was down to bad cycling. We've all seen the rljers and pavement-hoppers and unlit ninjas but then we hear that a young professional woman who has been cycling in London for years

Thinking about it, that's a very fair and good point

dondare

How about a major advertising campaign, not with moonwalking bears in basketball games but with lorries and cyclists, which show on TV throughout the prime-time programs on all chanels and with full-page spreads in all the newspapers that if you are using a bike then you have to keep well out of the way of lorries.
That'll save possibly a dozen lives a year out of the 3000 road deaths in total.

dondare

I'd like to get rid of the ASLs because these have a feeder lane (which the cyclist MUST use in order to enter the box legally) that puts the cyclist right in the left-turning-lorry's kill zone. Who designed these wretched things?

dondare

In a couple of weeks time there's suddenly going to be about a 1000 extra cyclists riding around in London at any one time. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the squish rate then.

always_tyred

dondare wrote:

Blame the victim, then.

I don't know about you, but I see a lot of cyclists, particularly in the summer (i.e. fairweathers) who will aim to make forward progress no matter what. This frequently includes squeezing down the inside of busses, vans and trucks. There is an educational need to be addressed.

This is not the same as saying that dangerous overtaking is okay - you are banging on about a different issue.

dondare

Always Tyred wrote:

dondare wrote:

Blame the victim, then.

I don't know about you, but I see a lot of cyclists, particularly in the summer (i.e. fairweathers) who will aim to make forward progress no matter what. This frequently includes squeezing down the inside of buses, vans and trucks. There is an educational need to be addressed.

This is not the same as saying that dangerous overtaking is okay - you are banging on about a different issue.

I see this too, and not just from summer cyclists.
The point that I am making is that cycling is a very safe activity and that driving a lorry through crowded streets designed for horses and carts is not.
Cyclists are not required by law to pass a test either to show that they are competent to ride or that they are able to identify dangerous situations and so there will be incompetent and unaware cyclists on the road. (But that does not make them a significant threat to others. Drivers have to pass a test and still are a threat. )
There will be inexperienced children and naive adults as well as those who might be classed as "too stupid to live"; but the roads are how we all get around, not a way of culling the inexperienced or incompetent.
Lorries are the problem, not stupid or foolhardy cyclists.

always_tyred

Dondare, the motor vehicle has been with us for a centrury now. The bicycle for not all that much longer. How far do you want to wind back time?

dondare

The motor vehicle, in the form of the steam locomotive, actually predates the first practicable bicycles. But attemts to use these huge, heavy, dangerous and terrifying contraptions on the public roads met so much resistance that the railways were developed instead to allow steam-powered vehicles that weighed many times more than the heaviest waggons and travelled many times faster than the fastest stagecoach to be used in a way that posed no threat to the public. When bikes were invented it was apparent that they could be used safely on the existing roads.

Keeping all powered vehicles off the public roads is not possible, although it would be nice. Putting freight back onto the railways is both possible and desirable but is unlikely to happen. Ultimately we say that lorries are here to stay and that the human toll is worth it. What I object to is the attitude that when lorries kill cyclists it is because the cyclist is being stupid rather than that lorries cannot be used safely on public roads.

One more point is that the OP refers to buses and lorries. Actually most buses are designed to be used in towns and have the driver's cab much lower and further forward and surrounded by glass to reduce blind spots. Buses are not the threat that lorries are by a very wide margin.

always_tyred

Rail freight will keep lorries off the motorways, but you still have to get goods to shops and warehouses in and around towns, so it wouldn't do cyclists much good.

I'm not entirely sure about your railway story there. Steam engines require vast amounts of coal, as a proportion of the power they generate. I think their adoption for rail (which pre-date steam power) is more to do with the practicalities of operating a shovel and a steering device simultaneously, for an engine powerful enough to be worth bothereing with.

dondare

Everything about a lorry is designed for use on motorways. If rail freight kept lorries off the motorways (where they are a bloody nuisance in any case) then those used to distribute goods in towns could be designed for use in towns; smaller and with cabs like the cabs of buses.
The other danger to cyclists comes from the smaller lorries used mainly to transport building materials, cement lorries and scaffolding trucks. I suspect that this is very much a driver problem.

londonbairn

Always Tyred wrote:

dondare wrote:

Blame the victim, then.

I don't know about you, but I see a lot of cyclists, particularly in the summer (i.e. fairweathers) who will aim to make forward progress no matter what. This frequently includes squeezing down the inside of busses, vans and trucks. There is an educational need to be addressed.

Agree, I would say a significant portion of commuters will filter irrespective of risk, some of the filtering I see is stupid....

always_tyred

What, busses are safer?

You don't see very many articulated lorries right in city centres. No our cities are already crammed with smaller (say 30ft-40ft long) delivery trucks which are able to cope with the roads perfectly well. Rail freight would simply not help you, unless you cycle on the roads between large retain parks and motorways a lot.

DonDaddyD

Rail freight would help reduce the number of lorries but it wouldn't eliminate lorries from roads be it motorways or city's.

Motorists, cyclists and pedestrians still need to be made aware of the present dangers each pose to the other.

People need to accept that there is no one magnificent solution and more likely a combination of solutions that won't solve the problem entirely but may help improve the situation. The success of which, probably relies on how much each group is willing to work together to improve matters.