I know that I'm relatively new to these fora and it may be a bit soon to be suggesting changes. However, I think that it may be worth considering a sub-forum of Advocacy and Safety for people to file accident reports.

I appreciate that it is important for people to express that which affects them and am certainly no stranger to doing this myself. However, A&S has a lot of threads which are cut and paste of "cyclist killed" headlines and I think that they are somewhat counter-productive. The inevitable "VC this" and "cagers are evil that" with pepperings of "the media hate cyclists" etc come out and assumptions get made on what it a very emotional subject. The carry over into the debate and dicussion of advocacy and safety issues seems a little inevitable. Not only that but many of the articles are poorly written conjecture of circumstances whch are then taken to be accurate representation.

I would propose that an Accident Report sub-forum might create a useful buffer zone between the high emotional response to the harsh realities of accidents and deaths and the need to calmly and rationally debate the measures required to protect cyclists from them along with the best way to bring them about.

Honestly, I doubt it a great amount.

I have not seen too many serious reports like that, at least enough to make a whole new subforum for it.


hi565

I believe folks would simply move the conversation you criticize to the proposed subforum. What's the point of yet another mouse click to carry on curret behavior? I suppose we could have the mods police so that only "dead and injured cyclist" comments are posted with no discussion as to cause, effect or prevention. Seems cumbersome.