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news
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe and Boris JohnsonMet Police boss: Trucks in the capital are ‘killing machines’
The Metropolitan Police’s Chief Commissioner has warned that trucks and large vehicles in the capital are ‘killing machines.
In an interview with LBC Radio’s Nick Ferrari, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said that "one wobble" could see riders end up under the wheels of a lorry or bus, in the wake of a week that saw five cyclists killed on London’s roads.
"It's a tragedy that we've had so many deaths in the last few days. I think overall it looks as though there are fewer cycle deaths per cycle journey, but that's no comfort to the poor families who've lost someone.
"We've all got to think about the way that we drive and the way that we cycle. It is difficult for the drivers. They're big vehicles, they can't always see out properly but they've got to take a little bit more care. When you've got such a big vehicle, then obviously they can be killing machines.
"Equally, if you've got your own cycle, you've got to abide by the rules of the road and you've got to think about your own safety."
Sir Bernard encouraged riders to take part in an ‘Exchanging Places’ scheme, giving cyclists the chance to see the view HGV drivers have from the cab of a lorry, and better understand the risks involved in cycling around them.
We wrote about these schemes and the impact they can have on a cyclist’s habits earlier this year.
Sir Bernard said: "We've got the Met's Exchanging Places scheme and that's where cyclists and lorry drivers swap places and see the roads from each other's perspective and 95% of the cyclists who took part said they would never have understood just how difficult it is for lorry drivers. There's huge blind spots.
"But equally, the drivers have got to think that but for a wobble, they could be in front of a vehicle. I think for many people, we've all got to think carefully about how we drive and how we cycle.
Earlier this week we reported how the Mayor of London Boris Johnson also appeared on LBC Radio in connection with the cyclist deaths in the capital.
He said cyclists need to take responsibility for their own safety, and while he clearly stated he wasn’t trying to blame the victims in those specific incidents, an opposition politician has accused him of doing just that, describing his remarks as “an insult to the dead.”
Mr Johnson maintained that cyclists were obliged to follow the rules of the road and to comply with traffic signs.
He said: “Some of the cases that we've seen in the last few days really make your heart bleed because you can see that people have taken decisions that really did put their lives in danger.
"You cannot blame the victim in these circumstances. But what you can say is that when people make decisions on the road that are very risky – jumping red lights, moving across fast-moving traffic in a way that is completely unexpected and without looking to see what traffic is doing – it's very difficult for the traffic engineers to second-guess that."
A total of 13 bike users have been killed on London's roads so far this year.
A ‘Save Our Cyclists’ petition calling on London mayor Boris Johnson to take urgent action, now has nearly 23,000 signatures after just 24 hours, and a ‘die-in’ protest and vigil has been organised for November 29 at Transport for London headquarters.
http://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-our-cyclists
The die-in protest will start at 5pm on Friday November 29 with a vigil for the cyclists who have died on London’s roads outside Transport for London HQ at 197 Blackfriars Road. That will be followed at 5.30 by the die-in and rally, before the event ends at 6.30.
“Transport for London needs our peaceful protest to be brought right to their door - the HQ of those who have failed to make our streets safe for our children or our pensioners to cycle on, never mind fit adults,” say event organisers.
Meanwhile, The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) has written to the Mayor of London calling on him to convene an urgent Cycling Safety Summit in response to the recent spate of cyclist deaths on London’s roads.
PACTS Executive Director, David Davies, said: “The boom in cycling in London has many benefits and PACTS supports it but the tragic events of the past few days show that there is a need for urgent action.
"We are therefore calling on the Mayor to convene a cycling safety summit to see what can be done immediately to make cyclists safer. It is essential that actions are based on good evidence and well targeted outcomes. We must avoid knee-jerk reactions and measures that might be counter-productive.”
In addition, Gordon Seabright, Chief Executive of CTC, has written to Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport Robert Goodwill MP calling on him to hold hauliers to account over cycling deaths.
He writes: “We know from the Freight Transport Association’s disparagement of even modest efforts on behalf of cycle safety by your Department that hauliers refuse to take this issue seriously.
"Until they do, CTC urges you to call in the leaders of the haulage industry so they can be held to account by yourself and representatives of pedestrians and cyclists whenever a vulnerable road user is killed by a lorry.
"As Minister you have an opportunity open to nobody else; by dramatising the problem and causing personal discomfort to those responsible you can focus their minds on making changes that are already available to them and already effective outside the UK.
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And 3 of the 'workers' are just leaning!
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Italian tourist and pussycat in Portugal.
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29 comments
Hmm, six of one and half a dozen of the other.
Banning
Reduces large vehicles on the busy often narrow roads.
Perceived to reduce the number of cyclists being killed
Increases the usage of smaller vehicles on busy roads.
Shifts noisy operations (loading/unloading) from work hours.
Perceived increase in deaths of those working night shifts.
Not banning
Continued use of large vehicles in narrow and busy streets
Cyclsits continue to be killed.
Noisy operations during work hours.
Drivers work day shifts and live longer.
So to sum up,
Either way a teeny tiny percentage of the UK population is going to die.(Removing the emotional side of dealing with the aftermath.)
We either poison ourselves with a few big vehicles or a lot of little ones.
To put another slant on it
South Yorkshire have dealt with 14 deaths on road in 18 days.
Lifted from Wikipedia
2012 1,754 dead 193,969 Injured.
Conclusion,
Banning the use of roads would reduce the death and injury rate by 100%.
Banning people would also reduce the number of deaths and injuries by 100%.
I'm off to buy a Pave bike in anticipation.
The stats on foreign registered trucks regarding crashes are pretty scary. Eastern European trucks have a terrible safety record here in the UK. There is a DfT report on them.
But these cause crashes elsewhere on the UK road network and aren't the tippers causing the cycling fatalities in London.
Neil, cheers mate. I didn't mean for it to come across as EU drivers are worse than UK ones just with their vehicles being left hand drive and driving on unknown roads etc but you cleared that point up, ta
Actually, Stumps, you raise a couple of good points, especially the one about left hand drive lorries (which can make cycling up the right hand side of a lorry far more dangerous).
Some of the things to look out for are foreign number plates, left hand drive warning signs, an elbow protruding through a left hand window, and blind spot mirrors on the right hand side of the cab, as opposed to the left.
Also look out for indicators that are turned on and then swiftly cancelled (a sign of being potentially lost), hesitation at junctions (unsure about being lost), a failure to progress in a timely manner in stop start traffic (a sign that the driver is indeed lost), and the possibility of a driver looking for somewhere to stop (a sign that the driver wants to stop being lost) just as you're cycling up the inside.
Just out of interest does anyone know how many of the hgv drivers involved are from abroad ?
Maybe its there lack of local knowledge thats letting them down so they concentrate more on where they are going / satnav than whats around them.
In my experience within the transport industry, I'd say it's unlikely that foreign drivers are involved in more accidents than British drivers, at least in London. Apart from anything, the sample (ie 10 to 15 deaths in London each year) is too small to measure any trend. But you are right to raise the issue of concentration. HGV drivers have quite a lot to think about, and so any unexpected distractions are a bad thing. I just think that those distractions have an equal effect on drivers, regardless of their nationality. Foreign drivers need to display a high level of competence to their employers, simply because transport firms are well aware of the adverse publicity that these tragedies generate.
I gather that "tipper trucks" of the type commonly involved in London tragedies are mainly driven by UK drivers, simply because EU drivers tend to be driving artics, which usually pays more, and if you're saving up to buy your house in Poland, for example, you can save faster by having a vehicle in which you can sleep (ie an artic with a sleeper cab), so avoiding the need to pay rent. Certainly most of the names of the drivers recently in the media spotlight appear to have typical UK surnames.
However, it is indeed the case that foreign lorries are staistically more likely to be involved in an accident, perhaps for a number of reasons. As an example, according to data from RoSPA, foreign drivers driving left hand drive vehicles driving on main roads, are 3.4 times more likely to have a "side swipe" prang. And, according to VOSA, foreign registered HGVs are twice as likely to be served prohibition orders for vehicle defects (10.6% for UK trucks vs 21.8% for EU trucks, in 2011), so there are a lot of potentially defective trucks out there. In fact, I've personally had a total brake failure myself in London, when driving an HGV (although the Mercedes computer flagged it up rather incongrously as, "warning - braking characteristics have changed") and it was only my habit of leaving plenty of stopping distance that saved the day.
I think it's good that drivers and cyclists are having these discussions, because if we left it up to Boris we'd be waiting forever to see any improvement. We must all work together on this one.
The issue of HGVs seems rather complicated. I think I'd need to see a lot more data and analysis before I could form an opinion. For example, how has the size and number of them on London roads changed over time, and if it has changed...why? (Presumably its increased due to a loss of rail freight capacity? But why has that happened and is there any way to reverse it?)
One thing that occurs to me though is that while lorries might be the immediate instrument of death for cyclists, those collisions occur on roads that are also chock-full of other traffic. Perhaps lorries might in fact be more difficult to remove from our roads than much of the rest of the traffic, and perhaps it would be easier to keep lorries and bikes apart if so much road space wasn't consumed by all that other traffic (much of which I suspect doesn't really need to be there)?
@Neil753.
HGV's are killing almost one cyclist per month, every month, in London. That is not acceptable and nor is it necessary as we know from the very different statistics in Paris. If we did whatever they do in Paris then *we* could stop HGVs killing cyclists too.
If that means I have to pay a little more for my coffee and banana whilst in London then it's fine with me. I try to avoid the place anyway.
In a year from now it is likely that your precious HGVs will have killed another 10 cyclists in London. That's a lot of kids growing up without their fathers or mothers and a massive long-term loss to the greater economy too. Totally unnecessarily.
These cyclist deaths are tragic and yes, they are sometimes as a result of driver error. In other cases, they may be the result of cyclist error. Here's a quick example of the sort of situation we must all be aware of:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leW8Mx1GciE
So let's not be starting down the road of antagonising each other, or I'll be telling you about the time I was a passenger in an artic, and discovered that even climbing out of the window whilst turning left into traffic on Seven Sisters Road, and emploring cyclists not to squeeze through a diminishing gap, wasn't enough to prevent some of them from doing so.
You mustn't insinuate that it's always the driver's fault, any more than you should assume that any measures to reduce deaths should always favour cyclists. And you must also realise that although you say you don't mind paying extra for your goods, a lot of others in the UK may not have the spare cash that you apparently have, and would certainly not want to have to pay more for everything they buy, just to enable you to have a lorry free ride into work.
We have to try and look at things from other peoples' points of view, maintain a dialogue, and leave no stone unturned in our quest to end these terrible tragedies.
Good post. Awaiting the tidal wave of idiots who construe any comments which in anyway promote a motorists view or something which mildly criticises cyclist to be anti-cycling troll work. They are, of course, welcome to their opinions no matter how far it gets them.
I think you're doing a really good job at that. I tend to come down strongly on the side of "the person creating the danger is the one with the onus to change and be restricted in their freedom/choice". However I do appreciate the points you make.
Mr Hogan-Howe should remember to keep his opinions to himself as he will just get slagged off by so called know-it-all's.
Jacknorell - Cant state this as fact on your occasion but if a film company want Police at the scene they pay the force for the use of the officers and the officers get paid overtime by the force - thats what happens in our force.
Cyclists, non? Or has that become a politically sensitive word nowadays?
Maybe they are inferring that some of the 'bike users' weren't competent enough to be described as 'cyclists'. More blaming the victim, eh?
Mmmm. Coffee and bananas.
As you are a lorry driver Neil your probably better clued up than me regards deliveries in London. I know for me. Our first lorry delivers stock at 5 am. There's another two after that. All before 8 am. Sometimes we get one at 9 pm. On my way to work (4am) I will pass various lorries tipping stock at different retailers. So there is no issue with that one. I think the big issue is that the lorries involved in many of these tragedies are from the construction industry. My brother does logistics in this area and he can only shift materials during the day. And that's where there needs work done.
As an aside. When you and your colleagues do the cycle awareness course. Do you get to ride round the streets or do you sit in a stuffy room like some of the training I have to go to?
Not sure what Mr Hogan-Howe is trying to say here. Yes all road users should follow the Highway Code, but there is a sense that he is victim blaming here. And he makes the obligatory reference to Red Light Jumping, even though I don't think there is any evidence that RLJ is a factor in the majority of cycling accidents.
Also interesting to note that pedestrian deaths are far higher than cycling deaths, yet this never gets mentioned by the authorities.
In 2011 77 pedestrians died, 16 cyclists, (and of the 16 cyclists 9 involved a lorry).
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-pedestrian-deaths-and-cycle...
Also the statement "....it's very difficult for the traffic engineers to second-guess that"
Is missing the point. If the infrastructure was well designed cyclists wouldn't be taking risks in vulnerable traffic environments.
Maybe he should sit down and watch the Groningen video and rethink his ideas.....
https://vimeo.com/76207227
if a terrorist attack killed 13 people what would happen? Is a life not a life. This guy is beyond words and is clearly not capable of doing his job. Which is to protect the public.
Sir Bernard can do something about this right now: Insist that his officers thoroughly investigate RTAs and recommend prosecution to the CPS whenever evidence supports it. That does not happen today.
Then the police can at least regain some trust from us, and hopefully we will start to see just how lousy the CPS is at gaining convictions.
Also, anti-social and intimidating driving needs to be patrolled, with fines & points levied for punishment passes, tail gating, etc.
Again, not happening. Maybe because road patrol police officers aren't exactly expected to patrol?
Today I saw two motorcycle officers working as guards on a film set in Hackney, thus off the road. These officers are probably our most traffic-safety-aware, and they should be doing what they do best: Patrol our roads and keep us safe. Not work as glorified security guards. The estate police car working the same event was probably more than enough.
Though it mystifies me why a film set needs police officers at all!
Jacknorell you write the most bigoted tosh. You clearly don't understand what goes on out in the real world and have no understanding of the law. The police do investigate serious accidents and where relevant recommend it to the CPS. Its in their job description.
Apart from the ad hominem attack on me accusing me of being a bigot... have you paid any attention whatsoever?
Or do you actually believe that a job description guarantees competency or actual carrying it out?
I'd like to live in your world. Unfortunately, I have to live in the one where all too often the police blames the victims for getting run over, or resist taking reports if they feel like it.
Having worked for them this rings true...
Reminds me of the time a vehicle proceed up a road with parked vehicles on one side squeezing me onto the opposite kerb and the car just happened to lose it's wing mirror as I was forced onto the pavement.
Ironically the "cyclist" witnessing behind me was the senior inspector for traffic at Devon and Cornwall. He tracked me down at the office and made me pay for the wing mirror or face repercussions.
I take exception to your extremely selective quoting and broad generalisations. I'm sure Stumpy loves the fact that you think police officers don't do their job.
I don't disagree with the fact that some officers are less than sympathetic to road traffic incidents involving cyclists at times - but don't throw the baby out with the bath water. In accidents where road traffic accidents are brought to the CPS who do you think sent them there? You apply the same sort of bigotry that would have cyclists all tarred as red light jumping idiots to your characterisation of the police.
This is ad hominem because you begun this when you decided to selectively quote me and feel that is was acceptable for you to tell me to hand in my drivers license, when you don't appear to have read or understood what I was saying and basically told me get off the website....that seemed a little ad hominem to me......
Mr Boris, obeying the rules doesn't seem to be the issue, it's the killing machines.
Perhaps someone famous needs to be killed before these killing machines will be reigned in.
"Equally, if you've got your own cycle, you've got to abide by the rules of the road and you've got to think about your own safety."
Catch 22.
Good report on cycling in London on last night's Newsnight. The report starts at 15.53;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03hn9r1/Newsnight_15_11_2013/
Interestingly in Paris, where they have more cyclists than London, they recorded precisely zero cycle-related deaths in 2012. In Paris lorry movements are restricted to non-peak hours and of course lorries account for about half of the deaths of London cyclists. Imagine that. With one sweep of Boris's pen he could probably HALVE the deaths of cyclists ... and make London a better place to live and work at the same time.
Better place to live and work for who?
Most places that lorries deliver to are only open during "normal" hours, presumably because all those workers have homes to go to, with friends and families to spend time with. It's also well known that "shift work" can affect peoples' health, draining precious NHS resources and possibly leading to statistically earlier deaths, maybe more deaths than occur as a result of these awful accidents we've seen in the last few days.
Certainly, if restrictions on driving were imposed, those restrictions would be bumping up against the current night time restrictions on many London lorry routes, and you'd almost guarantee that huge numbers of firms, already trying to compete in a global or national market place, would probably go to the wall.
I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but it would not have escaped anyone's notice that a reduction in deaths could also be achieved if cyclists were banned a peak periods, rather than trucks, or at least banned from those routes where conflict exists. So let's not clamour too much for lorry restrictions, in case someone at the top suddenly realises that a restriction on cyclists could achieve the same effect.
Banning trucks sounds like a good idea, but it's a very complex issue that needs careful consideration.
Ok, I'll consider it. Hmm ... done. Now lets do it and start saving lives.
Banning trucks is not a 'complex issue' at all. It's actually an incredibly simple one. HGV's operate at restricted times in no less than 14 European countries including Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Greece, Spain and Switzerland. Note that the restrictions mostly apply to the entire road network and are not just limited to specific cities.
An HGV is generally defined as a vehicle over 7.5 tonnes. Deliveries can still be made with vehicles up to that limit.
Btw, you seem to be under the illusion that HGV restrictions mean they can only operate during non-working hours. Actually it's often the opposite. It's usually the weekends and public holidays that are most sacrosanct.
Commercial businesses will quickly adapt to a change in the laws just as they did when the congestion charge was introduced. Yes, it is possible that some (weak) businesses may 'go to the wall' however their passing will simply provide new opportunities for others to exploit. The same number of bananas will still be eaten and the same number of coffees will still be drunk in London whoever is supplying them and however they are delivered.
So you want to mix it with HGV drivers, all doing increasingly awkward shifts, with the associated increases in poor sleep, heart disease, cancer, abnormal metabolic responses and and an increased risk of accidents whilst out on the road? Don't believe me? Just do a little research before you arbitrarily dismiss the affect on the health of the HGV driver behind you on the road. It will make you very nervous.
That's a little unfair, since we have seven day trading and more of a trend for "just in time" stock replenishment.
You could replace one artic with twenty vans but would you be happy with seeing that many vans on London's streets, being driven in most cases by drivers with just a car licence? Would you be happy with the congestion, the pollution, the cost of depots needed to "decant" the goods on the outskirts of the city, and the cost of everything you buy being raised to pay for the additional logistics? How many people do you know who would be happy with a substantial rise in the cost of living?
That depends on how much of the additional costs are added to those bananas and coffees.
It's a strange situation to have a foot in both camps, as a cyclist and an HGV driver, but my hunch is that, with the need to provide goods for an ever expanding population, it's unlikely that you will have a phallanx of lorries parked up, just so you can have a slightly easier ride during the rush hour. We need to campaign for more realistic changes, such as a 20mph speed limit, segregated cycle routes, and "quiet routes".