May
6
Category: 
|Danger lane: are new rules making cycling riskier?-TimesOnline
The CTC makes no mention of this on its website, however.
Under the proposed alterations laid before parliament the new Highway Code will require cyclists to stick to cycle paths and lanes rather than using the road. Cycling groups warn that many cycle lanes increase the risks they face, and being forced to use them would take away their members’ right to use their initiative and react to changing road conditions.
The debate centres on amendments to the wording of the new document, due to be published this summer. In the version drafted in 1999 cyclists are required to use cycle routes “where practicable”; in the latest version they are required to use them “wherever possible”.
The change appears minor, but to cyclists it is the latest in a series of measures to corral them off the main roads and further evidence that the government’s cycle policy is flawed. “If the new document goes through unamended it will be the single most anticycling thing that this government has done since it’s been in power,” says Roger Geffen, campaigns manager for the Cyclists’ Touring Club (CTC), the national cycling organisation. “It will be a catastrophe.”
