Journalism and Cycling 2: the difficult second album

Shocking. Unfortunately for him he's in for another shock when he discovers that dangerous driving is a crime and as it will be up to the Gardai to initiate (through the DPP) criminal charges, it'll almost certainly go nowhere. Hope he has better luck with a civil claim.

I generally have good experiences with drivers on the roads when you consider the sheer number you come into contact (not literally!) with on a 60/ 90 min commute. The good ones almost always outweigh the bad ones. People are generally decent - or at least there are more decent people than asshats. It's surprising though, given the attitude of so many in authority... Gardai, RSA etc etc. Constant victim blaming and fear mongering.

Sobering (Post edited to remove clickbait link... )

"Figures from An Garda Síochána show that 112 people have died on the roads this year, an increase of 14 from this time last year and 28 compared to pre-pandemic figures for 2019.

The figures show that 41 drivers, 27 pedestrians, 22 passengers and 15 motorcyclists have died on Irish roads this year."

That's an add for Aviva dressed up as a meaningful survey; its the opinion of 1000 random motorists.

T

+1, a dangerous driving charge as rare as hen's teeth it appears when a cyclist is involved. Some shocking cases over the years downgraded and even dismissed.

The only such conviction I'm aware of recently is of the electrician who tailgated an unmarked garda car through the port tunnel in which no one was hurt or killed so where there's a will there's a way but that ethos still needs to be transferred to cases involving two wheel road users.

It seems to be getting more common - possibly driven by the likes of the Indo who seem to scour the internet for those kind of clickbait 'reports'. I should have just copied the relevant statistics rather than drive traffic to them.

They were cheapest for me this year, but only after I went online and applied as a 'new customer'. Their renewal quote was higher than both my existing policy with them and the new quote I got online from them. The whole system is a scam. You waste hours every year dealing with insurance companies just for the sake of not getting ripped off.

Very true.

That concrete has barely set, the works pictured in the tweet was only done in the last 3 months and now they tearing it up so as to add car stacking capacity for an additional 2/3 cars on the primary City bus corridor in Galway City.

I've seen representatives doing a lot of presentations/panels and pushing for just transition and climate justice. They seemed to appear over Covid, or perhaps just became much more active.

Four more dead in Clonmel last night, including three Leaving Cert girls, following on from the dreadful Debs crash in Monaghan a few weeks back.

Without commenting on any particular incident, is seat belt use going out of fashion these days. Some of the recent incidents looked like the kind of crash that you'd be very likely to survive, even with significant injuries, if wearing a seat belt.

Can you imagine the uproar and calls for action there'd be if a bunch of feuding gangsters had caused 155 deaths and almost 1300 serious injuries in 2022? I grew up in Donegal and have written here before about the toxic mix of speed and youthful sense of invulnerability that sees families - my own extended one and that of friends/neighbours included - left in mourning. Despite solutions in terms of higher barrier of entry/enforcement/actual consequences being achievable, there continues to be a malaise to do anything about it in official Ireland - the cynic in me looking at the correlation between voters and drivers. As for enforcement, I'll cut the Guards some slack and say that with the best will in the world it must be dispiriting to waste time bringing dangerous drivers to court only for them to produce some sob story and be let off with a slap on the wrist by some gimp of a judge.

I know little at this stage about the circumstances of the horrible tragedy in Clonmel, but what I've read sounds depressingly familiar, and my heart goes out to the families

Having seen how blatantly people ignored the bus/taxi only lane at Fairview park when it was under construction, and there was a detour that was like 5 mins if even, busconnects could be a massive failure unless they have cameras for enforcement.

At one stage the construction workers were trying to stop private cars from being in the lane, because the Gardai weren’t arsed to enforce it