BORIS Johnson, London mayor, has written to the Department for Transport to ask them to allow cyclists in London, and ultimately all around Britain, to be allowed to turn left at red traffic lights.

It sounds crazy but on closer inspection it makes a lot of sense. The idea is that cyclists would wait for a safe gap in the traffic and allow right of way to pedestrians – much the same as any other junction. Not having to stop at the red light would allow them to clear the turn without the threat of overtaking lorries.

In the UK in 2007, 32 of the 136 cyclists who died on the road were hit by a HGV. In built-up areas, the statistics worsen: nine of the 13 cyclists killed on London’s roads in 2008 were hit by a HGV. The picture isn’t dissimilar in Oxford.

Exactly a year ago, St Clement’s was closed for about five hours following a collision between a cyclist and a HGV. It didn’t sound hopeful at first, but the cyclist did make a good recovery. The crash happened where Marston Road meets the bottom of Headington Hill. While the truck was turning left to go up Headington Hill, the cyclist hit the side of the truck in what is a tragically common accident.

Tsk Fok died two years ago at the junction of Broad Street and Parks Road in precisely these circumstances.

The scheme would require an amendment to the Traffic Signs, Regulations and General Regulations Act 2002, going through the appropriate parliamentary processes to take effect.

Would it work? Yes. In Germany, any vehicle can turn right on a red light if a certain sign is present (that’s the equivalent of us turning left – they drive on the right). In the States, vehicles can turn right on a red light if it’s safe.

For the scheme to work here, it should be for bikes only as cyclists are overwhelmingly the victims of left-turning vehicles at junctions.

There are junctions where it may never be advisable to turn left on a red, so a green bicycle-shaped filter should be used to indicate that a left-turn is permissible on a red light.

In a city with as many cyclists as Oxford, we should make sure that all junctions have Advanced Stop Lines (ASL) for cyclists to wait in, ahead of potentially deadly turning HGVs. The world’s first ASL is outside the King’s Arms pub in Parks Road. Despite several requests from Cyclox, the county council still hasn’t installed an ASL on the junction opposite, where Tsk Fok died.

Ideally, Oxford needs a road system in which bikes are only ever required to stop when it is really necessary, but allowed to proceed at junctions where there is no impediment.

We need cycle bypasses at junctions where bikes don’t need to stop, such as the one we share with buses on the Botley Road inbound lane.

If a similar bypass were installed at the T-junction where South Parks and Parks Roads meet, thousands of cyclists every day wouldn’t have to wait uselessly at the lights, in the knowledge that jumping it would probably not be dangerous.

Green light filters to enable cyclists to turn left when it’s safe (while cars wait on a red light) would also stop a lot of red-light jumping.