Another woman under a lorry survives

Photo by Neil Hammet, 18 October 2011

Witness Neil Hammet took this picture yesterday by London Bridge Station. This is the junction of Joiner Street with Borough High Street. He reported on the London Fixed and Single Speed Forum, subsequently re-reported on Londonist,

Suddenly people started shouting "Stop! Stop!" and I could hear a rapid crunching/popping noise.

Turning round I saw an articulated lorry, driving toward the bridge.

On her back, knees bent and feet on the front bumper, was a lady who was being pushed along the ground by the lorry - her bike was just going under the front wheel which was the crunching/popping noise.

The driver was looking around him at all these people shouting "Stop! Stop!" and shrugging - his reaction was "they cannot be shouting at me", so he kept going.

It was probably all over in seconds, but it seemed to be a long time before he finally decided that the people (including myself) who were waving/pointing at him, the lady and shouting, did mean that he should stop.

The lady cyclist probably got pushed 2-4 metres, hard for me to judge and I'm wary of exaggerating.

When he stopped lots of people rushed over and escorted the lady to the side of the road, she was fine, just shocked, she said that she thought she had made eye contact with the driver at the lights, but then he'd just driven straight into her/over her bike.

She then went to sit down on some steps as a PCSO ran over.

The truck driver was out of his cab by now, and circling his vehicle taking photographs.

Not once did he approach the cyclist, didn't speak to her at all- he must have taken from her ability to walk that she was ok.

Maybe he is under orders not to apologise for accidents lest it be taken as an admission of fault, but still-  if the cyclist had not had the presence of mind (amazing, under the circumstances) to get her feet on the bumper the driver would have been standing there having killed her.

So it's happened again, another female cyclist in a miraculous lorry escape. On 11 July a woman went under a lorry, with her bike crushed, on New Bridge Street, Blackfriars, but escaped almost unharmed. The lorry crossed her path turning left into Queen Victoria Street. I recall seeing a photo of that incident as well but can't find it now. In that case I think the woman got trapped under the high part of the lorry trailer and got out before her bike went under the back wheels.

This latest incident follows hard on the heels of the death of Min Joo Lee at Kings Cross on 3 October. Olaf Storbeck predicted this death in April 2011. From the Islington Gazette report:

Min Joo Lee, a 24-year-old fashion student from Korea, was pronounced dead at the scene after the incident at 11.40am on Monday.

She is the third cyclist in five years to die at the junction, which joins Euston Road, Pentonville Road and York Way.

The driver of the heavy goods vehicle, a man in his 60s, was treated for shock at hospital.

The woman is believed to have become caught under the wheels of the truck.

Dr Odeh Odeh, 32, a surgeon at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, who witnessed the aftermath, said: “I saw a mangled bicycle lying in the road with a body next to it. It was a horribly graphic scene – many people were staring in shock. It is not something you ever expect to see.

In 2006, Emma Foa, 56, died after her bike was in collision with a cement mixer lorry at the same junction. [Slightly incorrect: it was nearby, at the junction of Goodsway and Camley Street]. Cyclist Madeline Wright died in 2007 near King’s Cross Station after a collision with a lorry.

A spokesman for Transport for London said: “We are extremely sorry to hear of the death of the woman following a collision with a HGV in Euston Road. More needs to be done to prevent serious harm befalling London’s cyclists, and TfL is working with other organisations across London to tackle this serious safety issue.”

The spokesman said it was the 13th cycle death in London in 2011 compared to 10 last year.

The other 12 deaths have been, courtesy of Olaf Storbecks's tabulation:

1. Gary Mason: Sandy Lane South, Wallington, killed by van
2. Daniel Cox: Dalson Junction, killed by lorry
3. Tom Barrett: A40 at Northolt, killed by van
4. David Poblet: Tanner Street, London Bridge, killed by lorry
5. Paula Jurek: Camden Road, killed by lorry
6. Gavin Taylor: Mildmay Grove North, Islington, died after colliding with parked car
7. Female cyclist: Queen Caroline Street, Hammersmith, killed by lorry
8. Thomas Stone (age 13): Bell Farm Avenue, Dagenham, killed by car
9. Male cyclist age 62: Layhams Road, Bromley, killed by car
10. Paul McGreal: Hackney Road, killed by lorry
11. Johanna Bailey: Cavendish Road, Lambeth, killed by van
12. Sam Harding: Holloway Road, killed by bus after getting knocked off by car door

As the TfL spokesman says, more certainly "needs to be done to prevent serious harm befalling London's cyclists".

There are clearly massive problems at the major junctions around all London's main rail stations for a start. These are places lots of cyclists go. We needs an urgent, concrete and comprehensive action plan to tackle these. Not more contemptible weasel words from TfL about "balancing" or "reflecting the needs of all road users".

Why do we make no progress on the issue of lorries and cyclists in London down years and decades? As I have said before, it is because we have a hold of the wrong end of the stick. The (main part of the) answer is not educating lorry drivers and cyclists to be better aware of one another. It is separating cyclists and heavy vehicles, whose drivers can't necessarily see them, by design. Designing so that drivers and cyclists don't take risks, or when they do take them, the consequences are slight. Prioritising the movements of pedestrians and cyclists. The Dutch concept of sustainable safety.

Unfortunately such thinking seems to be as far away as ever in London. TfL's latest cycling-related idea seem to be to effectively pay people for cycling, in an inducement scheme. As Croydon Cyclist says,

It gives two pictures, on one side TfL want to make the traffic flow for motorised vehicles as quick as possible, but on the other side they want to get people out of their cars and onto the streets which they have just put fast-moving and dangerous traffic on to.

I think, unfortunately, this scheme could work. People are quite inclined to accept material inducements to do dangerous things, particularly in difficult times. We'd better get ready for more tragedies.

Lorries and cyclists, then and now

I have just been sent the following by LCC:

Dear fellow cyclist,

Thank you all for signing and supporting LCC’s biggest ever petition. Over 10,000 signatures were presented to London Assembly members on Wednesday 18 May 2011 at City Hall.

We are really pleased with this progress, however the campaign still has a way to go. LCC urgently needs more donations to keep up the pressure. We are pushing for “on bike” training for lorry drivers to be approved nationally. Then we can urge all 33 London councils to deliver it.

Since I had handy the October 2002 London Cyclist, as I referred to an article I wrote in it in this post, I was leafing through that. In it is an article Be alert to blind ignorance, headed with this preamble:

Matt Seaton explains why both cyclists and lorry drivers need educating about each other's road requirements and practices, and considers the effectiveness of awareness-raising initiatives

Yes. The effectiveness of "awareness-raising" initiatives is very much the point. For I expect in every year of publication of London Cyclist, down more than 30 years, one could have found a similar article calling for these "awareness-raising" initiatives to educate cyclists and lorry drivers about each other's needs. This is one problem, like so many others in the relationship of UK cyclists to other road-users, that just seems stubbornly insoluble, despite all the campaigns and initiatives. If anything, the problem is getting worse. Lorries still account for a majority of cyclist fatalities in London, and, as Futilitarian points out, there is statistically no evidence of any increase in safety through larger numbers of cyclists on London's streets in recent times. (I dealt with the "safety in numbers" theory in an earlier post).

Here is a list of the sub-headings in the 2002 article:

Three mirrors not enough

Putting the stats into context

New awareness camapign

But do the initiatives work?

A change of emphasis

What more can be done?

It's a well-written article, but it all seems so wearyingly familiar. Plus ça change, c'est la même chose.

Well, now LCC is calling for on-bike training to be given to lorry rivers by London councils. As I understand it, even if completely implemented, that scheme would only get the training to those drivers who work for the councils, and maybe to council contractors as well. So not to the majority of HGV drivers, and not to the statistically most dangerous drivers, those of tipper trucks, skip lorries and cement mixers. I don't think it will make much difference, to be quite honest.

And what about all this other awareness-raising, on the other side: campaigns to explain to cyclists what it is like to drive a lorry, by, for example, getting them to sit in the cab of one, on one of these cycle "event days" that proliferate at this time of year? How many cyclists can such exercises ever actually reach? And isn't this tending to put the onus on the cyclist to get out of all possibility of danger, letting drivers "off the hook", ignoring the fact that many lorry deaths are caused by dangerous overtaking manoeuvres that the cyclist is powerless to prevent? (This is what I suspect, though it is an unproveable assertion, as, in such cases, the cyclist is dead, and can't give an account of what happened.) Isn't it all too close to vicim-blaming? Danny (Cyclists in the City) clearly had similar thoughts while writing his post of Tuesday but didn't put them so explicitly. For the truth is, the only way that cyclists can avoid all possibility of being crushed under a recklessly-driven HGV is to leave their bike in the garage and choose another method of transport. No amount of training and "awareness-raising" will protect cyclists from some combinations of hazards.


"Awareness-raising" is one of the great rallying-cries of what I called in a previous post "the environment-issue avoidance industry" that is much of British cycle promotion and campaigning. My question is:
Isn't this all part of a wrong approach, a demonstrably, over time, failed approach, putting all the emphasis on trying to get behavioural change though education, either of cyclists or of drivers, against all evidence that it just doesn't work?


That brilliant servant of the public health agenda, Dr Ian Roberts, of London's School of Hygene and Tropical Medicine, had this to say about road safety education and awareness-raising in a slightly different, but related, context, that of road safety in the Third World:

The problem for public health is that the safety policies the car lobby promotes are not particularly effective in preventing injury.

Their favourite policy is road safety education. Despite decades of evaluation research, safety education has never been shown to reduce road injury rates, a point emphasized by the WHO in the World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention. Road user education is favoured by the car lobby because it places the responsibility for road traffic injury squarely on the victim and has no impact on industry profits. Its primary purpose is ideological. It sends the message that road space belongs to drivers, and that pedestrians and cyclists must look out or die. This also applies to children, who account for 300,000 of the 1.2 million road deaths each year.

Awareness campaigns are another favourite. The [Global Road Safety] Commission is currently promoting the ‘Think Before You Drive’ campaign, supported by the Bridgestone Corporation, which reminds drivers to use child seats and seatbelts and to check their tyres. Sensible suggestions though they may be, such exhortations have no discernable effect on road safety. On the other hand, the campaign may improve Bridgestone's corporate image.

So, to return to lorries on the streets of the UK, and their interaction with cyclists, what else can be done, apart from education and awareness-raising? Well, we could start looking seriously at the infrastructure and planning. We could learn from counties that do this better (for example, The Netherlands, which has the best road safety record in the world). We could start to end the situation where cyclists are forced to share road space with big lorries because they have absolutely no alternative. We could put in place more advanced, safer junction designs where cyclists have separate phases and are not mixed up with HGVs doing turning manoeuvres in tight corners. We could take out lethal, cyclist-trapping guardrailing at junctions. We could restrict the movements of large lorries in our cities more, and enforce those restrictions rigourously, though technology. We could put in place schemes on a town and city basis for distributing goods in dense urban areas using the most appropriate vehicles for the purpose, co-ordinating deliveries between businesses, and putting them at times when they will pose least risk to cyclists and pedestrians.

Now this is all a bit more complicated than organising an event where cyclists are asked to get into the cab of a lorry. It takes more organisation, political will, money, planning, and time. And there will be those who will say, "Yes, but the infrastructure and planing changes take decades to make a difference, surely we should be doing now all that we can through education to reduce the number of these incidents in the short term?" The answer is that this is what we have been doing, for decades. simultneously with not making the changes that could, by and large, solve the problem for good. Might that be because campaigners have not lobbied consistently or hard enough for those changes, because they have been so distracted by the awareness-raising agenda?

Cyclists keep dying under lorries. How long before we change tack?