Still, without even knowing James' name, three strangers told him that he was very loved; he just had to keep fighting. Grief ... Dr Nicky Martin with a ghost bike on the spot where James was killed on Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn. But when James Cross took his last breath, he went from being a charismatic, talented, sometimes mischievous 22-year-old man to a simple, bleak statistic. And while there are tragic stories behind every road fatality — the truck driver who hasn't worked since and the impact on his young family, the trauma felt by the witnesses who held James in his final moments — the greatest loss is felt by those closest to the life lost. Nicky Martin hasn't been in her son's room for over a year now. "All his things are there packed in suitcases. It looks like he's either ready to go somewhere or he's just come home." She reads his journals from time to time, and listens to his music most days. And when she visits schools on the Mornington Peninsula with the Teenage Road Accidents Group, a local body that teaches road safety, she always begins the same way: "The first thing I say to students is that I'm a life member of a club that no one wants to join. Once you're in this club, you can never go back, and life is never the same. It's the most disconcerting, destructive process that anyone can go through."

Losing a child in any circumstances is tragedy enough; knowing they were killed by a momentary lapse in judgment — a driver not looking properly for a cyclist, not seeing them — only adds salt to the wound. Nicky Martin and James Cross are both doctors; they know all about risk management and litigation. If they want one thing to come from their son's inquest, it's a transparent account of the events leading to his death and the implementation of measures to ensure they're not repeated. Frightening reminder ... A tag left on the ghost bike explains its significance. "Dooring" — when a motorist opens their door onto an oncoming bike — is no small issue: there have been 1112 reported incidents between 2000 and 2010 in Victoria. And while James Cross is the state's first recorded "dooring" fatality, cases of serious injury stemming from collisions between cyclists and car doors are many and rising: there were 161 last year alone, up from 96 in 2008. Dooring is one of many "crash types" VicRoads identifies in its statistics on cycling fatalities and injuries — others include "side impact at intersections", "manoeuvring" and "lane change". According to James Holgate, director of road user safety at VicRoads, "road rules state that people opening vehicle doors, leaving doors open and getting in and out of vehicles must ensure they are not causing a hazard to any person or vehicle". Failure to do so carries a maximum court penalty of $366, or an on-the-spot infringement fine of $122. In instances where someone is killed or injured, police can raise more serious offences. The driver who opened her door onto James Cross' bike was neither prosecuted nor fined, a decision that sparked outrage from cycling groups, particularly Bicycle Network Victoria's Garry Brennan. He says "many drivers open their doors with the assumption that there will never be a bike riding past", and while "fines alone are not the magic bullet" in changing driver behaviour, they are a starting point in making people aware "of the severe consequences of careless driver behaviour".

MORE than 7000 people cycle to work each day in Melbourne (comprising 10 per cent of all on-road journeys into the CBD). This figure increases 10 per cent a year, according to VicRoads, although lord mayor Robert Doyle hopes to increase the figure to 10,000 in the next two years. In July, much fanfare — and incredulity from cyclists — surrounded Premier Ted Baillieu's announcement that Melbourne had secured the Union Cycliste Internationale title of Bike City, making it — nominally — the world's second most cycle-friendly city after Copenhagen. Yet the title hasn't been matched with infrastructure spending. According to the Bicycle Network's annual survey, the City of Melbourne spent $12.43 (per resident) on infrastructure in 2011, well behind Sydney ($62.34), Perth ($46.63), Adelaide ($34.21), Canberra ($26.77) and Brisbane ($19.78). Melbourne's population has increased 17 per cent in the past decade, and money has been invested in building bike paths — VicRoads will spend $14.5 million on bicycle improvement works in 2011-12 alone and a further $12 million from the state government will go to "specific bicycle commitments" in this term. According to Roads Minister Terry Mulder: "We will continue to consider the needs of cyclists as part of all major transport projects." And yet accidents such as that of James Cross, who was riding on a shared parking and bike lane, continue to happen. Which prompts the question: is enough being done to protect the most vulnerable road users? Statistics on precisely how many accidents involving cyclists occur on our roads each year are difficult to pin down. Ambulance Victoria statistics released in May show that in the three years to March, paramedics were called to 2928 accidents involving a cyclist or motorcyclist: 963 accidents in 2008-09, 1016 the following year and 949 in 2010-11. In the two years to August 2010, cyclists made 646 claims to the Transport Accident Commission for hospital admission costs. In 2010, 1259 fatalities and injuries were recorded on Victorian roads, with 346 injuries deemed "serious". Bear in mind that "serious" cycling injuries involve amputated legs, cyclists left in comas, in wheelchairs or with brain damage. For every accident that paramedics attend, hundreds go unreported. Marilyn Johnson, a research fellow at Monash University's Accident Research Centre, says that "one of the things you can be sure of is that we don't have enough cycling data to use as a denominator to determine incident rates. We don't know for sure how many people ride, when they ride, how far or where to."

Johnson has spent the past five years studying cyclist behaviour on Melbourne's roads: via helmet-mounted cameras, at intersections, following cyclists on their daily commute to work. If there's one statistic she is certain of, it's that injury rates are rising. "If you look at hospital data over the last 10 years, it shows that every year the number of people who present to hospital with a cycling injury has increased 9 per cent." Dr James Taylor, director of Sandringham Hospital's emergency department and himself a devoted cyclist, sees Lycra every day. Most admissions come from accidents on Beach Road, one of Melbourne's busiest cycling routes, which attracts an estimated 10,000 cyclists a weekend. Taylor and colleague Dr Paul Biegler have spent the past 12 months on a pilot study linking cyclist injuries to accident conditions, rider experience, injury types and recovery times. It's not statistics they're after, it's the stories behind them that will map a richer understanding for how and why accidents happen, and the variables that spell the difference between death and bruises. Taylor has been working at Sandringham Hospital since 2001; the impetus for his research grew from the simple observation that his emergency room dealt with an increasing number of adult cyclists each year. "In 25 years of emergency medicine, I'd never seen such a high level of adult cyclists as I had here at Sandringham. It was a disproportionate number [compared with other areas]." Taylor's primary concern wasn't just his patients' health, it was the cost of their injuries to the larger community. "We're looking at males in their peak years [30-40 years old], in the peak of their earning capacity, coming off their bikes and even if it's only a minor injury — head trauma or a broken arm — they could be off work for the next month . . . or six months. The cost to the community is enormous, tens of thousands of dollars for a head injury." Taylor and Biegler's research attempts to link previously distinct data sets, correlating crash types with injury types, recovery times and 100 other variables. "We looked at 160 cyclists who have sustained injuries over the last 12 months and put together everything that led up to the accident and everything afterwards, combining hospital data, injury data and accident data with rider experience, details of the clothes they were wearing, weather conditions, traffic conditions, time of day, day of the week, whether they were riding in a group, in a designated bike lane and so on," says Taylor.

While the study remains in its early stages, Taylor hopes its findings will present a model for further research. "We have to be careful about making pronouncements about what happens in a small data group, but we will get a good idea of what's causing these accidents. When you think that the difference between a minor injury and death can be a centimetre, and these cyclists we've spoken to are alive, determining what makes the difference is crucial." For Victoria Police state bicycle co-ordinator Sergeant Arty Lavos, who cycles to work each morning and on patrol most days, that "difference" can be many things: defensive riding, obeying road rules, inexperienced riders riding too close to parked cars or weaving between moving vehicles, or cyclists thinking that riding in a bike lane means they don't need to exercise caution. October was Safe Cycle Month, a statewide traffic road safety campaign that involves police visiting schools to speak on cyclist safety and a range of initiatives around cyclist and driver interactions. Every three months, police run Operation Spoke, which involves mapping bike crash black spots around the city and carrying out "blitz" offensives: fining cyclists for running red lights, riding on footpaths, not using a helmet or lights, and drivers for not respecting cyclists' safety on the road, or using mobile phones — driver distraction is a primary cause of all road accidents. "Dooring" is not a phrase Lavos is fond of, neither is "road rage", namely when it's used to suggest motorists "have it in for cyclists" or intentionally set out to compromise their safety. "Dooring is a word that expresses malicious intent, but no one opens a door on a bike on purpose and there's far less road rage between cyclists and drivers than between drivers," says Lavos. "Anything that creates an 'us and them' mentality is pointless; we have to work together." One of the greatest hurdles for cyclists is the haphazard provision of bike lanes: excellent tracks that stretch for several kilometres and then vanish; lanes that expand and shrink to less than the width of a handlebar with little warning; and motorists who routinely ignore bike lanes.

"Melbourne's bike infrastructure started appearing decades ago, long before proper standards and practices were adopted, and it originally evolved opportunistically rather than systematically," says Garry Brennan. Marilyn Johnson says that while engineering guidelines exist on how to install cycling infrastructure, bike lanes are predominantly retrofitted, "so it really comes down to what's feasible in that space". If a road narrows and room for a bike track peters out, cyclists find themselves back on the road. ONE of the coroner's recommendations from James Cross' inquest was the relocation of bike lanes to the left-hand side of parked cars in Melbourne's busiest streets (examples of which exist in Albert Street, East Melbourne, and Swanston Street), a strategy to reduce dooring. Still, Johnson says bike lanes are only part of the solution. "It takes much more than a bike stencil and a bucket of paint to make roads safe, and you can't just draw lines on a road and expect people to obey and comply with them. If you're not a cyclist and you drive on the road it's not intuitive to understand how a cyclist behaves." Education is the key, she says, and for this reason it's imperative that cycling becomes a central focus in licence testing and driver teaching. "People who have had their licence for over five years, and that's the majority of road users, really haven't had any education about all these bicycle facilities and don't know how to use them."

Brennan agrees. He says increasing cyclist numbers also means more inexperienced cyclists are on the road, necessitating aggressive education campaigns on road behaviour on both sides. As for the Cross family, they remain optimistic that James' life has not been lost in vain. VicRoads this month announced plans for a campaign encouraging "greater understanding and respect between bike riders and other road users to share the road safely and mindfully". One of the primary focuses of the campaign, which is set to begin in early 2012, will be to encourage drivers to check for riders before opening their doors. Next Wednesday, Marilyn Johnson will join a panel including Dr James Taylor, James Holgate, Garry Brennan and Nick Szwed, former manager of road safety engineering at VicRoads, to debate the introduction of a new law that would institute a statutory clearance distance between cars and bikes of one metre. Next year, RoadSafe Action Group, comprised of four inner-city councils, will begin "Operation Doorknock", an initiative aimed at persuading drivers to adopt simple safety techniques when getting out of parked cars. One technique, called "leading with your left", asks drivers to open their car door with their left hand, forcing them to look over their shoulder for cyclists as they do so. On the first anniversary of James Cross' death, his family held a concert of local bands at Morning Star Estate in Mount Eliza. Called "Crossy's gig", it drew a crowd of 1000, many of them James' friends. A similar event is planned for next year, with funds raised going to cycling and road safety campaigns. For now, his parents set about trying to "build some semblance of the new real".

Loading "It's a different world," says Michael Cross. "You distract yourself . . . You go through this process of thinking what would we be doing if that hadn't happened." Adds Nicky: "It's the sudden cutting off of all of that potential. Why couldn't it have been me? He had so much more to give. I'll never know how the universe figures that out."