Chris Bennett: Seeing a way to safer roads

An elderly man turned to me this morning blinking as if struggling to focus. He had just looked up from his smartphone and realising he couldn’t see me he slipped a pair of ready readers off his nose.

Although the man in question continued to squint in my direction I couldn’t catch his eye and he clearly wasn’t able to focus on me.

Not an unusual situation you might think? Not so. It was rush hour, I was on a bike riding at 20mph towards him and he was in a car pulling out from a sloping side road.

I would guess he was a school run cabbie as the car had half a dozen kids of a similar age, he was a frail looking man well past retirement age. The only thing worse than his eyesight was his clutch control.