The reality with any major issue is that it only truly touches you when it comes close to home. However regularly you may cycle on Britain’s city streets and however aware you are of the risks of doing so, it is not until you have seen one of your closest friends and colleagues stretchered off the tarmac from beneath the wheels of a lorry only yards from the office that the vulnerability of cyclists hits home.
Mary Bowers is a news reporter at The Times. She joined the paper as a graduate trainee in September 2009, though her beaming smile and effusive personality were common sights around the office from previous roles as a researcher on the comment and foreign desks.
With a passion for social affairs investigations and witty features, she has a writing style that is as distinctive as her sharp, quirky dress sense. She also has a remarkable singing voice, and it is an honour to have been one of those lucky enough to perform with her on several occasions in the folk clubs of London.
Yet it is only by a hair’s breadth that we are still able to talk about Mary in the present tense. Her survival to this point, now almost three months since her accident in London at 9.30am on Friday, November 4, is down to the passers-by who stopped and called the emergency services.
It is down to the paramedics who arrived on the scene within three minutes, to the fire crews who cut Mary and her mangled bike from beneath the wheels of the lorry, and to the doctors and nurses in the intensive care unit of one of the city’s busiest hospitals. But Mary cannot thank them herself. Not yet. Not for a long time. Possibly never. Because, though she is stable, Mary is still not conscious and remains in a trauma unit. Her broken legs, arm and pelvis are slowly healing, but other damage sustained during complications in her treatment, almost inevitable after so traumatic an injury, will be far harder to overcome, though she is making slow progress.
There are also people Mary would not want to thank. There are the authorities who have neglected to ensure that junctions like those on The Highway in Wapping — or countless others where cyclists have been maimed and killed in Britain — are made safe for cars, lorries and cyclists to co-exist safely.
Mary, a news reporter, would be first to ask why it is not mandatory for lorries driving on city streets to be fitted with sensors and mirrors to pick up cyclists in their blind spots. Or why training for cyclists and drivers on how to share the road responsibly is so poor. Or why some junctions are so dangerous that jumping a red light can actually be a safer option than lining up alongside HGVs at the lights like a racetrack starting grid. Or why London trails so far behind cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen in terms of the infrastructure and legislation to protect vulnerable cyclists and to help the drivers who are trying to avoid them.
But such questions are not a priority at the moment for Mary’s sister, Laura Fawcett, whose constant support by Mary’s bedside has been a source of strength not only to Mary, but also to the huge circle of friends, colleagues and loved ones who are guarding her in their thoughts.
Laura said: “I’m angry that the accident happened and that it was even possible for it to happen. Mary’s nurses said to me that, if I’d seen what they see all the time in intensive care, I would never cycle again. It is just so random and cruel, but it feels like so many of these things can be prevented by increasing awareness and changing road structures.
“Mary is such a loving person and a real people-person, which attracts so many people to her and is why so many people she had come to know around the world are concerned about the tragedy and horror of what happened.”
There are many families who are not able to visit their loved ones in hospital, because they did not survive. “My husband had a human right to cycle to work and come back home again alive,” said Debbie Dorling, whose husband Brian was killed in October last year on his way to work.
As a point of comparison: since 2001, 576 British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq; 1,275 cyclists died on British streets. The latest data shows there were 1,850 deaths or serious injuries in the first half of 2011, a 12 per cent rise on the year before. Britain leads the world in competitive cycling; it is time that we did the same for the cyclists on our streets.
Drivers and cyclists need to realise that co-existing safely benefits everyone, in terms of public health, traffic, pollution, and congestion on our roads, trains and buses.
The Times is launching a cycle safety campaign not simply to call for safer roads, but to outline exactly how that can be achieved, in a way that will hold transport authorities and politicians to account. Too many cyclists have died on the streets of Britain. Too many families have lost their sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, husbands and wives.
It is time for that to change. (NO LINK)
.