There’s three solutions there. A) Jump the red light B) Pull right out in front of the lorry towards the yellow box so the driver can see you (and make sure you clip in first time 😆 ) or C) Hang back and let the lorry go first. Or rather ‘stay in the correct lane!’
Instead, they chose to act like brainless Lemmings.

I love how the guy with the camera is so proud he ‘got it all on camera mate’ despite the fact it just serves to prove what a d**k the cyclist was!

Everyone goes on about drivers having to start out on a bicycle. Perhaps cyclist should spend a mandatory day in a lorry??

Yeah, straight steering directly towards the pavement

He’s not steering to the pavement, he is driving a massive truck which is only a few inches narrower than the lane he is driving in, of course he is going to be near the kerb when he arrives through the junction.

cyclist fault absolutley.

however i do think that our cycle lane up the inside of traffic and ASL infrastructure conditions cyclists to ride like this.

wouldn’t happen in The Hague.

You just know that video is going to end up on the Daily Mail or London Evening Standard website with a “WHO’S TO BLAME?”” headline and then a million comments underneath about road tax and insurance.

If only they’d have junped the lights there’d be no problem! 😉

Maybe dispense with mirrors completely and replace with monitors

This is very much a thing, and can be expected to be rolled out fairly widely in the near future.
Not only does it offer much better visibility and safety, it provides truck operators with a significant boost to fuel efficiency.

http://www.stoneridge.com/news/mirroreye/

I’m with edukator. The penalty for being a self-entitled idiot shouldn’t be death. And I think the lorry driver deliberately closed the door on the cyclists because he was unhappy about their undertaking using the left turn lane.

I don’t agree. They sat in the left turn lane as if somehow it was a filter lane for bikes then were surprised that traffic going straight on didn’t give them room. If the cyclist had been a car, everyone would be saying “What an idiot” but because he’s a squishy bike rider it’s somehow now the fault of the lorry driver.

Could he have predicted SOME of the riders would continue ahead, even those he couldn’t see, yes possibly but how do you calculate that “risk” of unseen events happening? He saw some riders (but not all) in a left lane and saw some zoom ahead. Should he sit there stationary at a junction on the off-chance someone wants to go against the road markings? How would anyone ever get anywhere?

The problem here is some riders want to preach about sharing the road (which is absolutely right) whilst simultaneously somehow expecting other road users to give them allowances that would seem unreasonable for any other form of transport. Yes there is responsibility if you’re driving a bigger vehicle but likewise, as a squishy road user, you also have some responsibility to not do dumb shit. The other day on a ride I reached a junction with an advanced stop but there was a bus in it already. The “cost” to me of waiting was about 10s on the ride, the cost to me of sneaking down the side where he couldn’t see me and trying to beat him across the junction could have been a crash that I wasn’t going to come off best in.

Everyone has a part to play in both road safety and the movement of traffic in cities. This rider (and his cohorts) haven’t helped at all. That said, TfL know that’s a major bike commuting route and it’s shocking how poor the junctions are.

Already on the Daily Fail, with a headline that bears no resemblance to the reality.

I think people who click Fail headlines (I did it purely for research m’Lud) are those who in another era sat knitting next to the guillotine.

franksinatra – Member

You may well be right but everyone knows that right now they are on the road, everyone knows that HGV’s have mahoosive blind spots and everyone knows that cyclists cutting up the left hand side regularly get squashed to death.

I don’t think everyone knows that, not by a long way. It’s basically unintuitive- people reasonably assume that other vehicles on the road and especially in cities are basically safe. You and I know they have huge blind spots (and that even in the areas that can be seen, they have a lot of perimeter to check) But they are fundamentally dangerous, and people don’t expect that.

as a squishy road user, you also have some responsibility to not do dumb shit

and there endeth the lesson

The only safe way to undertake there – and TBH it’s probably what I would have tried to do – is to get well ahead of the lorry at the junction, i.e. sit well in front of it at the lights (which is of course illegal).

Or do as I’d do, not undertake at all just stay back behind the lorry. There’s no law that says cyclist’s “have” to filter to the front at every junction.

as a squishy road user, you also have some responsibility to not do dumb shit
and there endeth the lesson

Amen to that. Just because we are a forum full of cyclists doesn’t mean we automatically side with a cockwomble. Don’t undertake lorries and ride in the correct lane. This will magically reduce the risk of being dead

the00 – Member
Want to buy that driver a drink, poor guy

Poor guy. All the stress when he did nothing wrong.

It’s time cyclists lost their feeling or moral superiority and began to consider themselves road users subject to the same rules as drivers.

Those particular cyclists do seem to be taking the same attitude as the average car driver. Perhaps its time car drivers lost their feeling of moral superiority about obeying the laws.

These particular cyclists are idiots. It happens. Personally I prefer an idiot cyclist to an idiot driver since the latter is more of a threat.

I do find it crap though that lorries are allowed to drive around with huge blindspots. On a site they would need a guide to deal with it but on the busy roads not a problem.

Could he have predicted SOME of the riders would continue ahead

Probably could predict that all of them would, because had they intended to turn left they’d probably just have turned immediately, ignoring the lights, and continued. Isn’t that what “nearly everyone” does ? *sigh* 🙄

But yeah – poor lorry driver. “Got it all on camera, mate”, the guy really does think they haven’t done anything wrong, doesn’t he?

I do find it crap though that lorries are allowed to drive around with huge blindspots. On a site they would need a guide to deal with it but on the busy roads not a problem.

Whilst I do agree with you and am encouraged by fifeandy’s response above I think the main thing they can do in the current circumstances is be predictable in their movements so other road users can anticipate their actions. I think it would not be unreasonable to say that that happened in this video.

Yeah I think they should have some form of ASL at the junction.

Cyclists will always try to get to the front of the queue so with all that space for the left lane filter I’m not surprised so many were cutting across.

Lorry design really needs updating to get rid of that blind spot. You can’t expect everybody to obey the rules all the time so you have to be aware of other users.

cyclist fault absolutley.

IMHO it’s not that specific cyclists fault as much as the group/herd/swarm….

however i do think that our cycle lane up the inside of traffic and ASL infrastructure conditions cyclists to ride like this.

I don’t think it helps but the follow the pack/herd is exerting a far bigger influence.
Probably 90% of them wouldn’t have acted the way they did if others were not…

Cyclist should have backed off when he realised that he wasn’t far enough in front of the lorry before the road funnels down on his side. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone pedal so much and accelerate so slowly 🙂 Driver not at fault, I suspect he was accelerating to get in a gap left by cars on his right and the cyclist put himself in a stupid position. Embankment isn’t great in general but that is a particularly rubbish section of road for cyclists for a number of reasons.

Im just amazed how unaware the cyclist was. Directly in front of a lorry and not even realise how close it is!?

I can’t really tell what the driver could see or what his intentions were from that video. I suspect he was paying attention to the cars trying to merge from his right without taking into account that cyclists would be simultaneously trying to merge from his left.

All I can say for sure is that that junction is a prime example of piss poor infrastructure.

Know that area well after working on site on left just before lights, driving there you really do need eyes in the back of your head for avoiding the cycling masses, but as usual with this stuff 6 of 1 and half dozen of the other, unless lorry driver hasn’t driven in London before he would have known that cyclists would do that and vice versa for cyclists, no need to take that sort of risk.

Even before the incident I thought that almost squashed cyclists position was mental. Why would you park up beside the wheel of a truck, what if the truck driver decided to turn left. Utter madness from the majority of the cyclists in the video.

The only person at fault is the cyclist.

The only person that should have anticipated the others direction of movement was the cyclist.

Truck driver in correct line, drives straight, I see no issue.

I’m sure as well to get into the left lane, the cyclists would have passed the rear of the truck which these day carry a big sticker saying do not undertake!

TLDR

Anyone who rides up the inside of an HGV is a moron.

For info there are three lanes at lights, middle and right-hand lane are straight ahead ONLY and filter down to one after lights so lorry driver really has no options although I suspect he knew perfectly well what was going to happen only a saint would have sat there until no more cyclists undertook him

I assumed that the longer he waited, the more cyclists would come through?

as a squishy road user, you also have some responsibility to not do dumb shit

and there endeth the lesson[/quote][/quote]This, Google-translated in cyclist speak: if you can’t outsprint the HGV, don’t attempt to.

Didn’t even look like an attempt at a sprint, more like a gentle meander in the wrong gear.

Cyclist in question in insane in the membrane, insane in the brain! 😯

Bunch of cyclists trying to undertake a lorry in it’s blind spot from a left only filter lane, and one of them is surprised they got hit? What planet are they on!? 🙄

Cyclists all acting like idiots there, no question. 100% to blame.

The company I work for manufactures cameras to remove blind spots – it’s now in quite a few cars to help with parking. Because of this I got see quite a bit of the behind-the-scenes lobbying going on.

The haulage companies actively fought against implementing systems like this for road use because they’d said they’d have more liability in an accident (nothing to do with the quality or performance of the systems). They lobbied the London Mayor against making them compulsory for lorries used in London. For lorries used exclusively on site (under HSE rules), they bought the best systems available (e.g. for mining tipper trucks).

It’s not an accident lorries have these blind spots, it’s deliberate :/ That’s the real problem that needs solving.

People (whether they are driving or cycling) always make stupid decisions, we just need to reduce the likelihood they result in death.

Bunch of cyclists trying to undertake a lorry in it’s blind spot from a left only filter lane, and one of them is surprised they got hit? What planet are they on!?

but they got it all on camera though, so definitely in the right

Truck driver in correct line, drives straight, I see no issue.

But the lane he’s in goes right as the road goes from two lanes to one. Check out the junction on Google earth.Someone not trying to run a cyclist off the road would be moving right.

The cyclists undoubtedly made a poor choice in congregating there to go straight on and in not making sure they were in front of (by enough distance to be seen) or behind the HGV by the time the road thinned, but this was clearly encouraged by very poor road layout, unsuitable for the traffic and particularly cyclist volumes present.

The bloke with the helmet cam was going on the left of vehicles indicating left, also, which is always a dodgy move regardless of the type of vehicle.

The HGV driver also made a bit of a poor choice – those saying he “rightly” expected all the cylists to turn left, is that before they move? What about when they start appearing in front of him? I’m not saying he did anything deliberate or necessarily wrong (particularly bearing in mind there was traffic merging from his right too), but he did also make a poor choice in not slowing down and/or allowing room on his inside for the cyclists that, with hindsight, he should have realised *may* be there.

I don’t think HGVs with significant blind spots are an appropriate vehicle to be using in places with large numbers of pedestrians and cyclists.

Riding up the inside of an HGV towards a pinch point.

WTF did he expect to happen

poor choice in congregating there

Not poor, just wrong. A left only lane, not a feeder/ASL. Any cyclist, or driver for that matter, going straight on from that lane is in the wrong.

A left only lane, not a feeder/ASL. Any cyclist, or driver for that matter, going straight on from that lane is in the wrong.

And yet the infrastructure (road layout, light phasing, the road before that junction) encourages you up the left, then there’s nowhere to go as there is no ASL.

As I said earlier: If you’re going straight on & are in that lane, you either need to beat the traffic or not be surprised when the traffic doesn’t mysteriously part for you.

And yet the infrastructure (road layout, light phasing, the road before that junction) encourages you up the left, then there’s nowhere to go as there is no ASL.

It doesnt encourage you, its available for you. If you want to go left you can use it, if you want to go straight move across into the correct lane. Its like ASL, you dont HAVE to use them, but people keep repeating it like you do so morons who dont think for themselves use it every time with no thought.

If you’re going straight on & are in that lane, you either need to beat the traffic or not be surprised when the traffic doesn’t mysteriously part for you you are in the wrong.

It’s a left only lane.

Cyclist was a slow, scared, self-righteous moron. This clip should go on TV as an example of exactly what not to do.