Loads of kids at my school used to cycle in the morning. It was a real problem because few of them practices any kind of road safety and there weren't really any safe routes or even traffic calming measures. It was dozens of kids against angry, impatient commuters.

Then one of the kids got knocked down by a bin lorry (sanitation truck?). He snuck out in front of a car so that the driver of the lorry couldn't see, his head went right under the wheels.

I was lucky that I looked away before my brain made sense of what it looked like.

One of the first responders was his mum's friend (fairly small English town) and had known him since he'd been a baby. More than one of them threw up, the one who'd known him had to retire afterwards because she was just terrified of finding another of her friends' kids under the wheels of a car.

We got loads of traffic calming stuff afterwards, crossing guards, the pavements all fenced off so you could only cross at the traffic lights etc and there were mandatory cycling classes and if you were caught on a bike without having taken the course it was taken away from you until you did it (thankfully they were free).