This morning I had the misfortune to witness a car being driven into a cyclist (well, I at least had the fortune not to be that cyclist: the incident occurred on a route that until this week I’d been using daily).
Fortunately, although he hit the deck fairly hard and sustained some cuts and bruises, the rider was not seriously injured. But the design of the road at that point is very clearly dangerous, and it’s a design that is being planned elsewhere.
If The Nice Way Code did one thing, it at least focused a number of people’s minds on the issue that public perception doesn’t match up with facts.
Time, perhaps, to take a step back and view The Nice Way Code in the context of this, not to berate the Code itself (“see someone berating The Nice Way Code, think flogging a dead horse”, as they might themselves say), but to ask how its perfectly reasonable supposed aims of improving inter-modal relationships on shared roads could actually be achieved.
In Bolton last week, Greater Manchester Police were out and about having a bit of a jolly old crackdown on cycling.
Well, ok. Maybe it’s fine. But let’s see how it fits into the bigger picture.
The law told us one thing this week: You’re really going to have to work hard if you want to get banned for life.
Every week the law – along with those who enforce and apply it – teaches us things about its attitude to roads, vehicles, and – most importantly – the people who use them.
So, provided I can muster sufficient time and energy on at least a semi-regular basis, this is the first in a series of digests about those things. I mostly won’t go into too much detail (anything that warrants it will get its own post) so consider it a whistlestop tour of what’s hot in the world of institutionalised and systemic crappy attitudes.
Ready? Let’s go.
I thought I’d make a home for the parody posters from the @NicewayCodeGB account. They’re appallingly-drawn three-minute doodles but hopefully they’re amusing and serve to satirise some of the flaws in The Nice Way Code.
I’m going to explain them as we go. I’d hope they don’t need explaining (you know what they say: if you have to explain it, it’s not funny) but occasionally I just have an urge to make sure a point is rammed home.
So, in chronological order, here we go.
Last week on the Nice Way Code website, in response to the bizarre half-launch, someone called Neil speculated that “it’s going to get even more patronising and even worse“; to which, someone on behalf of the campaign responded: “You’ll have to wait and see I suppose. Remember – you haven’t actually seen the campaign yet!”
Well, now we can see it (at least, we can see two TV ads; there may well be more to come). So let’s take a look.
Beyond the Kerb 