ban cyclists from roads
Comments
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A pedestrian can also step out in front of you and cause serious damage to you and your £5000 bike (not to mention making a large dent in any car that hits them at speed) - so why not require them to have insurance too? Surely they should at least be required to have insurance if they are walking on shared pedestrian/cycle paths? Maybe they should have to pass a walking proficiency test..Slowbike wrote:
Not entirely - you can do quite a bit of damage whilst riding (or falling off anyway) - you can put a serious dent in the body work of a vehicle - that vehicle may cost 00000's ... but more seriously, you may collide with a pedestrian and cause permanent injury - which is where insurance may help.Southgate wrote:Insurance for cyclists is therefore a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
... but ...
it is a much smaller risk than that of motorists ...
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neeb wrote:
A pedestrian can also step out in front of you and cause serious damage to you and your £5000 bike (not to mention making a large dent in any car that hits them at speed) - so why not require them to have insurance too? Surely they should at least be required to have insurance if they are walking on shared pedestrian/cycle paths? Maybe they should have to pass a walking proficiency test..Slowbike wrote:
Not entirely - you can do quite a bit of damage whilst riding (or falling off anyway) - you can put a serious dent in the body work of a vehicle - that vehicle may cost 00000's ... but more seriously, you may collide with a pedestrian and cause permanent injury - which is where insurance may help.Southgate wrote:Insurance for cyclists is therefore a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
... but ...
it is a much smaller risk than that of motorists ...
Quite - which is why I said it's a small risk and why I don't think 3rd party insurance should be compulsory ...
btw - when are you giving me my £5000 bike back ... you've had it some time now! ...
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Slowbike wrote:
Not entirely - you can do quite a bit of damage whilst riding (or falling off anyway) - you can put a serious dent in the body work of a vehicle - that vehicle may cost 00000's ... but more seriously, you may collide with a pedestrian and cause permanent injury - which is where insurance may help.Southgate wrote:Insurance for cyclists is therefore a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
... but ...
it is a much smaller risk than that of motorists ...
Well quite. The reason my third party insurance (which my club requires me to have) costs tuppence ha'penny is because the damage caused by cyclists is statistically zero. Unless the insurance is thrown in with cover for theft or given away as a freebie with motor insurance, it's basically a waste of time as the premium covers the admin of the scheme, rather than payouts on a tiny handful of claims. Anyone and anything can cause damage to anyone and anything, but we don't go around insisting that they take out insurance, unless there is a genuine case for it. Or you might as well insure your cat. One ran in front of my bike the other day. I could have buckled a wheel.
I don't know the UK figure for damage caused by cars, but I just read that in the USA, teenage drivers alone cause $34 billion dollars of physical damage and personal injury / death compensation, each and every year. The damage caused by that small demographic of car drivers in one single country must be more than the total caused by all the world's cyclists, pedestrians and cats since the invention of the Penny Farthing.
The average annual damage caused by a UK registered car is the cost of the third party insurance premium, minus admin and the insurer's profit. The figure must be several hundred pounds a year, which will include a significant amount of fraud (note to Murdoch: hold the front pages - Motorists are Criminals!).
That level of damage caused by cars is a problem in need of a solution - hence compulsory third party insurance, without which the courts would collapse under the sheer weight of compensation cases, and given the large individual sums involved, enforcing judgement would be nigh on impossible unless you had the good fortune to be victim of a wealthy motorist.
I ask every motorist who shrilly demands (and it is always shrilly) that cyclists take out insurance, to detail in pounds, shillings and pence, exactly how much financial damage they have personally suffered as a result of being unable to recover damages from an at-fault uninsured cyclist. Invariably the answer is "zero". Which leads me to wonder why they are so passionate about this non-problem.
I can only conclude that the "uninsured cyclist problem" is, like the "they don't pay road tax" mantra, merely a ruse of the car lobby and bigoted ignorant road-hogs to push cyclists off "their" roads by creating new barriers to participation.Superstition begins with pinning race number 13 upside down and it ends with the brutal slaughter of Mamils at the cake stop.0 -
Yes there are some silly cyclists...but there are also silly drivers. I have seen a large amount of dangerous driving about. They just see a cyclist and seem to think that they can pull out and it won't matter because a) they have brakes, right? b) they're going so slowly I can pull out and be out of their way anyway. A lot of the time b isn't true and a shouldn't be relied upon.
Another thing that annoys me is people throwing things out of their car at passing cyclists (me). Sometimes the urge for an uber loud air horn is overwhelming...
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This is actually an interesting point. Depending on where you are and how busy the roads are, for car drivers and the way they act around other car drivers there is a grey area of acceptability when pulling out into moving traffic. Often cars will pull out, knowing that the approaching traffic will need to brake very slightly when they do so, and this is more or less acceptable up to a point, depending on the speed of the traffic, how busy the roads are, etc. The problem is that when drivers apply this same approach to an approaching bike they don't realise that the relative speed is much greater for the cyclist and the energy and skill required to brake and then accelerate again safely (especially in wet conditions or with dodgy road surfaces) much greater, and if this is combined with underestimating the speed of the cyclist in the first place it is a dodgy situation waiting to happen.TheLoneCyclist wrote:They just see a cyclist and seem to think that they can pull out and it won't matter because a) they have brakes, right?0 -
Southgate wrote:Slowbike wrote:
Not entirely - you can do quite a bit of damage whilst riding (or falling off anyway) - you can put a serious dent in the body work of a vehicle - that vehicle may cost 00000's ... but more seriously, you may collide with a pedestrian and cause permanent injury - which is where insurance may help.Southgate wrote:Insurance for cyclists is therefore a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
... but ...
it is a much smaller risk than that of motorists ...
Well quite. The reason my third party insurance (which my club requires me to have) costs tuppence ha'penny is because the damage caused by cyclists is statistically zero. Unless the insurance is thrown in with cover for theft or given away as a freebie with motor insurance, it's basically a waste of time as the premium covers the admin of the scheme, rather than payouts on a tiny handful of claims. Anyone and anything can cause damage to anyone and anything, but we don't go around insisting that they take out insurance, unless there is a genuine case for it. Or you might as well insure your cat. One ran in front of my bike the other day. I could have buckled a wheel.
I don't know the UK figure for damage caused by cars, but I just read that in the USA, teenage drivers alone cause $34 billion dollars of physical damage and personal injury / death compensation, each and every year. The damage caused by that small demographic of car drivers in one single country must be more than the total caused by all the world's cyclists, pedestrians and cats since the invention of the Penny Farthing.
The average annual damage caused by a UK registered car is the cost of the third party insurance premium, minus admin and the insurer's profit. The figure must be several hundred pounds a year, which will include a significant amount of fraud (note to Murdoch: hold the front pages - Motorists are Criminals!).
That level of damage caused by cars is a problem in need of a solution - hence compulsory third party insurance, without which the courts would collapse under the sheer weight of compensation cases, and given the large individual sums involved, enforcing judgement would be nigh on impossible unless you had the good fortune to be victim of a wealthy motorist.
I ask every motorist who shrilly demands (and it is always shrilly) that cyclists take out insurance, to detail in pounds, shillings and pence, exactly how much financial damage they have personally suffered as a result of being unable to recover damages from an at-fault uninsured cyclist. Invariably the answer is "zero". Which leads me to wonder why they are so passionate about this non-problem.
I can only conclude that the "uninsured cyclist problem" is, like the "they don't pay road tax" mantra, merely a ruse of the car lobby and bigoted ignorant road-hogs to push cyclists off "their" roads by creating new barriers to participation.
Excellent.0
