London assembly member claims mayor trying to blame cyclists after Johnson says they have duty to obey laws of the road

Boris Johnson has been accused of "gross insensitivity" and "dodging responsibility" after he suggested that the deaths of five cyclists on the streets of London over the past nine days underlined the need for cyclists to obey the laws of the road.

The mayor of London also appeared to shrug off calls for an urgent, independent review of cycling safety in the capital, arguing that, if cyclists did not follow the rules, "there's no amount of traffic engineering that we invest in that is going to save people's lives".

Johnson's remarks came hours after a man in his 30s became the 13th cyclist to die on London's streets this year after he was hit by a bus in east London.

On Thursday, the Metropolitan police named two cyclists who died earlier this week. Scotland Yard said that Venera Minakhmetova, a 24-year-old Russian who was living in Bethnal Green, was pronounced dead just before 9am on Wednesday after being hit by a lorry near Bow Roundabout. Roger William De Klerk, a 43-year-old IT consultant from Forest Hill in south London, died on Tuesday afternoon after he was struck by a bus outside East Croydon train station.

Venera Minakhmetova's sister, Dinara, said she was too upset to talk about Venara, who had studied at the Cass Business School and recently set up a networking app business. But appealing on a cycling chat forum for witnesses to the accident, she said she hoped her sister would be the last cyclist to die in London.

"Thank you all for caring," she said. "It was my sister, Venera Minakhmetova. If some of you were there or might think of any friends being there around the time of accident, please, try to find out as much as you can … My sister should be the last victim."

Discussing the deaths in a radio interview on Thursday morning, Johnson said that, while there could be "no question of blame or finger-pointing", cyclists had a duty to obey the laws of the road and heed signals.

"Some of the cases that we've seen in the last few days really make your heart bleed because you can see that people have taken decisions that really did put their lives in danger," he told Nick Ferrari on LBC 97.3.

"You cannot blame the victim in these circumstances. But what you can say is that when people make decisions on the road that are very risky – jumping red lights, cycling across fast-moving traffic to get to somewhere in a way that is completely unexpected by the motorist and without looking to see what traffic is doing – it's very difficult for the traffic engineers to second-guess that."

Transport for London said investigations into the accidents were still under way and that it was too early to say precisely what had happened.

The national cycling charity, the CTC, said the mayor was failing in his duty to cyclists and accused him of seeking scapegoats. "Boris Johnson's attempt to deflect blame on to cyclists is grossly insensitive after five fatalities in nine days," said Roger Geffen, its campaigns and policy director.

The London assembly member Darren Johnson, of the Green party, accused the mayor of "dodging responsibility" for the recent deaths and trying to blame cyclists for the accidents.

"Four out of the five deaths of cyclists in the last nine days have involved either his blue paint or his red buses," he said, in a reference to the blue-painted cycle superhighways.

"The mayor's comments this morning which targeted cyclists breaking the law as the primary cause of death and serious injury is an attempt to blame the victims, rather than tackling the real problem of HGVs, buses and dangerous junctions.

"It is an insult to the dead and injured that the mayor continues to blame victims in this way, rather than accepting his responsibility and getting on with fixing the things he has direct control over."

The string of recent deaths prompted the former Labour transport secretary Andrew Adonis to call for action: "The mayor should appoint a rapid independent review of superhighways after the horror of all these cyclist deaths in London."

Although Johnson told LBC that he was committed to making London's roads safer and would look into the Bow Roundabout section of Cycle Superhighway 2, where three cyclists have died since 2011, he warned against any snap decisions.

"There was a fatality yesterday morning at Bow Roundabout so clearly there's a lot of emotions running high and we'll have to look at what happened there," he said. "It is too early, I think, to pass a judgment."

Andrew Gilligan, the mayor's cycling commissioner, said that the controversial superhighways had already been reviewed.

"As a result of that review we announced last week that we would substantially upgrade them all, including Cycle Superhighway 2, which will be rebuilt with full or semi segregation along its entire length and five new cycle-signalised junctions, with cycle-specific traffic lights and segregated approaches to separate cyclist movements from traffic movements."

Geffen said the mayor should instead focus on improving cyclists' safety on London's roads and working with the government to improve lorry design.

"Lorries pose a far greater risk than buses, to pedestrians as well as to cyclists, due to the driver's high seating position and limited window area," he said. "Driver and cyclist awareness campaigns can only do so much when lorries themselves are such dangerous and inappropriate machines to be operating on London's roads and streets."