Following the Court result the week before last bicycle riders of Brisbane and Queensland have been called to action like I have not seen for some time. Following the court decision both the Brisbane CBD BUG & Amy Gillett Foundation made vocal the need for a minimum passing distance of 1m when a Motor Vehicle overtakes a bicycle. This was further pushed when Safe Cycling Australia with the help of MP Bruce Flegg launch a Queensland Parliamentary E-petition calling for Minimum of 1.5m passing distance. As of this morning the E-petition has reached 4100 signatures, if you are a Queensland resident please sign this.
Due to the Court Decision the CBD BUG to further highlight the current failure in the law last Friday organised an awareness ride with the help of the Amy Gillett Foundation. It is my understanding the CBD BUG put a lot of effort into getting this to be the best it could be. While the official title was "A Metre Matters Awareness Ride" it was unofficially named the "Ride for Richard" after the poor bloke that was killed. Luckily the family of Richard for lack of a better term gave there blessing to the ride.
The ride to have relevance was held out in Kenmore in the mid west of Brisbane between the Kenmore Roundabout and the Western Freeway/Bikeway on Moggill Road. Moggill Road is sadly where he lost his life. Like many Brisbane arterials this corridor is not a friendly place to get to by bike, the last kilometre has no shoulder and is dangerously narrow. Disspit this there was over 65 bikes gathered in the shopping centre car park bikes to take part in the ride as well as MP Bruce Flegg before the start. While as you imagine there was the Lycra on road bikes, there was also folder bikes, Mountain Bikes, E-bikes, city bikes & even a velomobile. Naturally this meant as well as Lycra many people were wearing normal everyday cloths. This has to be said is an indicator of how important this change is desired. Even more riders apparently joined just as the ride began as they had been delayed getting to the meeting point. The ride went off without a hitch apart from the group breaking up a little. This was always going to happen with such a mix of riders. I have to say thank you to the Lady in the 4WD that held up traffic to allow the group to get off the Western Freeway onramp lane and back onto the Moggill Road traffic lane.
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| sourced from www.smh.com.au |
With all this the event did get some much needed media attention including Brisbane Times, ABC Local "squeaky wheel" and Channel 7. Sadly Channel 7 when with the "Us Verse Them" angle and asked some "Choice" motor vehicle drivers about the concept. Never the less they did add the like to the e-petition on there website.
Apart from that lets hope the laws are changed because they need to. Currently BQ is deafeningly silent on the issue but with this amount noise and surely they also will get behind the push. We need the law changed. While it is true very few cyclists are killed the way Richard died inadequate passing distance is a major source of intimidation and scares many off riding. If there was a true minimum passing distance it people would feel more reassured when riding & if something does happen there is more tangible outcomes.
Once again I feel for the family of Richard.
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