The Technology Story

This came up in German news yesterday, and it's one of those page three items that most people will just skip and not take note of.

So, about every single week in Germany....some German on a bicycle, in some village, town or city....pulls up in the bike lane to a red-light (four-way intersection), and a truck pulls up.  The truck is going to turn right.  He signals this.  The bike guy doesn't move.  The guy in the truck is making the turn and his vehicle/trailer is going to 'swipe' the bike, and in most cases....bring great harm to the bicyclist.  In the majority of cases, the bicyclist is likely to die.

If you'd gone and examined this thirty years ago in Germany.....it likely happened on a very rare basis, and it's more often now because so many people want to bicycle to work. 

So this has been turned into a political topic.

The Transportation Ministry says that they've got a developmental project with a sensor-like device that they are working on.....that you'd hang on the side of the truck and just stop the vehicle when it got within a certain distance (I'm guessing half-a-meter) of the bicyclist. 

So the political hype (made by a Green Party guy) is that they want a mandatory EU 'rule', or a minimum of a German 'rule' that says all trucks must have this sensor. 

Cost?  Unknown.  That's the funny thing.  You would imagine that someone would put a cost factor to this.  There would have to be installation costs, developmental costs, and it probably would be a minimum of 500 Euro a truck.    So this might get into the billions category.

But the question is....what if you just stopped all bicycle lanes 10 meters short of the red-light?  Yeah, just forcing the bicyclist to halt way before the light, and allow the driver to proceed with no threat, well....you'd save tons of money, without all the technology.

Will they proceed on and make this a EU requirement?  My guess is that it'll slowly drift around and in three years....become a mandatory item on trucks and buses.  The sad thing is that you could have fixed this more easily.