woodstock road , speeding cars

Wed 4 Mar 2009, 17:02

Yes, please don't compare me to Igor because I may quite rightly get offended!

Geoff: you obviously haven't read my post fully, because in the last paragraph I took pains to point out that some cyclists (including myself) cycle too fast, thus making sure that I was deliberately not aligning myself purely with the cycle lobby. As I've said on this forum several times before, the worst road accident I have ever had came when I was run over by a cyclist so I am certainly not a blinkered apologist for all cyclists, good or bad.

I admit I was being a little provocative when I mentioned roadkill but I don't think I was talking complete nonsense. In recent years, numerous creatures (cats, rabbits, hares, pheasants, squirrels, even on one occasion what I think might have been a water vole) have run across the road in front of me when I have been out cycling. I have never hit any of these creatures. Why? Because I was only travelling at about 15-20 mph and thus was able to brake or swerve in time to avoid them. On average, cars travel much faster than bikes and thus are more likely to hit animals because the driver's reaction time is necessarily longer than that of a cyclist. I would have thought that was an incontrovertible fact. If everyone drove around Oxfordshire in a milkfloat (and what a fantastically surreal sight that would be by the way!) then far fewer animals would be killed than at present.

I brought up the issue of roadkill because I couldn't help noticing that there seems to be far more of it in West Oxfordshire than in other parts of the county where I have lived (and cycled extensively). I fully accept that most collisions between cars and animals are pure accidents but I also believe that some of them are probably caused by motorists driving too fast. Helen, when you said that animals "do not take steps to wear visible clothing at night, do not follow the green cross code, use pedestrian crossings, or look out for cars" then neither do some children and that was partly the point I was trying to make. I accept though that I shouldn't have brought pheasants into the debate. As we've discussed on here before, they are the most spectacularly brainless birds known to mankind and I would imagine are very hard to avoid hitting in a car. I have also been the passenger in a car when a particularly determined member of the 13th Oxfordshire Kamikaze Pigeon Squadron decided to dive headfirst into the bonnet of my friend's car, with inevitably terminal consequences.

Finally, in answer to Helen's question "Would it be possible to have a rational, reasoned and impersonal discussion on this forum?" I think that, sadly, the answer is an emphatic "No" because a small minority of posters will simply not permit it. A shame.