Alex Ingram,
a local blogger from Hammersmith who was run over yesterday by two lads on a moped being chased by the police, has decided to offer us all a glimpse into what being a victim is all about. He was busily tweeting from his hospital bed in the hours after the incident and has reproduced all of his tweets in one place so you can read them as a story - he's called it "
getting run over on Twitter".
Alex's experience raises serious questions both about why he was run over and whether the police were really taking the right level of risk by chasing this moped around Hammersmith roundabout, albeit without their lights on as Alex tells me, but he also makes the very valid point that there are a lot of other dangerous drivers out there, both legal and illegal.
Which is why the lot of a cyclist is always going to be a precarious one so long as we do not have proper bicycle lanes as they do on the continent, not these ridiculous blue stripes that don't even cover much of west London anyway. For the time being this blog will carry on asking for
the installation of Trixi mirrors and the re-hashing of accident blackspots in the Bush,
like the Uxbridge/Askew Road junction in the hope that we don't have any more cyclist deaths
like this one in Hammersmith just months ago.
Credit to Alex for sharing his experiences with us. And best wishes from all of us.
1100 UPDATE - in a bizarre twist of fate the moped that ran over Alex was actually stolen from the boss of another of this blog's readers!
The crazy thing is that Jonny has found out more about what has happened to his bike in the last 30 minutes on the internet than after countless minutes on hold with the police.
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