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Sunday 11 August 2013

Silly season for pedestrians?

The amount of times that I had to either ring my bike bell frantically or slam on the brakes to avoid pedestrian collisions are endless. I have definitely stopped counting.

The counting rocketed sky high when I started cycling in London but do also tick over when cycling closer to home. Mostly pedestrians do the safe thing and look left and right and then cross the road but I have find that a large percentage just cross without looking. Whatever happened to rules taught at a young age which say look left, then right and then left again before crossing? It is almost like those are made for the young generation and now that you are older - you are invincible. Searching for this via a search engine resulted in over 8,080,000 hits.

I recently admired a brand new electric car. As thoughts go, mine wandered from me being on my bike swerving to avoid a near collision with a non-looking pedestrian to wondering what will happen to these non-looking pedestrians when the electric car becomes more familiar on our busy roads, especially the city roads where it makes a lot of sense to drive (one of those)? I know there were talk about making the electric car more 'sounding like a car' because at the moment it is very quiet!

So if a pedestrian just walks off the pavement to cross the road, he or she might want to have a bicycle approaching them rather than an electric car as I think your chances of getting less hurt are better with a bike than with a noiseless electric car!

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