This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Bad motoring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
“Why was he riding on the motorway?”
A cyclist was killed by a hit-and-run driver in Newcastle yesterday. The ‘accident’ (which it wasn’t, of course) happened on the A19, a busy dual carriageway close to the Silverlink shopping centre.
It’s a road I’ve cycled on many times, the Silverlink centre is somewhere I often cycle to, and I use the busy Coast Road to get there. The A19 is an ‘A’ road, ie busy, but it’s perfectly legal for a cyclist to be on that road. When I heard about the fatal ‘accident’ I felt for the cyclist but I also knew some drivers would blame the victim because the road is a busy one, and, so the thinking goes, cyclists shouldn’t be there.
And so it has turned out.
Commenting on the story in the Northern Echo, a poster called Kathleen Boden wrote:
Why on earth was he riding a bicycle on the motorway.If this is legal it should be stopped! The driver of the car showed reprehensible behaviour in not stopping but the young man put himself in a very dangerous situation considering motorway speeds.
Kathleen Boden was duly flamed but then family and friends of the 23-year old killed started posting on the forum. If the postings are genuine, and they very much seem to be, you’ll read them and weep.
