Chris Boardman, Olympic track champion, speaks in the Evening Standard, against the lack of any visible action by Johnson to make cycling safer:
“In order to make cycling in London viable Boris Johnson really needs to make some ballsy decisions, and now is the time to do it.
“At the moment cars have priority and that has to change.” Boardman has proposed re-painting road markings to give cyclists more room and giving them two-way access on one-way roads.
Kensington and Chelsea council is already testing a scheme for cyclists to be exempt from one-way road restrictions after hundreds of cyclists were found to be flouting the rules. Boardman wants to see an expansion of this kind of scheme across London.
He said: “People just do not feel safe on the roads. We need to completely rethink the allocation of road space, and it is more than making cycle lanes wider.”
The cyclist standing on ice in the way of an oncoming car is a great example of the sort of situation where subjective safety plummets – and along with it the cycling rate.
This is precisely what has been done in the Netherlands. Roads are simply not the same at all. Subjective Safety is very important to get people to ride bikes:
http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2008/09/three-types…