There is an urgent
need for an information campaign on how to overtake a group of cyclists, since
ignorance of the norm is greater the older the drivers.
I was driving with
my car last Sunday on the PO-308 road and I passed by Covelo, around two in the
afternoon. An unexpected retention alerted me. An accident had just happened.
No health services had arrived, not even the Civil Guard or even Civil
Protection. Only a person with a reflective safety vest in the middle of
the road, with an exceptionally meritorious behavior, made signs to us to the
vehicles that we circulated towards Monteverdi so that we did not stop before
the scene of a person under a car, covered with a blanket, to the one that
surrounded other neighbors. Road to the capital and shocked by that fleeting
image, passed in the opposite direction, to the scene of the incident, a first
ambulance, then another medical zed, then two civil guards on a motorcycle and
almost reaching Enrique, the traffic jam team.
How many more
deaths will have to occur on the roads for the institutions to face
implementing measures that mean an effective reduction of windings to cyclists?
I am afraid that
they will dislike as much as I do know that in 2015, 42 cycling fans died,
practicing their sport, five of them in Galicia. In addition, in 2016 the
cyclists who died in Spain were 33. I did not find the specific data of
Galicia, but we all remember the most famous case, the winding that a driver
produced to a squad of cyclists, with 2 fatalities and half a dozen wounded.
Since then the authorities, particularly both the DGT and the Junta Galicia
promised various measures to quell this type of accident. Of all of them,
hardly the distribution of reflective vests to cyclists will
have begun among some groups of fans of pedal sports. However, performances of
greater packaging do not appear.
Urge a campaign to
raise awareness and information to drivers about what the rule prescribes: you
have to observe a safety distance of one and a half meters to overtake a
cyclist and it can be done by invading the opposite lane and in a continuous
line as long as there is no traffic car in front. Saving that safe distance is
not a whim. Any overtaking that you do not observe carries a risk, because the
air generated by the vehicle when it passes the cyclist may displace or knock
it down.
Novice drivers are
soaked with that knowledge from the driving school. The young and middle-aged
keep this rule in mind thanks to being more porous to information. The severe
problem is with drivers of very advanced ages. It is not a coincidence that the
coiling author last Sunday in Covelo is 82 years old, or that the author of the
Oil cyclist squad in March 2016 was 87 years old.
Collectives such
as Stop Accidents Galicia have repeatedly claimed that after 65 years, drivers
are forced to a recycling that entails relearning the regulations. The cycling
collectives such as Monteverdi and all those that move hundreds of fans every
weekend or holidays, have been crying for years to launch a campaign so that
drivers in safety clothing know how to overtake a group of cyclists.
Also, the institutions
announced that as much for this casuistry as for the eruption of older drivers
on highways and motorways in the opposite direction, the tests of the
psychotherapist required for the renewal of the card would be hardened.
Unfortunately, the statistics do not yet reflect a corrective effect.
