Good campaign, or useless?

First.Aspect

Cycling Scotland have started a campaign to get kids cycling to school. This is a good thing, clearly. However, the two posters and adverts I've seen are:-


Tagline - give me this much room

and the other is just a car passing a bike, with the tag line, "pass with as much room as you would give a car".

I think both of these are useless.

Does it mean pass the length of the child's arm away? i.e. about 6 inches from the end of the handlebars? Or are they trying to tell drivers to leave 5 or 6 feet? From the kerb, or from the bicycle?

How much room do they mean in terms of passing a car? Do they mean as much room from the kerb as if it was a car they were passing, or as much room as you would give to the side of a car you were passing?

So, this much room?


Or this much room?


Am I missing something?

unixnerd

To be honest I think it's good the Scottish Government are doing the campaign and getting drivers thinking about cyclists, no matter what's on the posters. It's better than last year's which had a girl wearing a dark brown coat on her bike.

veronese68

If the kid in the top picture was not astride his bike it would be much better. The message would be a lot clearer.
Clearly well intentioned, just not as well executed.

DonDaddyD

Yeah I think you lot have missed the point.

The point isn't to instruct drivers that they must give an exact amount of room when passing a cyclist in any and all scenarios i.e. "THOU SHALT GIVE 6 INCHES SPACE WHEN PASSING CYCLISTS".

The point is to get drivers thinking about whether they are able to give sufficient space when overtaking a cyclist. A good thought to have I think.

First.Aspect

DonDaddyD wrote:

Yeah I think you lot have missed the point.

The point isn't to instruct drivers that they must give an exact amount of room when passing a cyclist in any and all scenarios i.e. "THOU SHALT GIVE 6 INCHES SPACE WHEN PASSING CYCLISTS".

The point is to get drivers thinking about whether they are able to give sufficient space when overtaking a cyclist. A good thought to have I think.

I agree that its pleasantly unusual to see some recogniton that cyclists exist on posters and busses and so on. But wouldn't it be good to take that opportunity to tell people what's okay, rather than what's not okay?

Gizmo_

There's something on the back of buses in Hackney too. I found this deeply amusing while being cut up by one yesterday

suzyb

I think it's a good thing even just to draw attention to the fact there will be cyclists on the roads. It's summer, the weather is (marginally) better and the number of people cycling to and from places has increased and drivers need to be made aware of that. It shouldn't just be kids on the posters though, there should be different ones with different types of cyclist to highlight we all should be given room.

Mind you I find the posters slightly ironic as most of the cyclists I see in the area where I've seen those posters are riding on the pavement

unixnerd

Mind you I find the posters slightly ironic as most of the cyclists I see in the area where I've seen those posters are riding on the pavement

I find that so sad and I see a lot of it. My mate got a nice bike and all the gear on the cycle to work program. There's a good cycle path most of the way to work but the onroad bits frighten him and he hardly ever cycles.

pete_s

Useless. It's cheap, ennit, that's why they're doing it. They're dodging doing the right thing because it's difficult and 'can't find the money'.

Initialised

Well it's a start...

But what's more annoying, a motorist passing close enough that you could touch the car with an out stretched arm or the one that sits there behind you when there's plenty of room?

Common sense and default liability with the least vulnerable road user backed up with some high profile penalties would go a lot further.

As for riding on the pavement isn't that covered by the right to roam north of the border?