22 Oct 2024
Long-term eco-warrior and passionate cyclist Damian Gaskin reveals why he’s lost faith in the police…
In the event of multiple incidents of dangerous driving putting your child at serious risk of death, what is a parent supposed to do? I would always have said, call the police. As a parent, a member of a community, surely that is the right thing to do?
But what do you do when you find multiple reports were simply ignored?
Each report needed an hour of statement writing, conversations with call handlers and time uploading requested videos. But what is the point when all of that is simply ignored by the police.
When I have recounted the following story to a few friends in the last 24 hours their opinion has been, ‘welcome to the real world’. A world in which to report crimes is futile.
This weekend the police have made me feel like a fool and it appears, sadly, very true that unless there is an actual injury or fatality there is no point in reporting dangerous driving to the police. You would be better putting a clear image of the car on Facebook.
It is clear as day to me that cycling has to play a larger part in our transportation strategy. The cash-stretched Government has spent £60 million to promote walking and cycling, especially amongst school children. Schemes such as Bikeability aim to equip children with skills to cycle safely. We also had a National Cycle to School Week from September 23 to 27.
For 14 years I have avoided the St Albans school run traffic queues by taking my children to school by bicycle. Recently my daughter was old enough to transition from being a passenger in a Dutch cargo bike to riding her own bike on the road with me. She is dressed in a hi-vis vest, wearing a helmet, with flashing lights on the handle bars and a well-maintained, roadworthy bike.
Not only this but I have spent months, if not years, training her off-road before embalking on the school run. I know very well that if I miss one of these precautions then that’s what the police will pick me up on if there’s an incident.
Within the first week of the September term this year, the actions of some drivers on our short cycle to school gave me so much to worry about that I added even further safety precautions. Video cameras front and rear of my bike and walkie talkies in case my daughter and I are somehow separated at say, the passage way at the bottom of Therfield Road in New Greens.
In the second week of this term I had to make three reports of dangerous driving to the police. I am not anti-car but I suggest that a 12 tonne double decker bus mounting the pavement and driving towards me and my daughter warranted reporting.
I also suspect the Land Rover overtaking us at speed on Toulmin Drive then swerving into us both and slamming on the brakes was dangerous driving. I also reported a driver who, rather than waiting for us to turn right from a main road into a side road, beeped his horn (my daughter is nine) and then drove his car, while shouting something derogatory, on the inside of my daughter inches from her bike.
These early encounters were reported to the police and my local Lib Dem councillor in New Greens. I believed wholeheartedly in the police’s reporting process and its words of reassurance that these matters, the video evidence, the photos of the number plates and written descriptions and testimony given by me would all be looked into. I was not asking for licenses to be revoked, but for sensible and proportionate words of caution and perhaps the chance for these drivers to reflect on how frightening their driving behaviours are on a nine-year-old.
Technological ‘advances’ mean that drivers have almost no connection with the outside world anymore, with multimedia systems, surround sound speakers, text messages pinging, phones charging, and new route options flashing up to show how to shave another minute from the journey by taking a narrow road to cut out the Harvester lights, even though hundreds of children have to traverse this without any pedestrian crossings.
In the event of a crash, the air bags, crumple zone, safety cage and comprehensive insurance give today’s drivers almost nothing to worry about.
On the other hand the child’s safety cage is her rib cage or skull and she is going to take the full impact force of a three tonne SUV or 12 tonne bus.
Imagine someone accidentally hitting the love of your life in the head with a sledgehammer while they hum along to their airpods, distracted by a mobile phone call.
Given the current lack of support and protection for cyclists wanting to ride to school in St Albans I decided to start a ‘bike bus’. This is a way in which children with their parents all cycle together on the road, in a highly visible group, taking multiple cars off the road and ‘safely’ taking the children in a timely, fun, carbon and pollution zero way to school.
Every Friday we ride en masse, 10 or more of us, taking up no more space than two cars. That’s five cars off the road. Five drivers not fighting to park on the same double yellow lines just outside the school.
To run the “bike bus” we cycle around New Greens from 8am and the first 15 minutes is generally gentle and obstacle free as we ride the quieter roads picking up other cyclists who want to join us. But at some point we have to head downhill to Garden Fields School and that means taking High Oaks, turning right into Green Lane and 50 meters later, turning left into Therfield Road.
And at school run times this particular part of the journey becomes truly terrifying; the irony is that this section is part of the council’s “Green Ring“. Every day young cyclists and hundreds of pedestrian school children must cross Green Lane at this point and there are no pedestrian crossings.
What makes this section so horrific is the behaviour of some drivers. Some are short-cut-chasers trying to avoid the Harvester/Ancient Briton crossroads. Some are parents who have driven their children to one of the three schools on the estate, Townsend, Margaret Wix and the Links Education Support Centre and some are parents using the estate’s outer roads to drop their children as close as possible to other nearby schools such as STAGS, Garden Fields and Batchwood.
Combined with the school buses driving up the only road into the estate, Green Lane, this turns the narrow section where
the children cross into a death trap, with cars parked on the road, on the pavement, while drivers mount corners and mums pull their children or prams back in alarm.
As mentioned, this area of commuter carnage is an official segment of the St Albans’ Green Ring. If you have not heard of this, the Green Ring is “a continuous walking and cycling route that encircles the city centre”.
These are SADC’s objectives for the Green Ring: to “make cycling and walking a sensible first choice for journeys within the city, where previously a car would have been used. This will help reduce congestion, pollution and provide a valuable and easy way to get enough exercise. It is anticipated that the Green Ring will be used for both every day and leisure cycling”.
I wonder when councillors last cycled the Green Ring at 8.20am on a weekday?
Juliet Voisey is one of the few councillors actually putting her money where her mouth is, walking the walk and cycling the cycle path. All credit to her for applying her beliefs in practice and not just waving them in the air at election time.
Juliet has now ridden with us on the Bike Bus, twice, because she is supportive of residents who wish to think differently about our transportation problem in the city.
Other than Cllr Voisey, I doubt many will have experienced this daily dangerous situation first hand because I don’t believe you can and not clamour for change. It would be a complete disregard of one’s duties for a councillor to witness this and do nothing.
I would like to ask all other councillors voting on the Local Plan, to do what Juliet does most Fridays and join me on the Bike Bus. I would also welcome the developement chief executives s of CALA and Woollam Park to see for themselves the hazards seven-year-olds face on their way to school; keep in mind their multi-million pound developments will add 4,000 traffic movements to this area on a daily basis*.
Finally, I extend the invitation to the Head of Strategic Property at St Albans School who mentioned to St Michael’s Parish Council that he had been out cycling with councillors, and we were left to infer that there were no problems.
Given the scenes of driving chaos and the anxiety of crossing Green Lane I recently launched a petition for pedestrian crossings on Green Lane and Francis Avenue.
Within three weeks it has amassed 850 signatures. I would like it to reach 1,000. I am no politician but even I would think it foolish to ignore a thousand local voters in Batchwood Ward, when the Lib Dems only won by 42 votes in May of this year.
On my journeys by bike I have also noticed there are some much posher parts of St Albans with lovely quiet tree lined streets with 20mph limits.
Why does New Greens, with so many thousands of school children and a known short cut for cars, buses, trucks and even articulated lorries not have speed bumps, nor cameras, nor a 20mph limit? Is it because we are not quite middle class enough for the council? Why has our children’s safety been so neglected?
If you humiliate someone then it is likely you will make a very determined foe.
I am writing this in response to my humilation by the police. On Friday October 11 the Bike Bus took to the road at 8am. The first 20 minutes of our cycle was delightful. Neighbours waved, people smiled, young cyclists joined. The children were having a great time.
Yes, there was the usual insanely stupid behaviour of a Mercedes SUV driver coming up behind the Bike Bus at the High Oaks/Green Lane junction with 10 highly visible cyclists, four of them young children
Rather than waiting for the cyclists to see a safe gap and turn right, the Mercedes driver pulled his/her three tonnes into the right handside lane, (at the mouth of the junction) all four wheels completely on the wrong side of the road and overtakes us and turns right. I have the whole thing on film.
Because that driver could have killed one of us or someone else I reported it to the police. It was dangerous driving by any standard. I am a parent, a former teacher, a member of the wonderful New Greens’ community and a councillor. It would not be correct of me to ignore a person who’s driving so impatiently and badly that it could kill a child.
On Friday afternoon, October 11, I call 101 to report the Mercedes incident. I am in a queue, my call is ‘very important’ and I can hold my place and receive a call-back. That I like. And that’s the last thing I like. I know the process is time-consuming and so I also begin writing my statement on the 101 website.
As I wrote earlier, I reported the incident with the 12 tonne bus in the second week of this term. The same day I also reported the incident of the swerving Land Rover too and submitted video evidence. I never heard the outcomes of these reports which I logged with the police.
So when the call-back came I asked the call handler, a very nice person called Frankie for an update on these matters to which she replied, “They are, ‘no response’.
I asked what that meant, had I done something wrong, not responded to something or had there been no response from the bus company?
“No,” she says, “we decided not to do anything.”
I was stunned for a second. Were we talking about the same incidents? A 12 tonne bus squaring up to child and dad on bikes on a pavement caught on camera?
“But I gave you a video of a bus mounting the pavement and driving towards a nine-year-old girl. You asked me to upload the video. I believed I had done what you wanted. I believed some action would have been taken, at the very least, talking to the driver of the bus?”
No. Nothing happend. Not only had the police closed the matter without doing anything but they had also failed to tell me they were going to do nothing. Oh, and it was “no response” with the Land Rover and “no response,” with the man overtaking on the inside of my daughter, beeping and shouting.
If this is the situation then it is, as many people have told me, futile to report dangerous driving to the police. Why waste your time?
On Saturday a car sped past me on Green Lane with a very distinctive smell of cannabis lingering in the air. My immediate thought was that car was going so quickly it would have killed me if it had veered towards me. My next thought was, there is no point in reporting this as the police will do nothing.
A few minutes later, I saw two teenagers driving a very low, petrol-powered go-kart on public roads. My immediate thought was that the boys may not be seen by cars and there might be an accident. My next thought was to call 101. I did call but knowing full well nothing would be done but at least my conscience would be clear in the event of two pulverised teenagers being scraped off the road.
In summary, I now know it is utterly pointless to report dangerous driving to the police as they make you jump through lots of hoops and then do nothing.
If this Government and all its many councils want to have children cycling then they need to make it safe and this involves making serious consequences for those who endanger the lives of cyclists and pedestrians.
It is not enough to punish those drivers who kill. There must be sanctions for those who behave recklessly with the lives of young people on bikes and on foot.
In my experience the police do not act even with video evidence. Perhaps this is a smokescreen. Is it that the police and councils are just paying lip service to catching dangerous drivers and making cyclists safe, because they don’t have enough money?
In which case, be honest. Don’t lie to us. Don’t make us fill in forms, upload video and warn us not to put the videos on YouTube or social media.
Simply tell us you are not going to bother with dangerous driving complaints and, at least I know you don’t care about the safety of my daughter and her young friends.
At least I will know there is no point in wasting my valuable time reporting anything.
Are the council and the police joined up in making ‘cycling and walking a sensible first choice for journeys on the Green Ring’? No. They are not.
* 4,000 extra traffic movements per day. Richard Knox Johnston. See https://bit.ly/3BMy9iA
Ward councillor Lynn Cunningham said in response: “As soon as Damian called me I met with the local police officer who kept me in the loop about what she had done.
“One of the cars is insured to multiple drivers and the specific one could not be identified. The other is registered out of the district and deemed not proportionate to merit the time it would take.”
