Tragic end to a top bloke

Raced against him the previous year, sadly he died training for the next race…

Cyclist killed by van driver

Very tragic indeed

very sad 🙁

Best wishes to his family.

Shame the driver’s denied the charges really and put the family through a trial. He’s clearly not that distressed.

very sad. that stretch of road is not one i’d want to cycle, i have to say.

……He’s clearly not that distressed.

What makes you say that ?

What makes you say that ?

A knee jerk reaction probably. Everyone knows every van driver is evil and out to kill you, just as every cyclist jumps red lights.

RIP, let’s keep the ‘trial by STW’ comments away from a thread clearly to honour a true professional……. for once.

A knee jerk reaction probably.

one last post on this thread. He couldn’t see where he was going but chose to carry on regardless. If it was me as a driver and I’d killed a cyclist under those circumstances I’d say ‘Yep, I should have pulled over and made sure I could see so I was being careless/driving without due care and I won’t contest it’, particularly if I felt any guilt at all about what happened (which I would).

usually i would be in agreement with geordiemick00 – however STW paid its collective respects at the time. Ride In Peace GC Barrett.

As i had a friend hospitalised last year by ‘low sun’ and have recently been knocked off, im interested to see how the “its not my fault, i couldnt see where i was driving” defence works out

If you can’t see where you’re going you really shouldn’t be travelling at 50mph.

tragic… Served all those tours and then gets knocked off his bike by some douche..

If you can’t see where you’re going you really shouldn’t be travelling at 50mph.

I’ve picked a couple of people off the road where the driver has used this as an excuse. IMO it isn’t an excuse. If you can’t see that it is safe to proceed, you don’t, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s 50mph or 5 mph.

Admits driving when he couldn’t see in front of him, but denies that is careless driving? 🙄

“The sun was very low at the time and my sight was pretty bad.” is an admission of guilt, not an excuse.

Perhapse he came round a corner and faced the sun, perhapse he creseted a hill, or somethign similar which meant he was suddenly faceing the sun and doing 50mph.

Ever driven on the motorway at night? Seeing as you can’t use main beams on account of oncoming trafic you use diped beams right? You realise they’re designed to imluminate the approximate stoping distance from 30mph? So, ever driven over 30mph on the motorway at night?

Not saying he’s inocent but there are nowere near enough facts in that article to conclusively pin the blame on him.

tinas – true, we don’t have all the facts. What we do know is that a cyclist was killed after being hit by a van travelling at 50mph.

You are only talking about the level of blame as nothing short of a catastrophic mechanical failure or driver having a sudden health problem eg. heart attack or fit, would be any excuse.

Real shame to hear of this loss. Heart felt condolences to family and friends.

I am not familiar with the section of road but I would have to ask was this after a bend or similar so that the driver could not see far enough up the road. If you come round a bend, get blinded by a low sun then this could happen. Not sure it should happen on a clear road though as you will get moments of vision so that you can see what is ahead.

If you are driving along at say 50mph and you become blinded by the sun you do not do an emergency stop, it would not be safe to do so. I would expect you to slow down as you try to get clear sight of what is in the road in front of you. You should have a good idea as to what was in front of you and roughly when you would expect to reach it before you were dazzled.

Given that this is the A40 at rush hour I would kind of expect there to be a fairly steady stream of traffic. Further up the traffic I would expect to see cars braking and then pulling out to pass the cyclist. This should have been sufficient warning I would have thought. But how many are looking that far up the road when driving??

I tried to move over but there was oncoming traffic
lovely. Don’t want to damage our paintwork more than we have to, do we. Hit the soft target.

Very sad .

I leave most mornings to the sound of “Careful on the bike dad”.
“Always” I reply .

I can understand why people get angry about stories like this.
In all my years of cycling I had hoped for a more aware generation of road users,to somehow see a change to more considerate driving,giving people space and an appreciation of how vulnerable others can be(especially as there appears to be more cyclists around than ever).
I know this may be pie in the sky ,but can it really be so hard for people to understand,maybe there will always just be a high proportion of selfish ,bad and inconsiderate drivers following on from the last wave.

It’s a bit early to say exactly what happened. According to the news report it happened near the Polish War Memorial. At this bound the road is going through sweeping bends and under an overpass. It is possible the driver came into the sun suddenly.

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Polish+war+memorial+in+Ruislip&ll=51.548148,-0.397923&spn=0.000433,0.001321&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&channel=np&fb=1&gl=uk&hq=Polish+war+memorial&hnear=0x48766cf17fc2a02f:0xae323a6772f45f1b,Ruislip,+Greater+London&cid=0,0,8352844832709933936&t=h&z=20&layer=c&cbll=51.548148,-0.397923&panoid=VxQgvnw5AYR9ESWiQ2Ktdg&cbp=12,281.21,,0,4.84

I wouldn’t have been cycling on that road in the first place – a six lane dual carriageway. Much of the time I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone wasn’t doing 70mph. The scariest bit of cycling I ever did was a couple of miles of the A74 south of Gretna Green.

Many drivers suddenly hitting the low sun would be concerned about not braking suddenly unless they were rear ended on a fast road like that.

It’s another reminder to me of the risks of cycling towards a low sun. Not unlike James Cracknell being hit by a truck whilst cycling east at dawn in Arizona. Knowing I was in the right wouldn’t be much consolation to my relatives at my funeral.

Happened to my old OC..

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6616507.stm

But the cruel irony of the location etc….

Very sad, what a waste of a life.

How many people have you ever seen pulling over due to a low sun impairing visibility? Not wanting to jump on the bandwagon as I don’t know the road and how quickly the conditions changed (eg round a corner, sun came out from behind a cloud) but felt it went from a tragic accident to a bit of a wooly story when he said he couldn’t swerve as there was oncoming traffic – so what? Hitting a cyclist gives them no chance at all, hitting a car has to be better…

One of my mates managed to hit a bus due to being blinded by low sun, very easy for visibility to be impaired but that was completely ridiculous!

For clarification when heading west the A40 becomes national speed limit (70mph in this case as its a three lane dual carriageway) right at the underpass under the roundabout at the Polish war memorial, tragic loss but certainly not somewhere I would choose to cycle either.

If you come round a bend, get blinded by a low sun then this could happen.

Not if you were driving at a speed that allowed you to stop in the distance you could see to be clear. At the point that you get blinded, you slow down, using the space that you know to be clear, until you can once again stop in the distance that you can see to be clear. If you couldn’t see your stopping distance around the bend, you were going too fast.

Unfortunately, we accept a low standard of driving in this country. The behaviour described above isn’t taught in the driving test, and the typically lenient sentences handed out in similar cases are a reflection that society accepts that such accidents are an unavoidable side effect of “normal” driving.

Driving on a motorway at night is a bit different, as it is a road designated for motor vehicles, and so you can reasonably expect to not encounter pedestrians, cyclists or slow moving traffic. It also has a hard shoulder which means that breakdowns should be off the carriageway. This is significantly different to a dual carriageway. It’s unfortunate that we give these two classes of road the same speed limit as it encourages people to treat DCs as motorways, and as such, to not anticipate the type of hazards that you will encounter on a DC.

RIP Tom.

I’ve been taken off thanks to ‘low sun’. Luckily I escaped with my life, but my bike was written off for me, and the motorist scarpered once he’d made sure I was still alive.

Flipping flip, I work opposite that airbase (final approach is over the business park) and wont ride it because I thought it was too dangerous. One of the guys here got crushed by a dustcart squeezing past him at a traffic island along there a couple of years back.

Sadly its a common excuse to say you couldnt see as the sun was low, despite sunglases, windscreen washers, brakes, and common sence, if you cant see slow down or stop.

Let us hope that Justice is not as poorly sighted as the driver.

Sad for the cyclists family.

🙁

Most important time to use a flashing rear light is when the sun’s bright, IMO

RIP, I live near there, and it would not be somewhere I’d want to cycle. In fact I’ve never seen a bike on there before.

Most important time to use a flashing rear light is when the sun’s bright, IMO

Let me know when you find one brighter than the sun 🙂

Seriously, when competing with a low sun a rear light will be invisible.

My suggestion would be a mirror and being ready to ride off the road to the left.

irc – of course it’s possible to be bloody unlucky

However, since cars move and roads turn, stationary or “slow” objects aren’t directly in line with the sun for more than a second or two unless you’re on a dead straight road (in which case the “sudden appearance” of the sun doesn’t apply and you ought to be driving slowly anyway). The light gets me noticed before I become invisible

More commonly, if you’re approaching tree cover (relatively thick) but the sun catches dust on yr screen, any objects under the cover are pretty much invisible – unless they have a light source attached

As soon as I saw him I tried to move over but there was oncoming traffic

Has nobody else noticed this statement by the killer? Oncoming traffic. On a DC. It seems when making up his story he got a bit confused.

From another forum discussing this. The route home.

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?saddr=RAF+Northolt,+Ruislip&daddr=51.576983,-0.546476+to:beaconsfield&hl=en&sll=51.576003,-0.521507&sspn=0.113938,0.337486&geocode=FZ62EgMdtsD5_yHv8n73E1jsbA%3BFZcAEwMdVKn3_ylNO_-gam92SDHR48CqLa4OEw%3BFdxjEwMdbyv2_ymZWSicRWF2SDGYzS_qajgmrQ&dirflg=h&mra=ls&via=1&t=h&z=12

“There was actually a safer option, which was to head up via Harefield avoiding the worst of the A40 and then either via Denham on the A40, or through Chalfont Saint Peter avoiding it entirely. Adds less than a mile onto the 13 mile journey in the worst case.”

http://forum.ctc.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=60597

The driver may have been culpable. I’m not saying he wasn’t. The cyclist of course had every right to ride there.

My approach to cycling is to reduce every risk I can though. I use three rear lights on my commuting bike. I used to turn a 9 mile each way commute into a 12 mile commute to avoid a dangerous road. When I read any account of cyclist crashes I try and think what I could have done to avoid that situation. IMO for 70mph dual carriageways with no shoulder the best thing to do is not be there at all if there is a reasonable alternative route.

Agreed on the reducing risk thing. No way would I ride a 3-lane road or any 70mph stretch

to get onto a nice road route I have to ride about a mile and a half on the A36 between Southampton and Salibury. It’s heaving with lorries from the container port and a couple of big warehouses pretty much all day as well as plenty of cars and the odd tractor, plus loads of caravans etc in summer. Really pretty narrow considering the size of the wagons

I almost always ride on the glass-infested path as the road scares the shit out of me when there’s any level of traffic on it, but you see plenty of bikes on there even at prime-time.

Dreadful. RIP. I used to bus and bike commute along the A40 and would ride home to Oxford of an evening. Whilst there is a good cycle path along much of that stretch, unfortunately the section across the Grand Union Canal further down really isn’t feasible any other way, so I suspect he was used to riding on the A40 at that point. There is a MUCH longer detour via Harefield, but I never took it either.

Playing Devils Advocate here:

What are you supposed to do if suddenly blinded by an exposed sun? Hard to know without seeing the road conditions but there are certain times where you can get hit by a blinding bit of sun and there’s not much you’re able to do but flip down the visor and make sure your windscreen is clear to give you the best possible view. One of those few moments you could, I suspect, end up missing something in the shade.

That said, I suppose if it’s intermittent sun you should be looking far enough in advance, but there are some occasions in bendy regions where that’s getting a bit blurry.

Hang on, from earlier posts…

It’s a 6 lane duel carriageway at that point….

I tried to move over but there was oncoming traffic…

Something doesn’t add up.

T

Most important time to use a flashing rear light is when the sun’s bright, IMO
or, even better, a constant one. Unless you’re running a mobile disco, I guess.

I think the oncoming traffic statement simply means traffic passing in the next lane.

If the sun was bright and low down, its likely that drivers ahead were also only seeing the cyclist at the last minute, and we all now that even in good conditions, most drivers do not signal or move out appropriately to pass. So it wouldn’t be unreasonable to consider that there was little warning of the cyclist as he approached.

I’m sure every driver on here has come round a bend or over a crest to be faced with the sun right on the horizon, too low for the sunvisor to be of any use. You don’t just brake in these instances, it would be insane to do any more than feather the brakes at a point where following drivers are equally blinded and are at a very high risk of running into you. Sure, you slow down safely, but most people wouldn’t just stand on the brakes.

I’m not trying to defend the driver at all, just even up the argument a bit. For all I know, that section of road is probably flat and straight, the driver may well have had a dirty windscreen which would make the sun worse, and could have been watching his mirrors to try and overtake slower traffic ahead.