Now that they have introduced new laws to punish death/injury by dangerous cycling it's only a matter of time before registration and insurance will be required to cycle on the roads. The playing field will be levelled then and there will be a raft of drivers reporting cyclist for cycling with undue care and attention. Then we will hear a different story no doubt. I see just as many bad cyclists as i do drivers, especially in the tight roads where we live.
As with so much performative legislation and governance by the present incumbents of no.10 this is all going to come with a shed load of unintended consequences.
Firstly on insurance, those who seem to get the blood pressure raging the most are those wearing lycra, I would suspect that probably 99% of those already have insurance via a multitude of sources (be that personal insurance, membership of a club, membership of Cycling UK, British Cycling etc), what it will absolutely clobber is the bloke riding his bike to work or little Johnny riding his bike to school or wanting to go out and do tricks on his BMX with his mates.
Registration could possibly be a good idea, but considering how many thousands of un registered motors and unlicensed drivers are knocking about (estimated that over a million vehicles are driven uninsured or unlicensed daily on our roads) its just going to vastly increase the burden on a system that just doesn't work as it stand.
Thirdly its gonna lead to a hell of a lot more cyclists having camera's and reporting close passes etc, I don't ride with one now (would have been handy to have had one when the lorry driver who didn't know how long his wagon was hit me and put me on the verge, crushing my hand!) but would sure as dammit be buying one if this half arsed law comes into effect.
An ex traffic copper noted on Twitter the other day that actually if they bring this to the fore it potentially has a side effect that the drop in what would be defined as the "dangerous" charging thresholds to accommodate & make the legislation effective could then see hundreds more drivers jailed, bearing in mind that at present if you hit and kill a pedestrian on a bike (and are found to be at fault) you tend to do jail time (been two in last 12 years, both done time), motorists rarely do so if you are planning to level up the system, its gonna have to go the other way.
Long and short there are shit cyclists and shit drivers, but one are considerably more likley to injure and kill pedestrians so why are we wasting legislative time and money concentrating on the former (this is a rhetorical question, we all know why, its gets column inches inn the Mail and Telegraph and gets the party faithful's juices flowing) rather than using the existing laws better to manage the latter.
