Sometimes it feels like the idiots have taken over UK roads and there’s nothing being done about it so this story makes for interesting reading…

Cycling features twice which is good – and I believe there’s separate work already underway to review charging and sentencing of drivers when they injure or kill cyclists…

Road Safety improvements

Mind you, I’ve spend a lot of time driving over the last few weeks and overall, whilst I’ve seen some lousy stuff going on (e.g. undertaking in a 20mph limit and then standing on the brakes when you realise the fact no-one else is on the inside lane is because it’s coned off for roadworks!) in the main the vast majority have been sticking to the speed limit and driving pretty much as you’d hope. Same with cycling – I’m getting a lot more proper passes and hanging back till there’s space than I used to a few years ago…

Much more money on traffic policing would help with most of the abysmal driving that is currently prevalent. Plus some training for said traffic police that a helmet and high viz jacket are not magic protectors of vulnerable road users.

That £750,000 grant for more police. That’s, what, 20 officers? Maybe half that if you’re paying to train them and buying a car to put them in. And it’s a ‘grant’, so one off? So you might get 5 officers, for 2 or 3 years. And then what?

And the cycling stuff is pretty rubbish really. I’m sure I saw a survey that found that most kids do bikeability but then don’t ride their bikes again because there’s nowhere safe to do it or their parents don’t let them, because there’s nowhere safe to do it. Doing more of the thing that doesn’t work won’t help.

And the lorry sidebar stuff… “here at the DfT we think that at some point you’re probably going to be hit by a lorry, but we want to make sure you just get horribly injured, not killed”. How about actually building roads that don’t squash cyclists and HGVs together, rather than trying to make the consequences of those collisions a bit less awful?

They should let police forces keep the proceeds from fines and then have an army of officers on bikes, motorbikes and in cars looking out for people driving like morons.