Thank you, Alan!

Today, I received Graham Evan's weekly e-mail newsletter/bulletin. It had the photo of our meeting with him in it - so we have been featured two weeks in a row! 🙂

It also mentioned that Mr Evans ' attended a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group to discuss The Times campaign on cycling safety.'

So the wheels are still rolling! 🙂

Cycling, health and safety – Winning the arguments

'Cycling, health and safety: Winning the arguments' is a seminar by our friends at CycleNation. It takes place on Saturday 21 April in Birmingham. It is free, but you’ll need to book a place. By the way, just in case you do find yourself in a heated discussion about cycling, read CTC’s 10 Common Questions and you'll win.

For further information about the event, please visit http://www/cyclenation.org/uk/seminar/seminar.php.

Article in Northwich Guardian - and online - Tuesday 3rd April 2012 :

'CYCLISTS have launched a campaign for greater safety and harmonious co-existance among road users.

A delegation from Weaver Valley Cycling Club met with Graham Evans, Weaver Vale MP, and Clr Les Ford, deputy leader of Cheshire West and Chester Council, to discuss their mission to make things better on the roads of mid Cheshire.........'

The full article can be found here:

http://www.northwichguardian.co.uk/news/9627162.Cyclists_urge_a_safety_revolution/

P.S. If you would like to go to the online link and 'like' the article, it might give the issue of safe cycling a greater prominence?!

Thanks

Claire

The Times http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/

'Minicab chief: cyclists have to expect to be hurt on roads
Kaya Burgess
Updated 51 minutes ago
Campaigners and politicians are calling for a boycott of the UK’s biggest minicab firm after its chairman claimed that cyclists are responsible for accidents simply by taking to the roads and should expect to be hurt by drivers. John Griffin, founder and chairman of the Addison Lee taxi company, is facing a backlash for using his column in the April edition of the firm’s Add Lib magazine to suggest that cyclists are irresponsible for “throwing themselves onto some of the most congested spaces in the world” and also criticises those who are “up in arms about what they see as the murder of cyclists on London roads”. Mr Griffin’s column, which calls Britain’s streets an “abyss” for cyclists, comes in the week that he instructed his 3,500 Addison Lee drivers in London to ignore the threat of criminal prosecution for driving…'

So not everyone is convinced about 'Safe Cycling' 😯

Awesome article in the Times today!

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cyclesafety/article3392916.ece

Revealed: the country’s worst roads for cyclists

The worst roads for cycling in Britain are revealed today in the first national audit by cyclists and drivers, compiled by The Times.
Road safety experts described the network as “not fit for purpose” after more than 10,000 people highlighted junctions, roundabouts or stretches of road across the country as unsafe.
The blackspots were identified as part of The Times’s “Cities Fit for Cycling” campaign, which aims to improve cyclists’ safety and identify and improve dangerous junctions.
Cyclists and drivers from all over the country have together highlighted 4,010 junctions, 2,778 stretches of badly designed road, 1,453 poorly built cycle lanes and 1,360 roads afflicted by dangerous pot holes.
Road safety professionals, motoring organisations and cycle groups this evening urged the Government and local authorities to take heed of the findings and rebuild the worst roads and junctions where necessary.
Their testimony comes in a week when cyclists will pile pressure on politicians before the local and mayoral elections on May 3.
Ministers will tomorrow face an influential committee of MPs to defend their road safety policies after 34,000 people made a written pledge of support to The Times’ its “Cities fit for cycling” campaign.
The campaign manifesto called for the 500 worst junctions in the country to be identified, redesigned or fitted with priority traffic lights or convex mirrors to allow lorry drivers to see cyclists on their blind side.
Among those giving evidence to the Transport Select Committee tomorrow morning are James Harding, Editor of The Times, Jon Snow, the Channel 4 newsreader and cyclist, as well as Norman Baker, the Transport Minister, and Mike Penning, the Road Safety Minister.
Tens of thousands of cyclists are expected to join protest rides in London and Edinburgh on Saturday to call for greater road safety, and next Tuesday the four leading contenders in the race to become London’s next Mayor will address a special cycling hustings meeting convened by The Times.
The interactive cycle safety map reveals that seven of the most dangerous junctions (as identified by the people who use them) are in London, where Boris Johnson, the Mayor, is accused of prioritising traffic flow over cyclists’ safety.
Edmund King, the president of the AA, described the data as “a wake-up call for urban transport planners”.
“It would be fair to say from these findings from 10,000 people that in many cyclists’ view the roads are not fit for purpose,” he added. “Many of the things highlighted in the survey show that particularly on major roads in and around urban areas we need a fundamental review of road design and junction layout.”
The Times has previously called for the 500 worst junctions in the country to be identified.
The Elephant and Castle roundabout in South London received more complaints than any other junction in the country, followed by King’s Cross/York Way, where a 24-year-old female cyclist was killed last year.
Junctions in Bristol, Birmingham, Cambridge, Nottingham, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Belfast were also frequently cited, along with suggestions for making them safer.
Cyclists are also likely to fear for their safety at big urban roundabouts where major A-roads converge and enter city centres, the survey suggests.
Users complain that in many cities these junctions lack basic provision for cyclists — 20 per cent of the submissions identifying junctions raised concerns about roundabouts, and a further 20 per cent said that traffic lights were inadequate.
Many readers recommended the installation of phased traffic lights that would give cyclists a few seconds’ head-start over motorists at busy intersections.
The South Gosforth Roundabout in Newcastle, the James Barton Roundabout in Bristol and the Brook Hill Roundabout in Sheffield were singled out by many cyclists.
Several submissions claimed that the blackspots were well-known to local highways agencies, but that improvements had been delayed.
Martin Gibbs, policy and legal affairs director of British Cycling, said: “This is valuable data that the Department for Transport should use immediately to start remedial works. We need a total shift in policy. We should never have got into this situation and the government must now commit to putting cycle safety into road and junction designs before they are built.”
He added: “This iS a dramatic policy failure and transport ministers should be highly uncomfortable that a national newspaper is leading this process.”
Chris Peck, policy co-ordinator at the CTC cyclists’ organisation, said: “It’s time for the Government to get to work on a national cycling action plan with enough funding to begin to rectify some of these appalling places for cycling.”
Robert Gifford, executive director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, said: “If these comments are about Highways Agency roads, ministers should allocate funds to help to resolve the problems. If the roads are the responsibility of local authorities, ministers should send out a clear message to councils to sit down with cyclist groups to prioritise which problems to solve over what timescale.”

Addison Lee the minicab company whose chairman John Griffin's comments on cyclists infuriated many last month and led to calls for a boycott of the minicab firm is to give its drivers training to help raise their awareness of cyclists. The training will be provided by David Dansky of London-based Cycle Training UK.

In his column for the comapny magazine Add Lib Mr Griffin asserted that "It is time for us to say to cyclists, ‘You want to join our gang, get trained and pay up’,” the irony that those comments will result in more training for Addison Lee drivers will not be lost on many of those angered by Mr Griffin's words.

The news of Mr Griffin's two-wheeld conversion and the programme of driver training came in when I Pay Road Tax founder and BikeBiz executive editor Carlton Reid interviewd Addison Lee’s PR manager Alistair Laycock at a meeting at the firm’s offices in Camden on Monday. Mr Griffin was given an I Pay Road Tax cycling journey, underlining the point that cyclists pay for the roads too - as does every taxpayer in the land.

Reid spent an hour and a half with Alistair Laycock – who in a comment to an article about the meeting on the I Pay Road Tax website he reveals that he has started commuting to work by bike – Mr Laycock outlined some of the steps the company is taking to repair the damage caused by the backlash to the comments made by its chairman and founder.

Aside from driver training the company is also considering installing front-facing video cameras in its vehicles to record journeys, which could be used to provide evidence of what happened in incidents that lead to a subsequent complaint from a cyclist, potentially showing whether the driver or the cyclist – or, indeed, neither – may have been at fault.

As reported on road.cc two years ago, similar video evidence led to a London window cleaning firm sacking one of its drivers after footage showed that he had deliberately swerved into a cyclist.

Monday’s meeting came after a week in which Addison Lee had seen more than 200 cyclists stage a ‘Die In’ outside its offices in protest at Griffin’s comments, lost a High Court battle to prevent Transport for London to secure an injunction relating to his encouragement to drivers to illegally use bus lane, and had a number of contracts terminated, including one with the Government.

Later the same day, attending the mayoral hustings on cycling jointly organised by Sustrans and The Times, Reid also presented the newspaper’s editor James Harding, a keen cyclist, with an I Pay Road Tax jersey.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-18779129

🙄 😡 🙁 😕 👿

don't know the details but how the press report cycling related accidents really annoys me - aaargh!! ie:

"A cyclist has been killed in a collision with a car in Croydon, south London"

why is it always a cyclist in collision with a vehicle, when generally it should read someone in a "deadly weapon" not paying attention has knocked a cyclist off.

It's time drivers face up to how lethal their vehicles are and for press, police and the courts to be more pro-active.