I was at the protest ride and I do believe we need to radically redesign many of the major junctions in London. However, I do believe the hyperbole employed by some of our more well known activists might do more harm than good. To talk of these deaths, sad, tragic and avoidable as they are, as "carnage" creates an atmosphere of fear and terror around cycling in the city which is nowhere near justified. A female friend that I taught to ride a bike this summer rang me to cancel a ride she had planned to attend with me. After discussions with her husband about the fatalities, watching the news and hearing the comments they had decided it was just too dangerous. I tried to argue that we were only riding cycle tracks and a few quiet roads, that no activity is risk free, that more people are killed crossing the road, but we don't stop doing that etc etc. to no avail. How many more, I wonder, are dissuaded from cycling in London by the style of this protest? In the BBC broadcast link in the above post, there was a second item on KSI's from buses, most of these were pedestrians and the numbers were huge. Maybe we should campaign more broadly on the whole issue of road safety, rather than focus on cyclist deaths alone in this way.
