Go slower! Check out the slow bike movement started by the Copenhagenize blog.

They conveniently all ignored the fact that the same week, a semi-truck driver, who killed a cyclist by cutting her off (she was going straight, he turned into her) and grinding her against the fence that bordered the road was given a £275 fine.

I think they just pay attention because stories with bikes involved are unusual, while motor vehicles kill people all the time-- there's nothing new about it.

I wonder if Traffic addresses the idea, which I have noted anecdotally, that people in convertibles and on motorcycles behave more like humans and less like homicidal cretins.

I was once briefly a newspaper reporter in NJ, covering town council meetings on the night side. One assignment took me to an area where there had been several fatalities on a notorious stretch of road -- I read about it in the paper's morgue before leaving for the meeting I had to cover. Driving over this road around sunset made me nervous -- it was twisty and narrow and all the other drivers who knew it well wanted to go faster than me. I barely kept up with them.

When I made my return trip, it was pitch black, and there was no street lighting or other lighting from houses which were set back far from the road. Nothing but my own headlights. So I went slow. Another car came up behind me and the driver, who clearly knew the road, became impatient and finally enraged. He passed me illegally on the right, taking my breath away, then got in front of me and slowed down to five miles an hour to show me how annoyed he was. I pulled off the road and waited for him to go away. People like this are literally deadly.