Danger for cyclists: Drivers turning left across your path

On Tuesday 30 April, 13-year-old Luke Leonard was cycling home from school west along Dolphin Road about 3pm when a van turned left onto Crumlin Road across his cycle path, cutting him off.

He braked hard but hit the side of the van. Luckily, he was uninjured apart from minor grazes, says his mother, Catherine Leonard.

On Wednesday 1 May, Eoin Kilfeather was cycling along Griffith Avenue, when a car turned left across his cycle lane and hit him, he says.

“It was a clear day. I had on high-vis, two lights – it didn’t make a difference,” Kilfeather says. He says he’s still in physio, recovering from his injuries.

On Saturday 8 April 2023, just after midnight, Kate Cunningham was cycling east along the north quays and stopped for a light at O’Connell Street, next to an HGV.

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When the light changed, and they both set off again, the HGV turned left across her path and ran over her, she says. “I was in hospital for months,” Cunningham said. “I couldn’t walk for six to seven months.”

The Active Travel Collision Tracker, a website where people can report collisions, near misses and hazards, launched about three months ago, and an analysis of the first nearly 1,000 reports, shows that 10 percent mention a driver turning left across a cyclist as the cause of the near miss or collision being reported.

So what’s to be done about this common, dangerous scenario to make the city’s streets safer? Leonard, Kilfeather and Cunningham have some ideas about how to avert this unfortunately common scenario – and so do others.

The damage done

When the van cut off Luke Leonard and he hit its side and fell off his bike, it was on a day his mother, Catherine, didn’t have access to a car.

So the driver brought him home, she says. “He was lovely, he did everything he could to make up for his mistake,” she says.

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Talking to her son about the collision, she learned his friend had been knocked off his bike recently too, she says.

For the next two days, she dropped Luke to school in the car. “But then I thought, ‘Okay, he’s a city kid, this is not sustainable.’” So now he’s back to cycling.

“This was an opportunity to say again, ‘Do not assume the driver can see you,’” she says.

The collision hasn’t put the family off cycling, Catherine Leonard says, they’re still at it – except for her daughter, she says. “Teenage girls don’t cycle.”

When Kilfeather was hit, he was in the cycle lane in Griffith Avenue about 9am, headed west, coming up to the junction with Drumcondra Road, and there was a green light.

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His cycle lane was separated from the vehicle traffic to his right by a little raised concrete island with a pole rising out of it, holding up a traffic signal

After both he and the driver to his right passed that island, the driver turned left across his cycle lane.

He has a video of the collision. “I’d nothing broken but I’m still doing physio for it,” he says.

For her part, Cunningham didn’t want to talk on the record in any more detail about the collision she was involved in, because of an ongoing court case associated with it.

Behavioural changes

Of 968 reports submitted by users to the collision tracker – which recorded collisions, near misses and hazards over the past several years – as of 15 May, 97 mentioned a vehicle turning left.

Of these, 41 were reports of collisions – three of which resulted in fatalities. All three fatalities involved HGVs.

Two other reported collisions resulted in serious injuries such as Cunningham’s, and 25 in minor injuries such as Luke Leonard’s or Eoin Kilfeather’s.

Suggestions for changes to reduce the number of collisions caused by such “left hooks” by drivers included both efforts to change driver and cyclists behaviour, and physical interventions.

Dominic Brophy, director of the Professional Driving Instructors Association (PDIA), says drivers always need to be checking their mirrors before turning left.

To see if there’s a cyclist coming up inside, how far away they are, and how fast they’re moving, says Brophy, a driving instructor himself.

Eugene Drennan, who’s on the Irish Road Haulage Association’s management committee, says that when both a cyclist and a heavy goods vehicle (HGV) are moving through a green light, “large vehicles shouldn’t be cutting off cyclists, that’s just idiocy”.

But even if drivers should already know, what if there were more “visual cues” to remind drivers to check for cyclists? suggests Catherine Leonard.

Like, for example, what if there was a sign or something 50m or so before a junction, telling drivers to check their mirrors for cyclists coming up on their left? she says.

“There’s no silver bullet solution but I’m all about the visual prompts,” she says. “Very few motorists would knowingly cut in front of a cyclist, but they’re just rushing and don’t see them.”

Cunningham, who was run over by the truck at O’Connell Street, seemed sceptical of this approach. “There’s no shortage of campaigns for motorists not to hit cyclists,” she said.

She suggested that cyclists should maybe learn and use hand signals more often – and drivers should learn to look for and understand them.

That way, a cyclist can communicate to a driver next to them that they intend to go straight on through an intersection, hopefully reducing the risk of the driver turning left across their path forward.

And cyclists should be extra careful around heavy goods vehicles (HGVs), Drennan says, of the Irish Road Haulage Association.

While drivers of most vehicles should be able to see cyclists if they look, drivers of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) might not be able to see a cyclist near their left front door, or close in front of the grille.

So when traffic is stopped at a red light, a cyclist shouldn’t stop and position themself inside and to the left of an HGV stopped at the front of the queue of traffic, he says.

They might not be visible to a left-turning HGV driver there when the light turns green and they start making the turn, he says. Instead, the cyclist should wait one vehicle back, he says.

Kilfeather, the cyclist hit at Griffith Avenue, said his number one favourite solution to the city’s left-hook problem would be “better driver culture and behaviour”.

He said he recently visited Odense, a city in Denmark, and “it was just really remarkable how much mutual respect there was on the road, it was such a better culture”.

Nick Newton, technical director at Warrington-based T&RS Highway Consultancy, said that they “believe in the power of education, engineering and enforcement, which are all important ingredients in creating a safer road network”.

“It should be borne in mind however that education is a long process to change driver/rider behaviour and is difficult to evaluate but that shouldn’t be a reason not to do it,” he says.

Redesigning roads

Aside from trying to get people to drive and cycle more carefully, and do the things they already know they should do – there are also possible technical solutions.

Already in Dublin, some junctions are set up with a special signal for cyclists to let them set off early and get through an intersection before drivers get a green light.

That could avoid some left-hook scenarios because the cyclists would already be off and away before the vehicle could (legally) turn left.

Cunningham, the cyclist, pointed to these as a useful bit of technology.

Newton, of T&RS Highway Consultancy, suggested another tool in the engineer’s toolbox to help with this situation.

He pointed to a scheme in Hull, where engineers installed a line of motion-activated flashing studs, along the border between a cycle lane and a vehicle lane, coming up to five junctions.

So if a cyclist starts coming up the cycle lane next to a vehicle, the studs will start flashing, alerting the driver.

Brophy, the director of the PDIA, said this sounded like it could be useful at some junctions. “If it works properly and it’s not flashing when a seagull flies by,” he says.

But Kilfeather, the cyclist, worried about the cost and the time it could take for the council to find the funding and install such medium-sized schemes, and actually get the work done and get it up and running.

“Getting these interventions takes years and years,” Kilfeather said. “We need quicker wins.”

For example, instead, for the Griffith Avenue intersection where he was hit by a left-turning car, he suggests something simpler: put in a flashing amber left-turn arrow on the existing traffic signal.

Making HGVs safer

To solve the problem of HGV drivers not being able to see everything around them, newer vehicles have additional cameras installed, says Drennan, of the Irish Road Haulage Association.

“New vehicles we bought in the last two years would have left-side cameras and grille cameras,” he said.

In February, Green Party TD Neasa Hourigan asked whether the Minister for Transport had any plans to require HGVs operating in Dublin city centre “to eliminate all blind spots by adding camera equipment and other enhancements to driver vision”.

In his reply, Jack Chambers, Minister of State at the Department of Transport, put the responsibility for the issue on the Road Safety Authority (RSA).

“Work on direct vision technologies for commercial vehicles is a priority under Action 11 of the Government’s Road Safety Strategy, which is being led by the Road Safety Authority,” said the Fianna Fáil TD.

“As Minister, I support measures to make our streets safer for all road users and will consider recommendations from the RSA on this matter,” Chambers said. So Hourigan followed up with the RSA, which responded by email.

An EU law that starting 7 July 2024 will apply to all new vehicles registered “aims to significantly reduce deaths and serious injuries on EU roads by introducing a range of mandatory advanced vehicle safety systems”, the RSA said.

As part of that, buses and trucks “will be equipped with advanced systems that are capable of detecting pedestrians and cyclists located in close proximity to the front or nearside of the vehicle”, and warning the driver, it says.

The law “will also see the introduction of new safety systems such as UN Reg 151 – Blind spot information system for the detection of bicycles to provide assistance to the driver for left turn manoeuvres”, the RSA says.

The RSA is carrying out a study “to examine the retrofitting of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) to older vehicles which include some of the above systems that are technically feasible (e.g. blind spot information system)”, it says.