From Peter Hitchens’s blog, Daily Mail
“I think our roads are statistically safer largely because soft targets, particularly child cyclists, have almost entirely retreated from them. But the roads are not really safer. It’s just that people have learned to avoid them unless they themselves go out in armour, and have narrowed their lives as a result.” – Peter Hitchens
On Sunday morning a woman rushed out of a side road in a quiet Oxford suburb, violently knocked me off my bicycle and mangled the machine I was riding.
Quite understandable, some of you may think. It’s the only sort of treatment I would understand. But in fact the person involved had nothing against me, didn’t know me, and was quick to apologise for the hurt (even quicker and more comprehensive, once she had been given quite a large piece of my mind). She also paid for the damage to be repaired.
But, as some of you will have guessed, there was another element in all this – an element which makes an apparently shocking and inexplicable event make perfect sense.
My assailant was driving a car.
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