The run up to Christmas saw a large amount of news coverage of the number of cycling deaths on the roads in Britain, particularly in the capital. It is a sad fact that numbers have been on the rise and there have been increased calls for action to be taken to try and prevent the needless deaths occurring on our roads. By way of illustration of the negative reputation cycling has now, in London in particular, the Met Commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe recently said that he definitely wouldn’t get on a bike in order to get around the city.
Operation Safeway was launched to try to help tackle what many saw as something of a crisis on the roads of Britain, particularly in the larger cities. The numbers of cyclists have increased dramatically in recent years, partially thanks to initiatives such as the Boris Bikes that were designed to get people cycling rather than driving even where they didn’t have a bike of their own. Of course with there being no driving test to pass in order to take to two wheels, some of those who end up on the roads do turn out to be a danger, both to themselves and to those around them, and what Operation Safeway was designed to do was to try to give a wakeup call to those using the roads in London who weren’t doing so safely.
In the first three days of Operation Safeway in London more than 2,000 motorists and cyclists were fined. 1,400 of these were drivers who were penalised for offences such as driving whilst on the phone or going through red lights. 755 cyclists were hit with a fine for reckless behaviour like jumping red lights, cycling on the pavements and cycling in the dark either with no lights or with the wrong lights. The figures are quite astounding for just three days and show that there is a serious issue in London with the care that road users are taking both with respect to their own safety and the effect that their recklessness is likely to be having on those around them.
The operation ran between the end of November and Christmas with some 155 road junctions being monitored by some 2,500 officers from the Traffic Command and Safer Transport Command division. According to Detective Chief Superintendent Glyn Jones of the MPS Road Traffic Unit: “Our aim was to have a sharp and intense period of enforcement and education which would quickly prompt people to behave more safely on the roads.” He has since said that the intense period of monitoring has actually had a rather dramatic impact with less fixed penalty notices having to be issued as the operation progressed. He also made the point that there have been no cyclist deaths since the operation began, which is quite an achievement considering that it got under way at a time when there had been five deaths in just nine days.
Although Operation Safeway has now come to an end, what it does prove is that we are capable of cutting down the numbers of fatalities on our roads simply by being less careless, which is a good lesson for all road users, whether on two wheels or four.