A meritorious behavior with a reflective vest

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.