Right to Drive vs Right to Live

Ignoring the -excellent- news from London, something bleaker from scotland:

Driver, 94, faces trial after denying causing death of cyclist by dangerous driving


"A 94-YEAR-OLD woman driver yesterday denied causing the death of a cyclist.

Alice Ross is alleged to have driven on to the wrong side of a road, mounted a verge, drove along a pavement and hit a couple who were holidaying in Scotland to celebrate their first wedding anniversary."


This could be where automated cars could help -though they may increase pressure for 94 year olds to drive.

"Ross has a special defence of automatism. She claims she was unconscious after a medical condition caused her to faint."

The "medical condition" defence comes up again and again -invariably after someone gets killed.

Which is surprising: is it just a coincidence that whenever these "unknown medical condition" situations arise, the driver ends up killing someone? Because if not, there must be a lot more people discovering their  "unknown medical condition" while driving -but only hitting a lamppost, or going into a ditch.

What happens then? Do you think they go to their doctor and say "doctor, I was in a crash and don't remember what happened? Am I safe to drive? ". Or do they say nothing, and keep driving.

The DVLA should know things like the frequency of license returns, how it varies with the country and the demographics, and could help identify groups who appear to be underreporting their problems. 94 year-olds seem to be one: why is someone that old allowed to drive a weapon that can kill anyone else on the streets? Since the age of 70, she will have been required to self-declare her fitness to drive every three years. If the GP records could be examined, and she has been found to have lied on that form, does that make her guilty of dangerous driving?

And what about the GP -in this case or any other?  The DVLA has guidelines on their responsibilities.

"If you do not manage to persuade the patient to stop driving, or you discover that they are continuing to drive against your advice, you should contact the DVLA immediately and disclose any relevant medical information, in confidence, to the medical adviser."

This means: medical confidentiality rules can be broken if the patient is not considered safe to drive -yet is continuing to do so.

For anyone -anyone at all- to use the medical defence, their medical history should be disclosed to an independent medical reviewer, and if found that they had symptoms which prevented them from driving, then the defence should not be allowed -maybe even amplified. If you drive after being told you have a medical condition that should stop you, then you are automatically a dangerous driver.

What about the GP? They have a conflict of interest here. Do they be nice to the patient they have got to know, or do they represent the needs of the rest of society. The number of "the fainting condition", "my fear of wasps" excuses that crop up is something that needs to be raised here.

All it takes is a letter from the GP and they could have their license removed.

If that doesn't happen, then both the patient and the GP are responsible for loss of lives in our streets.

Of course, that assumes the patient really does have the condition, not some lawyer using it as an excuse.

But even there -if the lawyer does get them off, that driver needs to have their license removed until it can be demonstrated that they are safe to drive. That's better than a normal "6 month suspended license"  punishment, as this says "until we are convinced that your mysterious appeared-without-warnings condition isn't going to come back, no car for you". Somehow we need to make sure that happens.

If the DVLA do take back your license, you actually get a free bus pass and discounted rail and oystercard prices. People who can't drive for health reasons get better treatment on public transport than people who can't drive for wealth reasons. This shows how much the "right to drive" has been institutionalised -to feel sorry for people who can't drive, because it is such an abnormality in an adult.

Even so, that free bus permit does help people adapt to not being able to drive, to have a car sitting there saying "drive me, drive me" . Which brings up an idea: why not make everyone whose license is suspended to automatically pay for a local bus pass for the first year of their suspension? Once you've spent it, you may as well get on the bus, rather than lie to yourself and say "I have no choice but to drive", which is what we get today.

We have seen The Man and He Drives

The ongoing cycle safety hearings in London have looked at barriers to cycling -fear of death in cities designed for fast moving cars, buses and lorries, not people.

It's telling that even the MP last week said she wasn't prepared cycle with children -that's a failed cycling policy. Fit adult cyclists -especially aggressive men- can get up to speed, merge into traffic, get into the right hand turn in a multi-lane gyratory. The rest: intimidated away.

Clearly this is broken society.

But today: the ACPO appear: "we don't enforce 20 mph limits"

The ACPO sound like these limits are being imposed from above, and nobody in society wants them.

Yet the residents of the streets where 20 mile limits were rolled out have wanted exactly that -campaigned for them, worked with councillors to get them pushed out. The councillors have invested political capital in getting the 20 mph limits pushed out -because they know they are important to their electorate. They spent real money on the legal changes and the signage.

The ACPO have shown they don't care about that, because they don't agree with the limits -and they decide what laws get enforced. If the police don't enforce laws then the indifference of magistrates "it was only an accident that you killed a boy", becomes irrelevant. Same for the CPS: downgrading driving offences for easier success rates and better statistics in their annual targets -not justice for road traffic victims.

The ACPO last came to national attention with their funding of undercover police to infiltrate (legal) environmental activism groups, and then provide the support (here a van) to break the law -after which they were prosecuted. The ACPO are clearly deciding which laws to enforce -and who the enemies of the state are. They are the people campaigning for a better society, for better cities.

The ACPO are not accountable to parliament; they are exempt from FoI legislation. It is in fact a private company to which we have outsourced the decisions as to what laws are enforced in the country -and hence what laws we really have.

The Guardan, Jan 2011, the state's pedlars of fear must be brought to account:

 It is not, as its name suggests, the police officers' staff club, nor is it a public body of any sort. It is a private company, incorporated in 1997. It is sub-contracted by Whitehall to operate the police end of the government's counterterrorism and "anti-extremism" strategies. It is thus alongside MI5, but even less accountable.

Acpo was once a liaison group. But, like all bureaucracies, it has grown. It now runs its own police forces under a police chief boss, Sir Hugh Orde, like a British FBI. It trades on its own account, generating revenue by selling data from the police national computer for £70 an item (cost of retrieval, 60p). It owns an estate of 80 flats in central London. While the generous logistical support it offered the greens was doubtless gratis, we do not know if E.ON UK, the operator of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, paid for security intelligence from Kennedy.

George Monbiot, the Guardian, April 2011: One good thing can come of Mark Kennedy saga – disbanding of ACPO:

it has been running what is, in effect, a private militia in the United Kingdom. Until the Kennedy revelations made its role impossible to sustain, it controlled a number of police units, employing public servants to perform tasks over which there was no direct state control. As so often happens where accountability fails, the units worked for those who have power, against those who don't.
...
Their activities go far beyond the constitutional role of the police, straying into work that is blatantly political. When, for example, local people in Oxfordshire protested peacefully against RWE npower's plan to fill the beautiful lake where they swam and picnicked with pulverised fly ash from Didcot power station, NETCU slapped them on its list of "domestic extremists". They had broken no laws and done nothing extreme.
...
it is becoming obvious that police chiefs in this country are out of control. They appear to see their role as protecting corporate power against the people, regardless of what the law says. To this end they are spending both public money and private money extracted from public hands, without obvious lines of accountability or constitutional authority. 

They are behaving as you would have expected the Guardia Civil under Francisco Franco to behave: working for private interests against the public interest.

This is what we saw today: the ACPO, a private company, deciding that because they don't like 20mph laws, their officers won't enforce them. They don't exist. The signage, the effort, a complete waste.

Who is it making these decisions? Senior policemen who get driven round in chauffered cars. Policemen who clearly view the environmental movement as a threat. The policemen in charge of decisions to prosecute people from the Olympic Critical Mass.

Whether we want it or not: they are the enemy.

It won't matter what the national politicians do after this report, if they stop being a group of weasel worded "we give this our consideration" liars -because the ACPO will simply override them.

They are The Man.

2013 -the war on the bicycles begins in cambridge

2012: Pedal on parliament, the CEoGB, TfL's new routes, the growth of 20 mph zones. All of these bring hope to the future.

But: 122 deaths, the failure of places like S Gloucs to adopt Dutch-style designs, BBC documentaries and the general hate of cyclists by the Daily Mail fuckwits tempers that hope.

A lot of cycling campaigners hope that 2013 will be a good year for cycling. Hopefully it will.

But improvements in our cities will have to be fought for. Street by fucking Stree -making it safer to cycle. House by house: getting them to take their bikes out the garage and use them. Taking down one fuckwit with power and influence at a time -by converting them or destroying them.

This is -to be over dramatic- our Stalingrad.

The opening battle appears to be Cambridge.The new police commissioner -with no real mandate, and no majority in Cambridge itself has now declared war on cycling. Oh, he wraps it up in the "dangerous cycling" phrase, but he also uses the phrase "poor old motorist", which is as much a code word to the ABD lobby as "indigenous people" is to the BNP. He's saying "Cycle Haters -I'm on your side".

Which shows a problem with Cambridge, the showcase city of cycling. As Hembrow has observed: it's not a culture, it's because students can't bring cars. You have a split, then, of the students on their cyclists, and the town itself: the car drivers, the van owners, the people who commute in from out of the city. They don't cycle: they hate the cyclists because they are students, and because they are there. "Dangerous" cycling may be denounced, but using roads that are almost but not quite shared paths isn't dangerous -not for the cyclists. People do it because they feel safer.

Cycling without lights -possibly dangerous -but only in a town with cars. You don't need lights in car free areas.

Similarly: one way streets. The showcase cycling city, Portsmouth has made most of it's one way roads cycle-contraflow; Bristol is going that way. It's not dangerous -except that some drivers don't think bicycles should be there. That's education, not enforcement of one-way rules.

Polite letters and comments on new proposals "could to better" aren't going to fix things. The cambridge cyclists are going to have to be so fucking ruthless that the commissioner, the councillor and that sub-daily-mail paper the cambridge-fucking-news shuts the fuck up.

• Shit cycle facilities have to be aggressively and publicly rejected. if they don't tangibly increase cycling safety, they won't attract new cyclists, or discourage pavement cycling. That means they are fucking useless and a waste of money,. 
• Councillors need to be reached out, sat down with private conversations, and destroyed with the harsh truth: it's not the bicycles that kill people. All of their anecdotes " a cyclist killed a pedestrian in cambridge" needs to be shown to be false with that data -and they need to acknowledge that fact. If they say that to the cycling campaigners, and repeat that falsehood, they need to be publicly held to account.
• Start attending any neighbourhood council or police meetings. Complain about speed, car parking, dangerous school dropoffs (a good one this -who can defend it?), and drivers texting. Why texting? Again -hard to defend. 
• That wanker commissioner: he's tricky. No obvious tactic here, as he can claim a broader mandate.
• Someone needs to deal with the paper. Again -tricky. Going via the local advertisers may work.

A key change has to come from the cycle campaigners. They need to be more visible, more ruthless. And somehow, somehow, get the everyday cyclists on their side. 

One suggestion there: leafletting passing cyclists on milton road, "the police want you to die on milton road". 

Not so clear: how to get the students active. They can be -look at the university fee demonstrations- the campaigners just need to (somehow) get them visibly out on the streets. 

Imagine a go-slow on milton road on a weekday rush hour? Imagine cyclists getting videos and handing out leaflets to drivers, Son of the Wind style. Then start showing the paper, the police commissioner this and say "what are you doing here".

If not, the war on cyclists will only get worse.

(update: corrected the no. of deaths. Whatever the number, it is too much -yet the press and the politicians go on about bicycles on the pavement)

Walk, Cycle or Die: what should the NHS do?

Gven the Daily Mail
What about the NHS? What are they going to do without waiting for the Daily Mail to become "enlightened".

Freewheeler used to criticise the NHS in Waltham Forest for being car-sick. That's pretty common round the country.

1. They implicitly encourage their staff to drive in, by providing infrastructure to enable this.
2. They implicitly discourage their staff from driving in by providing shit cycling infrastructure.

The shit infrastructure goes further than the hospital site -the adding of an extra lane at the A38/A4174 Airbus roundabout is to cope with the extra traffic of the expanded Southmead hospital. The NHS now knows that driving is bad for the long term health of the patient, yet they aren't translating that into actions on the ground.

Anyone who has tried to park a bicycle at a Bristol/S Gloucs hospital will know they will have to trudge round looking for an obscure bike park which will be:  in an random corner of the site,uncovered, blatantly insecure and not even well signed.

Supermarkets with eight bike stands in front of their supermarket entrance alongside a 500+ car parking area have better bike parking facilities than most hospitals, as they have eight bike stands somewhere useful.

In Bristol, The BRI is pretty awful: one row of bike stands 6? in a well known theft zone. That's all. There's also a four storey staff car park round the corner and various other parking zones nearby. Not much visitor parking, but once all the staff parking is taken care of, there's little room.

Frenchay? It was pretty bad too. Apparently they were looking at a scheme whereby the amount staff paid to park was proportional to your salary: the more you earned, the more it cost. That's a nice idea. Frenchay also suffered from: no secure bike parking, minimal bus access. Regular patients knew the best tactic was to park in a nearby street and walk in. 

Southville -which is expanding as Frenchay gets shut down- will be test for Bristol and the North Fringe. Will it discourage driving by staff and patients, or will it encourage it.

The roundabout fiasco sounds like they aren't trying to discourage it, not matter what they say.

Yet a hospital staff should be the ideal place for the NHS and NICE to see if they could effect change in UK driver's habits

They NHS has an opportunity to change the reward scheme for transportation choices -in a way that it lacks for all other employers. 

It could

1. Provide secure and convenient bike parking for staff, where secure means "your bike and its lights will be there when you get back", convenient: closer to your office/place of work than any car parking. Some electric charge points could be good tool
2. Provide changing and shower facilities for staff. Yes, this is just icing on the cake, but it makes cycling more acceptable amongst colleagues -and if you live in Bristol, you will know about getting wet on the commute. You need somewhere to dry your wet things.
3. Provide convenient and secure-ish parking for visitors. Here, covered, near the entrance parking with good lighting and CCTV coverage is what to hope for. You want every patient going to the hospital to see the extended bike park even closer to the entrance than the disabled parking bays for the heavy smokers.
4. Provide safe cycle access to the hospital premises.
5. Provide information and assistance on cycling to work. Loan electric bikes, adult 1:1 cycle training  which covers the route from  home to work -these can come after the infrastructure.
6. Provide information to patients on cycling to the hospital. Today: little leaflets on parking and public transport. Nothing about cycling. An outline map of the approaches to the hospital, with details on how this connects to the rest of the city, could be good here.
7. Provice disincentives to driving. For staff, salary-proportional parking fees. For patients, pay to park. There's complications there: not just the disabled patients, but the long-visit day patients on dialysis, chemotherapy, etc. You can't expect them to pay a lot, or cycle in. At the same time, you don't want the Scottish vote-seeking model "free hospital parking". 

The safe cycle access is critical. Staff will come on the same routes regularly, so you need non-leisure routes that aren't too indirect, slow or unsafe. The development of these access routes could be an integral part of hospital development. Not meaningless 'we have a cycle plan' pieces of paper, not 'some S106 cash for some shared pavement', but "make increasing the percentage of cycling staff and patients a short-term goal. Short term, because failures and success needs to be visible within a year, to stop you pretending that 'by 2020 15% will cycle', when nothing is happening towards that goal. 

How is southmead coming close to this. It isn't.

• A new 200 place car park.
• A public transport plan that  says "cycling initiatives" but allocates no money or time to them
• A web site that does mention the 500+ parking spaces, .
• A 'find us' web page that is proud of "ample patient and visitor parking."
• A PDF site map that does show some walking/cycling only routes, but doesn't show bike parking on the site map, and whose surrounding street map points to M4/M5 over any nearby bike routes
• A transport plan that does promise to care about walking and cycling.

And, elsewhere:

How will you make it easier to get to Southmead?

The Trust has agreed to pay £1.5 million for improvements to public transport and almost another £1 million for improvements to road junctions in Bristol and South Gloucestershire. Work is underway between the Trust and the local councils.  A Joint Officers Transport Group has been established to lead this work and this will include identifying how the Trust’s public transport investment should best be spent in order to enable as many people as possible to get to the hospital by bus. An accessibility study has been produced which helps to inform these discussions.  It will also finalise proposals for how the road infrastructure funding will be invested and ensure there is appropriate provision for those who may come to the site by bicycle or on foot.

See that?  £1 million for improvements to road junctions. And a footnote about appropriate provision for those who may come to the site by bicycle or on foot. As if that will be a special case that they mustn't forget about -not the way they expect most of their staff and many of their patients to come by.

The NHS -if they want to fix society, they should look in the mirror first.

Walk, Cycle or Die: the Daily Mail vs the NHS

The Daily Mail loves its scare story, "lettuce gives you cancer", but one time there is something with a clear cut connection between action (driving everywhere) and outcome (10 years off your life), the DM refuses to acknowledge this, instead going for "Nanny State to increase parking costs".

If the DM news crew though it through -and believed the NHS reports- then they'd realise that shortening the lives of daily mail readers is bad for their long term income plans, unless they plan to "hook" another generation of daily mail readers. The demographics of printed press sales mean that isn't going to happen -unless they can convert this to page hits of people that don't use flashblock and adblock in their browsers, then even their web site's business plan is weak.

It should be in the DM's interest to get its readers to do some exercise, unless there's another goal. What? Well, there's the advertising revenue to think of; all the Car adverts. That hasn't stopped the Times.

It's most likely that the DM needs their agenda "europe to ban cheddar cheese", "asylum seekers groom teenage girls for sex", to sell papers. If there weren't scare stories on the headline, (or royalty joy stories), then people would leave the DM copies on the stalls as the newsagent, and so their paper sales -the ones they depend on the most- would fall.

That's something to consider as a tactic -if they could be switched into treating travesties of justice by law-breaking lorry drivers as something to put on the front page, then maybe they'd start to get through to an audience which, like it or not, represent a large proportion of suburban England (no comment on Wales, Scotland, NI),  But the DM isn't going to do that unless they think their audience would care -and if they don't, they won't. Maybe the tactic is that their children, and their grandchildren cycle.

Fucked by Justice

What happened in the courts today shows that Britain thinks cyclists are expendable; a slight inconvenience for drivers. Door one when you illegally tinted your windows? You won't even get enough of a conviction to see your premiums go up.

As for the lorry driver: on the phone, not looking, yet "careless?". You don't kill someone through carelessness. Careless is forgetting where you left your keys.

Even he must have known he did something wrong -because he lied about being on the phone. He knew he should have been looking -after the fact.

Meanwhile, over in Cambridge, the police are cracking down on cyclists who cycle on the pavement.

Everyone should buy a copy of the Times tomorrow -not just  to see what they print, but to show your support for their campaign.

And then what? If justice is broken -how do we fix it?

Everyone who cycles needs to go to their local "police meets community" meetings. They may seem a waste of time -but that's what directs police resources -and nowadays that means against cyclists.

You all need to go, and get your needs addressed, but subtly, in a way that even the cyclist-haters can come round to

1. "I think school parents park really dangerously round school XYZ". If you do the school run by bike, you'll fear actually arriving near the school, and of course it's just as bad walking. Make clear that pedestrian safety is one of your concerns, so you can't be boxed as "a cyclist"
2. "Speeding cars mean I can't cross roads safely". Again, pedestrian safety. How can the anti pavement cyclists complain there.
3. Drivers on phones, especially texting, nearly hit me at (cite some recent example, especially at a zebra crossing".
4. Cars don't stop for me at zebra crossings; run predestrian lights at junction XYZ. Again, cite places where this happens.

Can you see the commonality. Instead of complaining about the actions that endanger you on a bike, the actions that endanger everyone on foot. That stops it being lawbreaking cyclists unfit to complain "until they get their own house in order",  but instead people who walk round the city -proper citizens, yet ones who still get treated like shit in a society that places driving above all else.

What else? 

Press coverage. This could maybe, just maybe, be something to bring the Daily Mail and its readers around. Yes they hate cyclists, yes they want to ban them from the streets, but they also believe criminals should get what they deserve. A lorry driver (from abroad!) who leaves a woman in hospital for life pays a few thousand pounds and will be driving -on the phone again- within a year. Even they could resent that. 

But how to get the Daily Mail to even mention it. That's the next challenge. And a hard one.

£20 million? You couldn't build a roundabout for that!

The government has somewhere in the trouser pockets of the transport secretary managed to find a few million pounds to stop the cyclists complaining.

They'll probably have to put off adding an extra lane on a motorway slip way for three months or something similar.

What does that 20 million quid say about britain today?

1. It was portrayed as "for cyclists" and for "cycling', not "for the country"
2. No range-rover driving CBI spokesman (it would be a man) turned up to say this would be a boost for the economy, the way they do for roads. 
3. Claims that this would somehow make britain a better place to cycle were accepted by the press, rather than greeted with ridicule and laughter.

 This shows a key problem, cycling is viewed as "for others". CBI  businessmen believe that they and their employees need more roads to address congestion. Politicians view it as "for them" and not for the country. As for the press, they are either docile and naive or they saw through the bullshit but decided not to call them out on it.

If there is one thing to be grateful for: the daily mail didn't denounce it as a war-on-motorists action. No, they saved that vitriol for the NICE "walk, cycle or die" proposal (that's a good phrase -expect a followup article on it).

No doubt the people that will pick up on it will be the fuckwits who, to this day, comment on the Bristol paper's articles with anti cycling rants saying "£27 million wasted on lycra louts". Certainly, the portion of that spent in S gloucs was a waste -but some of the things they did in Bristol were good. It's just even there: nobody was prepared to take road space away from cars in the city centre; nobody prepared to to block off roads to motor traffic. And if they weren't prepared to do that in the city, well, S Gloucs was fucked from the outset.

Which shows problem #2 with the funding: you can do good things with money for cycling, or you can

• Waste it on bluewash paint jobs, of which the London CS routes are the key example. 70 million for nothing.
• Fritter it away on hi-viz giveways, leisure route maps and "personal journey consultants" who show you how it's easy to get to your destination by bike, -and you will probably reach it alive.

In the cycling world, that means there are two problems

1. Getting the funding needed to make our cities and suburbs safe to cycle around.
2. Getting cycle facilities designed that aren't so fucking useless that their sole purpose is to make the "cycling facility of the month" web page.

The CEoGB is pushing hard for #2, but you can see that TfL don't fully understand it. They need to really want to do good cycling facilities, rather than be a petrolhead who views bicycles as things that should be pushed to the side with pedestrians.

Funding? That's going to need all of us to stand up and say "you are taking the fucking piss".

Every few months, the fuel duty campaigners start their whining again, blackmailing politicians into giving them more than the cycle campaigners ever, ever see. We need to be as noisy, and we need to get listened to.