Oh, it was only a tap. I probably should have started off at the lights more quickly. These were the first words my shaken housemate told me on Sunday after being knocked from her bike by a careless driver in Brixton. There in the hallway, we shared our week’s scare stories from the capital’s cycle lanes (or lack of) – mine, a frightening near-collision with a speeding black cab driver who didn’t see me as he was turning into a side street off a poorly-lit main road.
In those slow-motion seconds waiting to be hit, my life really did flash before my eyes, as a new study last week confirmed it can. But the more frightening fact is that I was one of the lucky ones. My cycling scare came just days after a friend told me to take particular care cycling over Battersea Bridge after her poor friend had to have her leg amputated in a bike accident there last month. Last week, former lawyer Shatha Ali became the eighth cyclist to be killed in Holborn since 2008 – just months after children’s doctor Marta Krawiec fell victim to the same ‘lethal’ gyratory. The common thread between the victims in each of these stories? They’re all female.
