While cyclists reject a proposal for separate cycle lanes and criticise coroners who blame riders for fatal road accidents, the new Belisha beacons are causing problems for other road users

Cyclists and their grievances

The Cyclists' Touring Club are to hold a general meeting tomorrow, at which two resolutions are to be proposed. One of them censures the Minister of Transport, the other the coroners of England.

Mr Hore-Belisha is in trouble because he has expressed the wish to segregate cyclists in special tracks on the roads, as has been done on Western Avenue. The Cyclists' Touring Club consider that this method is unjust to them and limits their rights as road users. At first sight this argument is apt to strike non-cyclists as an excessive insistence on strict rights, and it will be interesting to hear whether speeches at the meeting can prove substance behind the show of injury.

The criticism of coroners' courts seems a graver one. The club's resolution states that in most cases the inquests on the victims of road accidents fail to determine the responsibility correctly, and urges the Minister to arrange for the establishment of special courts. There is a strong feeling among cyclists that those of them who, having been killed, are unable to speak for themselves are often unjustly saddled with the blame for fatal accidents.

Motorists ignoring pedestrian crossings

Mr Hore-Belisha's road safety campaign figured in the news yesterday. So far pedestrian crossings with beacons and studs have only been instituted by orders of the Transport Ministry in the London area, and here there has been a probationary period to allow drivers and pedestrians to become used to the system.

The authorities have apparently now decided that this trial period may now end, and that abuse of the crossings must now be prevented by prosecutions. "The regulations may be the subject of ridicule," said Alderman AJC Field, the chairman of the borough bench, "and when you are on the road may be irksome, but they are there and must be obeyed."

Youth goes to gaol for breaking beacon

A police constable concealed in a doorway in City Road, Finsbury, saw a youth of seventeen, who had two others with him, climb a Belisha beacon and break the globe with his fist. It was the hundredth beacon globe to be broken in Finsbury since November. Yesterday at Old Street Police Court the youth was sentenced to one month's imprisonment and ordered to pay 7s 6d costs.