"How many times have you been deliberately attacked with a deadly weapon by a cyclist, threatening you with serious injury ?"
As a pedestrian? Several.
What weapon did they use ? Did they take their D-lock off its bracket and swing it at you ? Did they have a kitchen knife in their panniers ?
I suspect that actually you're referring to their bicycle, but this is ridiculous. The idea that a bike is anywhere near as threatening when used as a weapon as a car or a knife or indeed any kind of deadly weapon is absurd. Riding a bike into a pedestrian is as likely to hurt the rider as the victim. Deliberately driving a car at any speed into a pedestrian or cyclist will usually maim or kill - and if there aren't any witnesses the murderer can say the victim "stepped out" and get away scot-free!
"Cyclists kill about one person a year in Britain"
By direct collision, perhaps. How many more injuries do they cause by illegal/reckless behaviour which causes other road users to take emergency evasive action?
Firstly, this is the ridiculous and contrived scenario of the form "I had to kill the second pedestrian because the first one stepped out into the road" Do you know anyone to whom anything like this has ever happened? Do you think that these kind of circumstances make up even a tiny fraction of the 3000 deaths and 30,000 maimings a year involving to motor vehicles?
And I don't mean it "nearly" happened. I wasn't "nearly" deliberately run into and then assaulted! My bicycle wasn't "nearly" destroyed. I mean actually. If we are counting "nearly" then I am "nearly" driven into about once a week! (But I'm an experienced and careful cyclist, so with one notable exception I manage to stop or swerve and thus avoid a crash with the red light jumping drivers, and the drivers who pull out in front, and the drivers who pull out onto roundabouts "without seeing me", and so on.)
Secondly, there is a hidden bias even in your very question. Walking and cycling are inherently very low risk both to the walker or cyclist and to others. It is quite unreasonable that drivers are permitted to introduce the enormous hazards of tonnes of heavy machinery and then impose on everyone else a requirement to behave especially carefully and follow a complicated and inconvenient set of rules to try to avoid some of the resulting injuries and deaths!
When a pedestrian "steps out without looking" in town, and is killed, that is not their fault! It may be their fault in law, but this is grossly unfair. People who want to operate heavy machinery in a public place should take full responsibility for doing so safely, and should not be allowed to impose onerous conditions on everyone else.
Imagine if you were to walk through the fair on Midsummer Common right now, and there was a complicated system of pedestrian traffic lights, and areas (marked on the ground with paint or kerbstones) where you were allowed to walk and areas where you weren't allowed to walk. Imagine that if you were to obey the rules you had to make long detours, wait for a chance to proceed sometimes for minutes at a time, and if you got it wrong you were likely to be decapitated by a flying piece of machinery.
Imagine that children had to be specially trained to submit utterly to the operators of fairground equipment - to look both ways for flying ride cars, to check for cars that haven't stopped when they should have done, and implicitly told that if they don't do that they would get very badly hurt and it would be their fault.
Imagine that 3000 people a year were killed this way.
No-one would stand for it. But that's the situation every day in every town dominated by the motor vehicle. As the Transport Select Committee put it,
It is inconceivable that any transport system invented today would be accepted, no matter what its benefits, if it involved this level of carnage.
no subject
As a pedestrian? Several.
What weapon did they use ? Did they take their D-lock off its bracket and swing it at you ? Did they have a kitchen knife in their panniers ?
I suspect that actually you're referring to their bicycle, but this is ridiculous. The idea that a bike is anywhere near as threatening when used as a weapon as a car or a knife or indeed any kind of deadly weapon is absurd. Riding a bike into a pedestrian is as likely to hurt the rider as the victim. Deliberately driving a car at any speed into a pedestrian or cyclist will usually maim or kill - and if there aren't any witnesses the murderer can say the victim "stepped out" and get away scot-free!
"Cyclists kill about one person a year in Britain"
By direct collision, perhaps. How many more injuries do they cause by illegal/reckless behaviour which causes other road users to take emergency evasive action?
Firstly, this is the ridiculous and contrived scenario of the form "I had to kill the second pedestrian because the first one stepped out into the road" Do you know anyone to whom anything like this has ever happened? Do you think that these kind of circumstances make up even a tiny fraction of the 3000 deaths and 30,000 maimings a year involving to motor vehicles?
And I don't mean it "nearly" happened. I wasn't "nearly" deliberately run into and then assaulted! My bicycle wasn't "nearly" destroyed. I mean actually. If we are counting "nearly" then I am "nearly" driven into about once a week! (But I'm an experienced and careful cyclist, so with one notable exception I manage to stop or swerve and thus avoid a crash with the red light jumping drivers, and the drivers who pull out in front, and the drivers who pull out onto roundabouts "without seeing me", and so on.)
Secondly, there is a hidden bias even in your very question. Walking and cycling are inherently very low risk both to the walker or cyclist and to others. It is quite unreasonable that drivers are permitted to introduce the enormous hazards of tonnes of heavy machinery and then impose on everyone else a requirement to behave especially carefully and follow a complicated and inconvenient set of rules to try to avoid some of the resulting injuries and deaths!
When a pedestrian "steps out without looking" in town, and is killed, that is not their fault! It may be their fault in law, but this is grossly unfair. People who want to operate heavy machinery in a public place should take full responsibility for doing so safely, and should not be allowed to impose onerous conditions on everyone else.
Imagine if you were to walk through the fair on Midsummer Common right now, and there was a complicated system of pedestrian traffic lights, and areas (marked on the ground with paint or kerbstones) where you were allowed to walk and areas where you weren't allowed to walk. Imagine that if you were to obey the rules you had to make long detours, wait for a chance to proceed sometimes for minutes at a time, and if you got it wrong you were likely to be decapitated by a flying piece of machinery.
Imagine that children had to be specially trained to submit utterly to the operators of fairground equipment - to look both ways for flying ride cars, to check for cars that haven't stopped when they should have done, and implicitly told that if they don't do that they would get very badly hurt and it would be their fault.
Imagine that 3000 people a year were killed this way.
No-one would stand for it. But that's the situation every day in every town dominated by the motor vehicle. As the Transport Select Committee put it,
Ian Jackson