lpm wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 8:51 am
Millennie Al wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 12:31 am
And to the extent that you wish to encourage cycling, imposing more rules on cyclists is certainly not going to help.
I dispute this. It will help. Casual and less confident cyclists will benefit. Nobody's going to say "I'm not going to try cycling to work because if I go through a red light while on my mobile and run over a kitten I'll be fined £200." But they do say "I won't cycle because motorists drive angry when they see rule-breaking cyclists."
It's part of a new covenant: provision of safer spaces for cyclists, in return for better regulation of tw.t cyclists.
OK I understand where you are coming from now, and that our aims are the same.
You quote the TfL survey indicating a relatively high level of general prejudice against cyclists, and we recognise that prejudice is an important part of solving the issue of why British people won't use bikes very much. The other main problems are crap bicycle facilities, which are made deliberately difficult to use because we are excessively focused on trying to exclude motorbikes from them rather than encourage their use by their intended users; and a perception of an unsafe and hostile roadspace to ride a bicycle on.
I doubt that bringing in sensible laws controlling cycling will suffice to reduce prejudice, in fact I think it is probably at best a small factor in that. What will happen is that the government will fix the law, there'll be a case with an "unsatisfactory outcome" from the victim's relatives' perspective, and they'll claim it didn't work, and we'll be back where we started.
It's like the motoring laws. What repeatedly happens there is that some people die, and other participants in that accident are acquitted, or found guilty of a lesser charge, perhaps because of evidential difficulties, or even without that given a sentence which perfectly accords with the sentencing guidelines but which fails to satisfy the victims' relatives' idea of proportionality in view of a death occurring. When the perpetrator belongs to an "out-group", as far as the victims and those who identify with the victims are concerned, be that out-group bicycle users, people with dark skins, "hooligans", or whatever, so a general sense of grievance againt that outgroup remains, a desire to hold them to a higher standard than if the perpetrator was a member of an in-group, a member of the victims' family, for example.
But ultimately that's not a reason to fail to bring in sensible and effective laws. The current proposal is for a stupid law. If bringing in a stupid law sufficed to do much about this, then I can see the sense in doing it. But I think a stupid law is going to be even less effective than a sensible law in achieving what you have in mind.
Meanwhile, solving prejudice is difficult. Why is that is prejudice rare in countries where bicycles are commonly used? It's because cycling is established across society so that no one sees bicycle users as an outgroup. Rather they identify with bicycle users because everyone has numerous family members and friends who use bicycles; and going out for a bicycle ride is seen as a normal family activity; and using a bicycle is seen as a normal way to make local journeys to school, work, the shops, etc.
Meanwhile we continue to design mostly-bad cycle facilities in a way that tends to perpetuates the "problem cycling" issue. The way to get w.nkers on bikes - and motorbikes - off cycle facilities, or at least make them less conspicuous, is to have such facilities heavily used by normal bicycle users so that the w.nkers find them unattractive. That's why you don't see gates and chicanes across the entrances to bicycle lanes anywhere except in Britain - it is only in Britain we feel the apparent need to make it awkward to get onto a bicycle facility, because it is more important to us to exclude w.nkers on motorbikes than encourage people to use them for their intended purpose.
Encouraging cycling also requires laws that put a proper duty of care on motorists to drive appropriately in the vicinity of vulnerable road users of all kinds. Recently a motorist got a £1000+ fine for a close pass (and his subsequent comments showed that he still misunderstood what this meant.) It was originally a £200 fixed penalty, but he chose not to pay, and ended up being prosecuted. That's a small start in the direction of changing attitudes to safe driving in the vicinity of vulnerable road users. But our laws in this area remain weak and relatively ineffective in comparison to most countries on the continent.
So cycling representative organisations are unsurprisingly incensed that the government talks the talk of encouraging cycling, falls far short in delivering the legal and infrastructural and attitude changes needed, but instead spends legislative time on this stupid law which will be cited in only a handful of prosecutions per year. If this stupid law was going to work in the manner you suggest, perhaps I wouldn't mind so much. But I don't think it will.