Sir – Oh dear, I had hoped that my letter of May 19 would help to shift the debate away from the unhelpful pedestrian versus cyclist confrontation and on to the really important question of saving lives on our roads, but Hugh Jaeger (Letters, May 26) has an agenda which he will not easily abandon.

We should be grateful that he has been able to do some research but uneasy that he quotes it selectively. For example, he says that there are 200 collisions between cyclists and pedestrians each year on average in the UK and wants us to believe that the cyclist was always at fault, but doesn’t tell us how many of these collisions took place on the pavement or on the road, nor how many were caused by cyclists and how many by pedestrians.

He says that three pedestrian deaths in the last five years were caused by stupid cyclists, but neglects to tell us how many cyclists were killed on the road in the same period by stupid pedestrians – almost certainly about the same number i.e. very few.

It is not clear how the proposed new legislation would lead to a reduction in deaths of this kind.

Let’s give Mr Jaeger his new law and even up the ante by introducing life imprisonment for reckless cycling (or walking?) leading to death. Can we believe there would then be fewer than three deaths of this kind in five years in the whole country?

David Dixon, Oxford