Given the tragic death of another cyclist today, we spoke to Christopher Snelling, head of urban logistics policy at the FTA, to get his view on the road safety debate.
Q. Should the transport industry be doing more?
A. The logistics industry has spent a lot of money [on the problem] and will need to carry on doing that in the future, with continued improvements to vehicles and upgraded driver training. We are always looking for continual improvement - until nobody dies on the roads we should all be looking for continual improvement. It's not about implementing one set of things and then it's over. In the future the industry is going to need to spend more to improve its safety record. It's already doing a lot, but it will need to do more.
What the last week or so has demonstrated - and where a lot of the questions now are - is that the quality of cycling infrastructure is just as important, as obviously, a lot of these deaths have centred around particular pieces of infrastructure. It's raising questions about the complete run of these routes and how safe they are. That's something for the public authorities to think about.
Q. Should mayor revisit cycle superhighway plans?
A. We're in support of them in principle, particularly where it is segregated - we think that is the safest way to go. I think there are questions to be asked about encouraging cyclists to use routes that maybe aren't quite ready yet. If you have a segregated route for part of a journey, you can be encouraged to go on it because it looks good, and suddenly you find you're at a non-segregated roundabout and it's much more difficult. We'd like to see them get the infrastructure right before they encourage more cyclists to start using it. And I think more work could be done on that to get superhighways up to standard, without taking too much road space away.
Q. What about cyclist awareness/behaviour?
A. In general, we think a greater safety awareness by cyclists - in terms of how to behave around HGVs, would be massively beneficial. We'd recommend any adult going to cycle on the streets of a city like London should take cycle training, including an awareness of how to behave safely around HGVs, in the same way as we'd recommend to our members that their drivers should have vulnerable road user or urban driver training.
Q. Situation outside London - any concerns there?
A. It's not completely clear what the trend is in London. It's just a point about statistics - when you're dealing with a relatively small sample, it will fluctuate from year to year. If next year the number of fatalities were to fall, we shouldn't assume it's job done;and if it's gone up this year, it isn't necessarily indicative of some change in the industry or some change on the roads. You have to look at the trend for some years to see what's going on. But we're not seeing any particular changes outside London.
The concern is what's coming - we're expecting to see more cyclists on the roads in the years ahead and if we don't get it right - all of us - then we could see an increasing problem in other parts of the UK.
See our entry on road casualties for more on the accident breakdown by vehicle type.