This is a really bad week on Bristol's roads, with two children, one 15, one 11 killed by hit and run drivers, as well as someone on a bike injured by another hit-and-run incident. A trend perhaps? It's too early to say. What is clear is that there is a single unified cause: a car. And there seems to be a unified decision by the drivers that the best thing to do is run off. Perhaps the drivers felt they could get away with it, or maybe there was enough alcohol in their blood that they didn't want a breath or blood test at the scene of the accident. Certainly when someone tried to run off from a car crash we were reporting on, alcohol was probably a cause of both the crash and them trying to run.
Everyone in the cycling/walking/street activist community will be pretty unhappy about this -as will, presumably, be the police and other emergency services. Every death of a pedestrian or a cyclist represents a failure of everyone's efforts. Yet what can you do if some people in the city are going to drive round in big metal boxes?
- It would be useful to know if (enforced) 20 mph speed limits would have saved lives. That would make for a better argument to have wide-area 20 mph zones, instead of leaving the main roads at 30. In particular, would Eastfield Road -the narrow hilly route between Westbury and Horfield, have counted as a main road?
- The Evening Post needs to keep an eye on the comment sections of any article involving cars crashing with bikes or pedestrians. The paper has put a lot of effort into pushing a bikes-are-the-enemy theme, and whenever something like this happens, the comments by some of the readers are appalling. They do eventually delete some of the comments, but by the time they do it's much later, when the damage has been done.
- In fact, we wonder if maybe it is time for the E.P to back from its bikes-are-the-enemy theme, as it doesn't appear to be true. The vehicle that kills people on pavements is called a motor car.
- When we look at the traffic logs of the web site, news of someone being killed on our streets brings a lot of traffic to this site. We'd rather that people didn't get killed out there; so that people didn't have to go to the web to get news about another tragedy. That web traffic is something to mourn.
- There's a good case for setting up a serious web site alongside this one. It's hard to mix satire that argues in favour of helmets and high-viz clothes for pedestrians with reporting the death of people walking down the pavement. Something that carry's the city's cycling news and events and not much else. Volunteers to help with this would be welcome.
All scheduled postings that were indended to be entertaining have been postponed for a week. There's nothing funny to say.