Memorandum from Alan Gillard (RS 64)
I understand from my colleagues in the Motorcycle
Action Group that you are about to chair a review of road safety,
and that you have invited interested parties to submit evidence.
While I have very little or no empirical evidence I would suggest
that 34 years of continuous riding in UK and abroad gives me fair
grounds to submit my comments, for the general good and for what
they are worth. I would like to urge your TSC to consider:
Allowing motorcycles to use bus lanes. Government
(TfL) statistics prove that there is no detriment either to bikers
nor anyone else, and indeed in one trial has shown a positive
improvement. There is no good reason not to permit this.
Reducing VAT on protective clothing to zero.
This would be in line with crash helmets, which are already zero
rated. While there is an obvious but very small loss of revenue,
the encouragement to adopt ptw for transport, particularly in
urban areas and cities, may assist congestion reduction, lower
pollution, and increase uptake of this very green mode of transport.
Appointing a motorcycling overseer, as per the
drug tsar. Silly name I know, but the role could very greatly
assist the migration of many transport users to this mode, which
is a very environmentally clean, efficient, and traffic-busting
solution.
Adopting a general road safety vision, as an
overarching encouragement to greater joined-up thinking and innovation
in road safety generally, but with ptw users especially in mind.
I say this because while the separate agencies all operate, they
do not operate together, and almost none ever consider the needs
of ptw users. Hazards are routinely built into new roads and once
there, they are there forever. This can be prevented. An overseer
would achieve that.
I say all these things against a background
of experience, with well over half a million miles of road riding.
Motorcycling has had a very bad press for about ten years now,
but statistics gathered by Government agencies show that while
numbers of riders are climbing, numbers of accidents are falling,
and continue to fall. None of the measures above would increase
accidents per se. Even the very largest of motorcycles, scooters
and mopeds are shown by Government figures to be not less than
14% cleaner than even newest cars, they take up very little space
either on roads or when parked, and are clean, efficient, nimble,
getting safer, and quicker from a to b than any other form of
transport realistically available now. They are part of the solution,
and should be recognised and promoted as such.
March 2008
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