Stiffer sentences for cyclists won’t make roads safer

CHARLIE Alliston is not the poster boy cycling in London needs or deserves. This week, he was jailed for 18 months for knocking down and killing 44-year-old Kim Briggs. The teenager — who crashed into Briggs on Old Street last year — was riding a racing bike with no front brakes. Before Briggs died, Alliston wrote online: “Hopefully, it is a lesson learned on her behalf.”

Alliston showed all the entitlement of the very worst drivers, just on two fewer wheels. Now, following a campaign by Briggs’s widower, the Government plans to hold an urgent review into whether there should be new road laws covering cyclists.

I can’t imagine the pain of losing your spouse in a traffic accident. But the vast majority of those who can, lost their partners in crashes involving cars, lorries and vans — not bicycles. In 2015, 1,780 people died on Britain’s roads — just two were pedestrians hit by cyclists.

You might say there’s still no harm in looking at the law but there is a question of priorities. Ministers have already postponed a promised review of the sentences for road traffic offences for more than three years. Moreover, cycling still accounts for fewer than two per cent of journeys in the UK. The Government is acting due to the prominence Alliston’s case received in the media (far more than those involving drivers who kill while looking at their mobile phones), rather than the risk to pedestrians.

Last year, I made a Freedom Of Information request about cyclists killed by drivers. It showed that even when the driver is arrested at the scene and later prosecuted, convictions are rare. Kevin O’Sullivan, the founder of the firm Cycle Legal, explained the problem to me. Drivers go on the stand.

Jurors, usually drivers themselves, think “that could have been me”. The dead cyclist can’t speak.

Alliston was convicted under the 19th-century offence of “wanton or furious driving”. That is more than most grieving families get.