Photo credit: Tejvan Pettinger
I can proudly say that I have never knowingly jumped a red light in my life. I may have skipped through a few when I didn’t even notice the traffic lights but I don’t believe that makes me a bad person.
Now a piece of research has been released which suggests that a lot of the nation’s cyclists are secret red light jumpers.
The investigation was carried out by the Institute of Advanced Motorcyclists. The headline figure is that 57% of cyclists say that they have passed a red light at least once, while 14% admit to doing this on a regular basis.
1600 people were questioned in the survey and there were some interesting figures which came out following this. Most curious is that in London there are some statistics for red jumping leading to accidents.
It seems that 71% of red light accidents are caused by cars, 13% by motorbikes and just 4% by bikes. It would be interesting to compare the number of people who pass red lights in cars with those who did in on their bikes.
Is It a Big Problem?
I drove abroad for a while and I can confirm that in some countries just about every single motorbike and bike will pass every red light they see as though it was a simply of figment of everyone else’s imagination. Of course, many cars do this in some places as well but I think that it is clear the that UK’s strict laws and CCTV monitoring (among other things) mean that red light jumping is nowhere near as big a problem here as it is in other places.
The problem with this is that you don’t expect it to happen and when it does you are taken by surprise. Let’s hope that car drivers, motorcyclist and bikers all stick to the rules and wait for the lights to change in the future.