The Department of Transport (DfT) has today made a series of important announcements relating to cycling. They have indicated that they are:

• Consulting on proposed new offences of causing death or serious injury while cycling and changes to the existing offences of dangerous and careless cycling.
• Reviewing parts of the Highway Code, including measures to counter the dangerous practice of ‘close passing’ by motorists when overtaking cyclists and other vulnerable road users.
• Commissioning the Cycle Proofing Working Group to develop national guidance and best practice for cycling and walking infrastructure.
• Providing £1 million to support pathfinder demonstration projects for repairing and upgrading sections of the National Cycle Network.

The proposed changes to cycling offences are a response to the death of Kim Briggs, who was killed by a cyclist in 2016. She died after being hit by Charlie Alliston, who was riding a ‘fixie’ bike that didn’t have a front brake, which is a legal requirement for use on the public highway.  Alliston was sentenced to 18 months in youth detention after being convicted of the 1861 offence of “wanton and furious driving”, which was seen by many as being disproportionately lenient and exposed the outdated nature of the existing legislation. The DfT is consulting on proposals for a new offence equivalent to causing death by careless or dangerous driving to be introduced for dangerous cycling.  The consultation runs for 12 weeks and closes on 12 August 2018.

The DfT is also looking at updating parts of the Highway Code to counter the dangerous practice of ‘close passing’. This will include a review of rule 163 of the Highway Code which says that motorists should ‘give motorcyclists, cyclists and horse riders at least as much room as you would when overtaking a car’. Many people feel that this advice is unclear and with close pass incidents becoming more frequent on our congested roads, there is a pressing need to tackle the issue by setting and promoting absolute standards as has been done in other countries. The ‘close pass’ initiative pioneered by West Midlands Police and promoted by Cycling UK advocates a safe overtaking distance of at least 1.5m. This has been shown to be highly effective with significant reductions in the number of reported close pass incidents and the number of cyclists casualties.

Government has previously announced close pass training materials and support for police forces. However, with limited staff resources, close pass initiatives can only be deployed in a handful of areas. For example, Thames Valley Police and the Hampshire Constabulary are currently only targeting Oxford, Portsmouth and Southampton, which are the areas with the highest numbers of cyclist casualties. We would like to see money for more specialist road safety officers to roll this out across the whole of the Thames Valley.

As part of the Cycling and Walking Safety Review, the government has commissioned the Cycle Proofing Working Group to develop national guidance and best practice for cycling and walking infrastructure. Existing government guidance is widely seen as being outdated and inadequate, lagging behind European best practice and that produced by Transport for London.  Although we support the commitment to update national guidance and best practice advice, we feel that this will be of limited value unless it is accompanied by significant and ring-fenced funding that his allocated directly to local authorities.

Finally while we welcome the announcement that £1 million will be provided to support the pathfinder demonstration projects for repairing and upgrading sections of the National Cycle Network, we feel that this is woefully inadequate to address the problems with the NCN.  This token gesture will only tackle a handful of demonstration projects scattered across the UK and it would not even be sufficient to address the existing problems affecting the network in West Berkshire, where bank erosion and surfacing issues have made NCN4 virtually unusable by cyclists for much of its length. We would like to see a sustained commitment to significant investment in order to address the backlog of maintenance issues that are blighting the NCN.

We would be interested to hear the views of SPOKES members and other West Berkshire cyclists on the above issues, so please do get in touch and let us know what you think.