Lorries

I wrote a post some time ago on the design problem that seemed to be posing an unreasonable level of danger to cyclists - that of lorry cab designs.

red-lorry-yellow-lorry-dead-lorry

The point I was making that the cyclists are not to blame for the problem, even though safety campaigns are invariably aimed at them - a cut and dried case of the "victim blaming" typical in this kind of situation. I would go further and say that often the drivers of these vehicles are victims too, as they are put under extraordinary pressures as a direct consequence of the design of the vehicle they are often expected to manoeuvre quickly and safely through crowded urban streets.

If you applied basic health and safety thinking (of the kind that really has made a genuine difference to the way the construction industry operates in this country) to this problem, the design of the cabs themselves would be an obvious starting point for remedial action. It is sad that so many major construction companies are not extending their health and safety obligations resulting as a consequence of their operations beyond the gates of their site compounds, and insisting that lorries used in crowded urban areas are better designed.

I am therefore delighted to see that the London Cycling Campaign has come up with visuals that show exactly the kind of thing I had in mind, as reported in The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/mar/19/cyclist-friendly-lorry-design-accidents

and as noted on the LCC website itself:

http://lcc.org.uk/pages/safer-lorries-safer-cycling

The biggest problem here for haulage companies and the extremely safety-aware major contractors that employ them is that these visuals look so entirely reasonable and sensible.

In a civilised world where people in cities come first, surely those in charge of governance would insist that the brutish and dangerous lorries were tamed before being allowed through the city gates? If you want to drive here, drive something safer.

Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry, Dead Lorry

A bogus article in The Guardian about getting cyclists to sit in a lorry cab, to better understand the hard life of a lorry driver in seeing cyclists, and then putting lorry drivers on a saddle to see the world from a different viewpoint is the perfect journalistic conceit:

1. Repeat what someone told you without any conceptual questioning of the principles;
2. Secretly recognise that you will polarise views completely amongst your audience;
3. Stand back and admire your blooming comment/page view statistics as irate readers vent their spleens.

As I found myself thinking at the recent Cycling Embassy of Great Britian Policy Bash, there are generally not simple solutions to complex problems. However, media debate and politics is just not capable of the sustained and difficult thinking often required - I refer you to the idea of stripping Fred Goodwin of his knighthood, as a way of reforming the banking system. Not exactly Nietzsche is it.

What the cycling blog of a national newspaper should be doing is calling this kind of lazy thinking to account. Whilst there is not a simple solution to the lorry problem, there is a simple philosophical position one can adopt when considering the issue. If a lorry driver, despite being highly trained and not setting out to kill anyone, is capable of causing death and injury simply due to the poorly designed machine he is operating, then the machine is not fit for purpose. Dragging cyclists into the frame and demanding that they be aware of the blind spot of a lorry or suffer the consequences is dangerous, unhelpful and just about the most counter-productive thing to say if you want to be encouraging cycling.

Of all people, the cycling blog of The Guardian ought to be the ones pointing that out.