9 in 10 Londoners would feel safer cycling on fully segregated lanes

jackdrew11 wrote:

What a pointless piece of research - were they expecting the majority of respondents not to feel safer from better segregation?

I hope YouGov aren't charging much for these surveys

I suppose many opinion surveys turn into statements of the bleedin' obvious, but all the same I would hope that all policy should be evidence-based (although what we tend to get instead is policy-based evidence making) and so surveys like this are necessary, and helpful to overcome the opposition.

For example, if you just follow the "stands to reason, innit?" approach you would probably conclude that taking away some road space will increase congeestion for motor vehicles, and that is the primary case of the opponents of the scheme. TfL has not really done any work to evidence the proposition, or indeed its opposite - the well-known phenomenon of "traffic evaporation" which sees reduced road space quickly restore equilibrium with no worse congestion because fewer journeys are made by car.

Of course, the wilfully ignorant objector will always fnd a way to misunderstand such statistics. For example, the letter in the Evening Standard which suggested that the 93% of survey respondents who never drove on the Victoria Embankment should be ignored as what did they know about it? For anyone who is not good with irony, we shold focus on the fact that a tiny minority (7%) of respondents actually benefit from driving on the Embankment (of whom quite possibly at least some were nevertheless in favour of the cycle paths - the reports just don't go into that level of detail)

rubbish suggestion. uptake in cycling is severely hindered by perception of safety. Even with collision protection would you want your family sharing space with a tipper truck?

Initialised wrote:

Segregation isn't necessary if you fit collision avoidance systems to all new cars and retro-fit to all commercial vehicles used on our roads.

I bet you have a shed load of case studies to back up your assertion...

Not a shed load:

http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/662743.pdf
US government looking to minimise costs by implementing CAS in their fleet recognises the lack of case studies in the field circa 2012!

http://www.google.co.uk/about/careers/lifeatgoogle/self-driving-car-test...
Google's driverless car can manage to avoid colliding with cyclists, that tech just needs minimisation and deployment.

http://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=806095
Drivers don't like warnings, prefer for the car to simply take over controls.

http://trid.trb.org/view/2014/C/1313158
CAS could prevent 1.2million injuries, 14,353 serious injuries, and 7412 fatal crashes if deployed in the USA.

http://trid.trb.org/view/2014/C/1326612
Modelling cyclist collision avoidance systems.

http://trid.trb.org/view/2014/C/1315476
3D collision avoidance for maximising airport throughput.

Drivers are the number one cause of road traffic accidents, take them out of the loop in an emergency situation by actively preventing the vehicle from getting close enough to other vehicles, static objects, cyclists, animals and pedestrians and and you pretty much eliminate the probability of an 'at fault collision'. Sure it might take 10-20 years to get to 90% of all vehicles but the sooner it starts the sooner road deaths become rare enough to be news worthy.

Initialised wrote:

Drivers are the number one cause of road traffic accidents, take them out of the loop in an emergency situation by actively preventing the vehicle from getting close enough to other vehicles, static objects, cyclists, animals and pedestrians and and you pretty much eliminate the probability of an 'at fault collision'. Sure it might take 10-20 years to get to 90% of all vehicles but the sooner it starts the sooner road deaths become rare enough to be news worthy.

But if it doesn't FEEL safe then people won't do it. Riding on roads full of large, fast-moving motor vehicles simply doesn't FEEL anywhere near as safe as riding away from them. I'm well aware that most of them aren't going to hit me, or kill me, but it only takes 1, and that makes roads feel unsafe. Good protected infrastructure is more relaxing and feels safer than 'sharing' the road.