Nuxx:4e373e25$0$2949$fa0fcedb@news.zen.co.uk

Path: num2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!num1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!number.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!goblin2!goblin1!goblin.stu.neva.ru!newsreader4.netcologne.de!news.netcologne.de!zen.net.uk!hamilton.zen.co.uk!reader02.news.zen.co.uk.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <4e373e25$0$2949$fa0fcedb@news.zen.co.uk> From: Nuxx Bar  Newsgroups: uk.rec.cycling Subject: Re: Taking the lane in London Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2011 01:00:37 +0100 References:    <99opuiF1c6U1@mid.individual.net> Lines: 33 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:5.0) Gecko/20110624 Thunderbird/5.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <99opuiF1c6U1@mid.individual.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Organization: Zen Internet NNTP-Posting-Host: 61a20f3b.news.zen.co.uk X-Trace: DXC=hV@]TVUbk6Ji>_65]9;HNIYjZGX^207PK`_c1YQ<7S2@IFYk > Although clearly contrary to the beliefs of some, there is no recognised > scientific body of knowledge on road use.

I thought Brake were such a body? It's clear that they use rigorous, unbiased academic processes to ascertain what their policies should be. Thank goodness they're not a bunch of dogmatic car-hating nutters who are funded by "safety" camera manufacturers, and who recruit the families of road collision victims (who of course are road safety experts, and are bound to be impartial, dispassionate and not easily led because they want to "do something" on behalf of their late loved ones) as mouthpieces.

Then there's the Campaign for "Better" Transport (who used to be Transport 2000), who again, are completely focussed on a noble scientific quest to find the very best road safety policies, and aren't in any way just an advocacy group for the bus and train companies who finance them: any anti-car policies which they just happen to come up with are there because they are genuinely going to save lives, and likewise, when they oppose, say, dualling the A9, then that must be because (contrary to what any reasonable person would think) doing that is not going to improve road safety, and their opposition couldn't possibly be anything to do with the fact that it would also make driving easier.

You are, however, correct that the likes of the ABD and Safe Speed know absolutely nothing about road safety, and everything that they say must be dismissed out of hand without discussion (purely because it doesn't make sense from a road safety standpoint; it's definitely nothing to do with the fact that their policies tend to help, rather than hinder, evil, selfish motorists, because only a Lou Knee would put whether or not a policy helped motorists above whether or not it improved safety).