Insults, injuries and incompetence

Boris shouldn’t just apologise for blaming cyclists for getting injured. He should correct the policies that are based on this mistake.

It will come as news to nobody that making a journey by bicycle on Britain’s roads means exposing yourself to a considerable number of people who are operating potentially lethal machinery despite having neither the skills nor the temperament for the task. The fact that a significant proportion of the people society has allowed to drive on the public highway are simply not competent behind the wheel is far from a new phenomenon. Indeed, it was one of the inspirations for starting this blog two and half years ago.

Over those years the blog has strayed off into all sorts of other areas, like designing out the need to deal with incompetent drivers entirely, but the original issue has been back at the top of my mind — partly due to the other thing I’ve been working on. Mostly, though, I think it’s because of the forceful reminder of the fact that comes from moving to SW17, just off Cycle Superhighway 7. Perhaps I’m just imagining it, or perhaps it’s simply the psychological bias towards to the recent, but after a New Cross-Bloomsbury commute, the roads between Tooting and South Kensington seem to have more than their fair share of the sort of motor vehicle operators who demonstrate a screaming lack of the aptitude and/or attitude that the activity requires.

It’s particularly highlighted in south west London by the near zero speed limit compliance around CS7 between Kennington and Clapham outside of the rush hour congestion, and the folk using the bus and cycle lanes to pass already speeding traffic as they try to get their high-powered cars — which I’ve always presumed must be stolen from the West End — back to Stockwell and Streatham. Or the few folk who still insist on commuting to the City by car, desperately seeking a ratrun back to the Surrey suburbs and not allowing any of LB Wandsworth’s traffic calming to slow them down as they slalom in and out of cycle lanes on residential streets like Burntwood Lane…

Morons in South West London just see traffic calmed residential streets with schools on them as the next level up in the game. Few of the bollards shown remain in situ.

And yet there is one person to whom this blindingly obvious problem might have come as news, at least until recently: Boris Johnson. During his successful campaign for re-election in the spring, the famously carefree with facts Mayor made the absurd claim that two thirds of cyclists who had been injured and killed on the city’s roads were breaking the law when they were injured. After months of pretending that he was trying to remember what the evidence for the obviously fictional factoid was, he finally retracted it — once the election had long passed.

Last month, Jenny Jones MLA asked the mayor to apologise:

In your response to question 2450/2012, you admit that Transport for London’s statistics and research completely disprove your previous claim that two thirds of cyclists who have suffered serious injuries were breaching the rules of the road at the time. Will you now apologise for wrongly blaming cyclists who have been killed or injured on London’s roads through no fault of their own?

The mayor instead decided to send a great big “fuck you” to victims:

Please refer to my response to MQ 2450 /2012.

But it seems to me that Boris has much more to make amends for than merely insulting the victims of bad driving and the way we operate our streets, and he needs to take far more substantial action than making an apology.

Because Boris is responsible for the problem, and if he really has been labouring under the delusion that it is cyclists who are responsible for the carnage on the capital’s streets then his mistake would at least explain why his policies have so far failed to do anything to address the problem.

The office of Mayor of London has always incorporated the role that in the rest of England and Wales is now played by the recently introduced Police and Crime Commissioners. Policing priorities are therefore ultimately Boris’s responsibility. And there is no remotely realistic policy in place for tackling the problems of life-threatening incompetence, aggressive anti-social behaviour, and barefaced criminality amongst operators of motor vehicles that is on near constant display every evening along Cycle Superhighway 7 and the residential streets of south west London. Boris has allowed deadly dangerous driving to carry on as the norm, apparently because he was oblivious to it, preferring to pursue policies targeted at changing cycling behaviour.

He has added insult to injury and he needs to apologise for both.

The telling death of a railwayman

Here, to keep you occupied while I work on something else, is a very short extract from a first draft of something else. It’ll need a bit of work. The context is that it comes amongst a long discussion of societal and judicial attitudes to dangerous driving, including the right to drive and our reliance on cheap road haulage and distribution with lax regulation, and illustrated with several of those case studies with which we are now all too familiar. (The pictures aren’t part of the extract, I’ve merely taken them from the Rail Safety and Standards Board Annual Safety Performance Report, and from STV news (warning: autoplaying audio/video)).

In 2011, a railway worker was killed. Just one. His name was John McInnes, an infrastructure maintenance worker who looked after lines in the north of Scotland. McInnes had thirty years of experience in a job that can come with all the hazards of working alongside fast trains, around heavy machinery, on high structures and amongst live wires. He was killed on the evening of the fourth of July 2011, while travelling to a work site on the Highland Main Line at Kingussie, only five miles from Crubenmore, where this whole story started. But McInnes did not die on the tracks. Accessing the work site by the A9 trunk road, his van and a car crashed with enough force to spark a horrific inferno that took firefighters 45 minutes to control.

This ironic tragedy highlights the already stark contrast between safety on the roads and safety on the railway. For more than a decade, railway workforce fatalities have been measured mostly at the low end of single figures, and five years have now passed without a single passenger or crew member having been killed in a train crash.

There wasn’t always such a profound difference between the safety cultures of the road and the railway. The navvies who built the Victorian railways were treated as expendable labour by powerful company owners who fought safety regulations, not only during construction, but also in everyday operation. Even when the railways were nationalised in the late 1940s, the toll on the workforce was still more than 200 every year. But strong unions demanding their right to safe workplaces, and public opinion demanding change when things go spectacularly wrong — as when major crashes occurred during the Railtrack era — has ensured that, these days, many layers of safety are built into every part of the railway.

The railway industry investigates not only all of the deaths on the tracks, but also the injuries and near misses below them in the Heinrich Triangle. The Rail Accident Investigation Branch makes extensive inquiries, consults the detailed operational records, and reconstructs events, leading to fifty page reports highlighting the lessons that are to be learned, the working practices to be revised, the rules which must be better enforced, and the new technology which should be adopted. The occurrences that it investigates are mostly what we would call accidents. Nobody was really to blame, and it is not the intention to find anybody to blame, only to prevent anything like it from happening again.

And so we have developed signalling systems which make it almost impossible to accidentally crash a train: train positions are automatically detected and the system keeps them apart by lengths of several train braking distances, refusing to allow the signaller to put trains on collision courses and automatically triggering the brakes if the driver fails to stop at red. Engineering work is checked and double checked and measured automatically by high-tech high-speed engineering trains on rolling schedules. In the event that engineering work must be carried out during live traffic, the engineering gangs work with dedicated trackside lookouts using flags and air horns to warn of approaching trains, while drivers sound their own horns until all workers have ensured their position is safe and signalled a clear acknowledgement in reply.

The railway has developed a culture in which staff at all organisational levels respect the fact that the railway is a hazardous work environment and that they must take seriously their responsibilities for the safety of their colleagues and passengers. But it did not achieve its enviable safety record simply by demanding respect and courtesy, and nor did it do so by imposing harsh penalties on workers whose momentary misjudgements ended in catastrophe. It designed a system which forgave those misjudgements: one which accepts that when humans are in control things will go wrong, so the system should be designed to allow humans to make minor mistakes and recover from them before there are any consequences.

In 2011, the Rail Accident Investigation Branch did not have to investigate a single worker death. John McInnes was on the road when he died at work, and when you work on the road, you’re still expendable labour.

Unskilled and unaware of it (re-post)

It was pointed out to me that I haven’t posted anything for weeks. It will be a few more before the project that has been taking up my time is out of the way. Here, then, is something I wrote way back in November 2010, which seemed relevant given the latest Department for Transport “please play nice on the roads” marketing campaign. If I were writing it today, I’d mention a million other things, and probably do away with the sarcastic transport mode tribalism that amused me so when this blog was young. But I’m not.

In the War Bulletin this week I mentioned a study that found drivers to be at fault in 87% of car/bicycle collisions.  According to the press release and coverage, the study included (but was not limited to) giving cyclists in Melbourne helmetcams, and analysing the footage of 54 “events”, including 2 collisions.  It sounds like the study has a number of limitations — it’s difficult to draw general conclusions about collisions from only 2 of them, and the results were only ever going to apply to the helmet-law and vehicular-cycling environment of Melbourne, and even then only to experienced cyclists who (presumably) were aware that that their own behaviour was being recorded.

The study was conducted by the Monash University Accident Research Centre, who I am sure did a good job.  But unfortunately nothing resembling it appears in their reports and publications, and I can find no evidence that the original research has been made public yet.  (Allowing the world’s media to uncritically churn your press release without being able to see the actual details of the work — and perhaps more importantly, before your fellow academics are allowed to review what you have done — is rather bad form.)  So there’s not really anything more we can say until we can see the study itself, and we may yet find that everything that has been said was wrong.

But the reported findings do fit with what we already know about accident causes and driver behaviour.

The Motorist attitude to their own collisions and near-collisions is a particularly interesting field.  When one suggests that speed cameras might be a good thing, for example, somebody will always pop up to declare that they have been driving at 90mph for decades and never caused a single accident, because they are a perfect driver who knows exactly when speed is appropriate. And it might be true: some people are good drivers and some people are bad drivers.  Trouble is, the driver himself can never know which he is: all drivers believe themselves to be above average.  Everybody is seeing bad driving, but nobody admits to doing it.

In Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt documents the details of the phenomenon of drivers unable to recognise their own lack of skill.  A large part of it he puts down to a lack of feedback.  For example, in the Monash helmetcam study, there were a mere 2 collisions, but there were 6 near-collisions and 46 “other incidents” (the classic Heinrich triangle).  These “other incidents” correspond to those situations where we notice people driving badly.  They occur because the driver failed to spot a hazard or failed to recognise as a hazard something that they did see.  By definition, if they did not see or did not recognise, the driver will never have been aware of the situation.  They will reach their destination assuming that they had done a great job, oblivious to the bad driving that had been recorded.  That’s probably what happened in 52 out of the Monash group’s 54 “events”.

And when the driver does finally notice that they have just been in a near collision, they can congratulate themselves for having the skill to have avoided an actual collision.

Thus reassured of their own driving skills, on the few occasions when they do get some feedback, they find ways to dismiss it.  That horn honk wasn’t aimed at me, or if it was, it must be because the other driver is an impatient egotistical bad driver who wouldn’t recognise good driving like mine.  The police pulled me over because they have a quota to fill, or because they’re anti-Motorist, not because I was driving dangerously.  After all, I already know that I am not a dangerous driver.

And then they crash, and it was an accident, bad luck, a momentary loss of concentration, beyond one’s control.  They couldn’t have caused it, because they already know from their experience and their long record of not causing accidents that they must be a good driver.

The evidence from driving simulation experiments shows that drivers can’t accurately remember what was happening in the lead up to the crash — what they saw and heard, who else was on the road and where and which order and when they appeared; what they were thinking and where they were looking and when they last checked their mirrors.  So they can unconsciously fill in these details with whatever makes them feel the least uncomfortable.

When drivers are shown videos of their driving (from helmetcams, or, as Vanderbilt discusses, Drivecam), most of them are surprised to discover that they have many more bad habits than they were aware of.  And that can create some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance for them, with attempts to deny or justify their behaviour, or, as with speeding, attempts to redefine it as safe.

It’s important to know these things about driver psychology if you’re trying to create a marketing campaign to make drivers be nice, or design ways to rehabilitate careless and dangerous drivers (how does sending a dangerous driver on their way with a £60 fine help anybody when the driver doesn’t have the skills to figure out what they are doing wrong?), or wondering whether to send your helmetcam footage to Roadsafe to be passed on to the offending driver.

And it’s important to know these things about driver psychology when deciding whether motor vehicles can ever share nicely with vulnerable road users.

John Forester is an asshole

Despite journalists who talk of a cycling “community”, and those beneath them in the bottom half of the internet talking of cyclists and all the evil things that cyclists do, people who use bicycles are a diverse bunch with diverse styles and, as is frequently demonstrated, diverse opinions. But I hope there is one thing on which British cyclists might be able to agree.

John Forester says of The Times Cities Fit For Cycling campaign:

The whole agenda is nothing more than a mix of half-baked ideas. … Consider the emphasis on HGVs. Fit them up to prevent “cyclists from being thrown under the wheels”.

Well, the exact approach to dealing with trucks was an issue we raised with the The Times at the Street Talks brainstorming session. On entirely friendly terms, of course, and all are agreed that there were problems with trucks to solve — they are, after all, a disproportionate source of danger and contributor to the barriers to cycling. Where I think Forester can unite us is in what he says next:

Crazy, who or what is it that reaches out and throws cyclists under the wheels of HGVs? While I don’t know the statistics from detailed studies, and apparently nobody knows, I suggest that the main problem is that cyclists throw themselves under the wheels of such vehicles during turning movements.

Well the Americans might not know much about the problem with trucks, but we know plenty, both from reviews like Morgan et al, and from the cases which make all too frequent headlines.

Eilidh Cairns, an experienced commuter cyclist, was killed in February 2009, when a tipper truck driven by Joao Lopes ploughed over her from behind. Lopes was fined £200 for driving with defective vision, but the death was ruled “accidental” and he was free to kill again.

Catriona Patel, an experienced commuter cyclist, was killed in the Monday morning rush hour in June 2009. Pulling away from the Advanced Stop Line as the lights turned green outside Oval Station, a 32-tonne tipper lorry driven by Dennis Putz accelerated into her. Witnesses had to bang on the side of the truck before the oblivious Putz stopped. Putz was a serial dangerous driver, was hung-over — 40% over the limit — and talking on his mobile phone. He denied a charge of causing death by dangerous driving, but was sentenced to 7 years for it.

Brian Dorling, an experienced commuter cyclist and motorcyclist, was killed in the morning rush hour in October last year. A tipper truck turned across his path at the Bow Intersection. They had to use his dental records to identify him.

Deep Lee was struck by a lorry from behind as the lights turned green; Svitlana Tereschenko was killed by a tipper truck whose distracted driver failed to indicate before turning and driving over her. Daniel Cox was run over by a truck which did not have the correct mirrors and whose driver had pulled into the ASL on a red light and was indicating in the opposite direction to which he turned.

Try telling Ian McNicoll that his son Andrew, well versed in cyclecraft as a road and commuter cyclist, should have known better than to throw himself under the wheels of the articulated lorry that side-swiped while overtaking him in Edinburgh. Try telling Debbie Dorling that her cycle and motorcycle-trained husband should have behaved differently at Bow. Try telling Allister Carey that the death of his daughter Eleanor under the wheels of a lorry in Tower Bridge Road was her own fault.

The cycling “community” in this country might not always agree about the most appropriate or desirable method for reducing exposure to danger and its role as a barrier to cycling, but I think at least one thing can unite us: anyone who, knowing little about the world beyond California, says that the problem here is all cyclists’ own fault for throwing themselves under the wheels of trucks, is an asshole who can keep his discredited half-baked ideas to himself.

After Westminster Hall, where next?

I have been neglecting this blog, both pulled away by other projects and watching with awe the unfolding of The Times‘ Cities Fit For Cycling campaign. I will assume that all of the readers of this blog have managed to keep up with those events through other sources, and have signed up and lobbied their representatives.

On Thursday afternoon, of course, the Cities Fit For Cycling campaign reached Parliament, with an excellent turnout of MPs enthusiastic for cycling and an astonishing degree of cross-party agreement about the things that make cycling unsafe and unattractive, and the sort of solutions that should be pursued. Unlike Boris “keep your wits about you” Johnson, the assembled MPs recognised that fast and busy roads are the main barrier to people making journeys by bicycle, and they recognised that Britain’s roads are not a natural and immutable phenomenon but things that we can alter to make less dangerous and more attractive for cycling.

There is, of course, only so much that backbench MPs can do, and the picture of Dutch-style cycling in Britain that one-by-one the MPs painted has so far been ignored by those who actually have the power to make a difference.  It is up to ministers to turn the debate into action, and the minister Norman Baker’s response to it all was, of course, embarrassing. Early Day Motions and backbench debates don’t, by themselves, change anything, and as Robert Davis and Cycalogical both point out, we should not be naive and think that the mere fact that this one debate has occurred means that we have received any of the things that were asked for.

But nor should we be too cynical and pessimistic: exciting things are happening. For as long as I’ve been writing about transport, cycling campaigners have tried to tell me that there is no point in asking for high quality cycling infrastructure because there isn’t the political will for it: there aren’t the numbers or the demand. Well the events this past year, and these past few weeks especially — the growing and multiplying flashrides and protests, the rise of cycling as an important London election issue, the Times campaign, and now the remarkably large show of MPs who really get it — have suggested to me that there are the numbers and there is the demand for change. Yes, promises have been made and broken before. But we know much more now — not least, of the alternatives that are possible. Now is the time to learn from those past failures, but not to learn that failure is inevitable. We must make sure that the issue remains at the top of our MPs’ agendas, and we must now set out exactly what ministers need to do, so that they can not fob us off with insufficient funds spent on inadequate things. This could be our “Stop The Child Murder” moment, but only if our efforts are sustained and focussed.

Norman Baker and David Cameron have already claimed their support with many words and few actions. It is, of course, obvious when poor Norman Baker is fobbing us off with a few pennies, barely enough for tiny isolated local incremental improvements; or when our MPs are trying to pass the buck to under-resourced local authorities. It needs to be equally obvious what real activity would look like.

The Times have set out the things that they think should be done in their manifesto. It’s a nice try, and identifying specific tasks for government — so that we can see clearly when they are or are not getting on with it — is exactly what we need to be doing. But The Times‘s list is not quite right. Chester Cycling has set out a better set of objectives for infrastructure, alongside an excellent set of principles for guiding policy discussions and keeping us on track.

My own list of tasks for ministers would place infrastructure at the top — because it’s the biggest, most expensive, and highest impact task — and look something like this:

Norman Baker’s department must get to work revising or replacing the engineering manual for cycling infrastructure — one of the most important promoters of crap cycle facilities and an active impediment to the import of international best practice — and changing the way that highways departments think about building for the bicycle (with the help of The Times‘s suggested “cycling commissioners”, perhaps). The Times are correct to identify junctions as the top priority for rebuilding, but unless we change the engineering manuals and culture, the rebuilt junctions won’t look any different from before. I will go into this in great detail in forthcoming posts.

The Times are absolutely right that funding needs to be redirected to cycling — more, even, than they specify (and taken from out dated relief road schemes). But of course large sums should not be handed out just to be wasted on substandard stuff that will need fixing later. In the first year, while a better engineering manual is being prepared, spending should be focussed on ensuring that we have the right expertise — the sort of expertise that Cycling England was just beginning to build up when it was cut — and that local authorities are ready to spend the money on something that actually sounds sensible and worthwhile when it does become available. Meanwhile, since almost everything that the DfT does is dependent on the Treasury thinking it’s a good idea, I imagine it would be sensible for Baker, Greening and The Times to be specifically working on those who hold the purse strings — making the case for serious and sustained investment.

The Times are right that 20mph should be the default urban speed limit, cycle lanes or not. 20mph is increasingly the urban speed limit, and most authorities would like it to be far more widespread, but 20mph zones are held back by the expense and bureaucracy of implementing it street-by-street. Given that this government is a fan of all that “libertarian paternalism” stuff — the latest being to make workplace pensions opt-out rather than opt-in — they should make 20 the default urban limit. Authorities would then have to go to the expense of opting out, consulting and erecting signs on the few roads where the appropriate limit is 30mph, rather than on the very many where it is 20.

The Times rightly identify big trucks as a problem. They suggest some sensible enough technological solutions to the danger they pose — alarms, sensors, safety bars, and the like — but bizarrely suggest that they only need to be present on trucks “entering city centres”. Vehicle design standards are generally handled by the EU these days, and my guess is that the EP is probably the best place to pursue this. However, there are steps that this government should be taking: standing up to the haulage industry’s relentless demands for bigger and heavier trucks, and pushing those big trucks back out of the city centres and narrow streets that should never have been expected to accommodate them.

There is one thing conspicuously absent from The Times‘s manifesto, given their focus on road danger and the many tragic stories that have been raised both in the newspaper and repeatedly by MPs who had lost constituents. They say nothing about getting dangerous drivers off the road. It is abundantly clear that in recent years we have developed a massive problem with the investigation of dangerous driving. Between us we could compile vast lists of hit and run incidents and near death experiences that have all ended in the police giving up because of lost files, untraceable number plates and the vehicle owner claiming not to have been the driver. Meanwhile, when cases of dangerous driving do make it to court, the sanctions are woefully inadequate. If the government were serious about tackling road danger, ministers from the DfT, Home Office and Justice department would be working on reforms to the policing and sentencing of dangerous driving.

Those are the areas where I think we should be expecting to see action from ministers, and I’ll go into more detail about each in later posts. The other items in The Times’s manifesto? Can’t argue with gathering more reliable stats on cycling: the “audits” that we’ve had in the past have usually been far from robust. Little to say about training: the funding for it is already adequate and protected, as ministers like to regularly re-announce (though I’m not sure why, given that vehicular cycling training has only been developed as a way to cope with their failed roads policies). And sponsored cycleways? A policy championed by Boris Johnson is the last thing cycling needs.

Prevention and cure

While organising notes, I stumbled upon this quote I bookmarked years ago, from the great Harvard cancer biologist Judah Folkman:

A pediatric surgeon in Boston just finished a difficult operation. To relax, he went to the Charles River and sat down on a bench. Suddenly, he heard cries of ‘Help! Help!’ and saw a person drowning. The surgeon jumped into the river and pulled the person to safety. He lay exhausted on the banks of the river and again heard, ‘Help! Help! ’ He glanced at the river and saw another person drowning. Despite his exhaustion, he jumped into the river and pulled the second drowning person to safety. Now, he was truly exhausted and lay on the ground huffing and puffing and again heard, ‘Help! Help! ’ He raised his head to look toward the river and saw a third person drowning, but he also noticed two basic researchers walking by the river. The surgeon shouted, ‘Colleagues, you must help! This is the third drowning person in the river in one afternoon! ’ The researchers looked at the river and then at the surgeon and said, ‘Three people drowning in one afternoon? This is very interesting! We’ll walk upstream to see who’s throwing them in!’.’’

(I think actually that it would work better if cast with public health researchers in place of basic researchers. The basic researchers would be too busy describing in obscure detail of the currents of the river, while translational researchers designed a better buoyancy aid for those currents.)

Folkman was applying the metaphor to his own field, cancer, but it works equally well for death and injury on our streets. The “road safety” approach to the problem has people studying the currents and advocating hi-viz vests and bicycle helmets, while spending billions on air ambulances and major trauma units. The “road danger reduction” approach goes upstream and asks why we are allowing large volumes of fast moving vehicles into the places where we live and work and play and learn. And it’s notable that in medicine, it’s the surgeons who think that preventing injury means bicycle helmets, and the public health researchers who think that preventing injury means calming and removing cars and trucks.

Here are a few of them: Danny Dorling talking about the open sewers of the 21st century; Harry Rutter’s Street Talk on moving towards a healthier city; and Ian Roberts, acting badly, on The Energy Glut. And you can hear Robert Davis talking about “road danger reduction” at London South Bank University on thursday next week.

During the 20th century, life expectancy lengthened by 30 years in the developed world. 25 of those years are attributable to public health intervention — to prevention rather than cure. But prevention disproportionately helps the poor and frequently hinders the rich. Guess which branch of medicine gets all the money.

A death in Hucknall

A funeral takes place in Nottinghamshire today. The Hucknall Dispatch reported on Sunday:

A LARGE congregation is expected to pay its respects at the funeral of a well-known Hucknall grandad who was killed in a tragic road-accident.

Cyclist Alan Davies (58), of Polperro Way, died after he and an articulated lorry collided on Watnall Road, Hucknall, near the Rolls-Royce site on Tuesday September 27 at 7 am.

His funeral is scheduled for Hucknall Parish Church on Market Place at 2.45 pm next Thursday (October 13). Cremation will follow at Mansfield Crematorium before a get-together at The Hucknall Empire pub and restaurant on Morven Avenue, off Beardall Street, from 4 pm.

As well as his wife, Dorothy, Mr Davies leaves three children — Danny (38), who now lives in Huddersfield, Kimberley (29) and Charlotte (28). He also leaves five grandchildren.

His family and friends have been devastated by the tragedy.

A man with strong connections to local football, Mr Davies was well known in Hucknall. He stood as an Independent candidate in the Hucknall West ward at the Ashfield District Council elections earlier this year.

A former fitter at the now-closed Linby Colliery, Mr Davies was also an avid writer of poetry and an expert on Lord Byron.

His family say he “had Hucknall at his heart”.

An inquest into Mr Davies’s death was opened and adjourned at Nottingham Coroner’s Court on Tuesday.

As reported in the Dispatch, Mr Davies died 30 years after his five-year-old son, Julian, was killed in a road accident on Annesley Road in Hucknall.

It was the top Google News report when I was looking for coverage of the Hucknall “Town Centre Improvement Scheme”, a Development Pool project seeking £8.5 million to pedestrianise the town’s High Street… by demolishing eighteen houses to make way for a bloated new “inner relief road” linking the two streets named in this news item. I have never been to Hucknall, but Nottinghamshire must have a pretty low opinion of the town if they think that this an “improvement”.

It’s another of those roads that council officers have been drawing and re-drawing for fifty years — and it wouldn’t look out of place in the 1970s. Perhaps the current head of highways drew it himself, as a lad, in a junior position decades ago?

Hucknall already has a bypass, the A611, built in the early 1990s. It only has a High Street traffic problem now because it failed then to do anything to prevent the town centre being used as a ratrun.

Like all these Development Pool plans, it all sounds very nice in the sales pitch — all this new walking and cycling and public transport provision:

1.2 What are/were the primary objectives of the scheme? Please limit this to the primary objectives (ideally no more than 3) the problems to which this scheme is the solution.

• To promote the renewal and regeneration of Hucknall town centre and create an attractive and prosperous retail centre;

• To improve the quality of life in and around the town centre by enhancing the quality of environment for pedestrians, whilst providing cycle facilities in the vicinity of the town centre, and improving links between different parts of the town and achieving greater integration with the tram/rail interchange;

• To make best use of highway assets by reducing levels of traffic congestion through Hucknall town centre and enhancing the status of public transport in order to encourage a modal shift away from the private car and improve bus service

You wouldn’t even guess that most of the money will be spent on demolishing 18 houses and building a big new town centre road, to the most walking and cycling unfriendly design possible for a road of its class.

“Enhanced pedestrian and cycle facilities together with environmental improvements throughout the town centre will be provided.”

What are those “enhanced” pedestrian and cycle facilities? A 3.0 metre shared pavement has been specified. A new source for the Facility Of The Month, perhaps. Maybe there will be a while line down the middle, giving pedestrians and cyclists each their 1.5m share of the pavement.

Three metres is the bare minimum for an adequate dedicated bidirectional cycle track. Anybody who proposes in an official document that cyclists and pedestrians share a 3.0m pavement in a busy town centre should have their bid laughed out of the Pool. There should be legislation stating exactly that: setting proper standards and disqualifying the bids of councils and agencies who don’t meet those standards. But what’s this?

Are you proposing any changes of scope from the scheme as described in Section 1? If yes, please describe in detail the changes you are proposing. Please also attach explanatory maps, diagrams etc. as appropriate.

• Localised narrowing of the 3m cycleway/ footway. This would deliver a cost saving of £100,000 as a result of reduced land take and retaining wall construction

I don’t take the linking of a personal tragedy to a political campaigning issue lightly. But tragedies like these are entirely predictable. When you build big roads and unusable “facilities”, and send articulated lorries through town centres and residential neighbourhoods, people are going to die. Nottinghamshire have killed a man and they plan to kill again — with £8.5 million of our money, if they can get their hands on it.

The DfT are accepting comments on Development Pool proposals until the end of tomorrow, Friday, on development.pool@dft.gsi.gov.uk.

In which I have to agree with the ABD

…that remedial lectures are not an appropriate alternative to prosecution for people who use mobile phones while driving. Stopped clocks, and all that. Rather less frequently than twice a day in the ABD’s case.

Lincolnshire, amongst others, are extending their remedial courses — the sort that are already widely offered as an alternative to prosecution for those caught driving too fast — to those caught using phones while driving. Greville Burgess, principal road safety coordinator for the Lincolnshire Road Safety Partnership, claims that such courses “could save lives”, but, this being a local newspaper, no evidence or source for the claim is cited. Burgess says:

“The evidence from other diversionary courses is very positive in that nationally less than 1 per cent re-offend within three years of completing the course. This strongly suggests that education rather than simple penalty points and a fine is more effective.”

But the latter does not follow from the former: Burgess does not give us the re-offending rates for those who take the penalty points. Is there really a statistically significant difference in rates at which people are caught — mark that, caught* — re-offending depending on which sentence they picked? But then, the utility of such numbers would be compromised anyway by the very fact that the offender picks the sentence: there is no randomisation in the groups we are comparing. The person who thinks that £60 and the points is the more lenient sentence might be very different to the sort of person who would rather spend £80 on the day-long remedial course. (Of course, both sentences look to me like absurdly light ways to deal with those who endanger the lives of others, but…)

This is the sort of intervention that is perfectly suited to a proper randomised controlled trial. While we’re at it, we could see whether combining the interventions — prosecution and remedial education — works better than either one on its own. If education really does work so well, why not make it a compulsory addition rather than an optional alternative to prosecution?

I don’t know what evidence Burgess thinks he has for his claim that these courses save lives, or are better than the alternatives, and I can’t find any likely candidates in the literature. But there is plenty of research on the topic, and a review of all the best evidence we have on driver education programmes — 32 properly randomised and controlled trials of advanced and remedial driver education programmes.  They found that the courses entirely failed to prevent re-offending.

And so far as I know, nobody has ever thought to investigate whether there might be side-effects to these policies. We have a prime-minister who sees moral hazard everywhere he looks, and is worried about whether we have sufficient deterrents to crime. We should not limit our assessment of driver education programmes merely to the rate of re-offending amongst participants. We must look at the wider and less immediately obvious effects of classifying mobile phone use while driving as the type of activity that merely merits spending a day getting a good talking to from a retired policeman. Perhaps there are no such side-effects. We don’t know until we look.

But I almost forgot. The prime-minister is also keen on some offenders being allowed their second chance.

I fear that this is now the second time I have found myself siding with the Association of British Drivers. But if I were to write about them every time they said something totally batshit crazy, I’d never get a moment’s rest.

* my own entirely unscientific observation is that, despite being universally recognised as extremely moronic behaviour, mobile phone use while driving is very common. The capture rate must be pretty embarrassing. I fear the 1% re-offending rate says far more about the efficacy of the policing than the efficacy of any remedies.

Risk compensation and bicycle helmets

Some months ago I left a series on bicycle helmets hanging while I got distracted with other things. We had looked at what the best evidence for the efficacy of helmets in preventing injury in the event of a crash is, and some of the reasons why we should be cautious about that evidence. We found that if you’re unlucky enough to have been hospitalised while riding a bicycle, you’re less likely to be there with a head or brain injury if you were wearing a helmet at the time of the crash. We noted several ways in which this protective effect is exaggerated and used to mislead, we noted that reduction in injury is from a very low level anyway, and that the research so far done fails to provide any sub-analysis of very different riding styles, such as racing cyclists, mountain bikers, and utility cyclists.

We also made careful note of the fact that a reduction in the rate of head injury in the event of a crash is a different finding to a reduction in the rate of injury and death of bicyclists. We briefly began the exploration of what this means by considering the fact that helmets are not much defence against a motor vehicle.

How could a reduction in head injury in cyclists who crash not mean a reduction in injury and death in bicyclists? Well, helmets could be causing other kinds of injury in crashes. Or they could be causing crashes — particularly the worst kinds of crashes.

The latter is a particularly interesting avenue. The idea is risk compensation or risk homeostasis, a phenomenon documented in fine detail by John Adams in the 1985 book Risk and Freedom. Adams showed that advances in road safety — seatbelts, motorcycle helmets, safer vehicle designs and wider, straighter, safer road designs — are never followed by quite the cut in injuries and deaths that is predicted; that while road “safety” has improved crashes are no less frequent, and that bystanders — pedestrians and cyclists — are butchered at an ever increasing rate.  There is a set level of danger that people are willing to tolerate, and so motorists were compensating for the new safety features by driving faster and taking more risks. To put it in Adams’s technical terms, potential “safety benefits” were instead absorbed as “performance benefits”.

James Hedlund reviewed the evidence on risk compensation and came up with a set of rules for when people are likely to compensate for a safety intervention:

1. They know it’s there.
2. They know it’s a safety feature.
3. There is a potential performance benefit to be had.
4. There is freedom to realise that performance benefit.

Well cyclists know whether or not they’re wearing a helmet, they know that helmets are meant for safety, there are potential performance benefits — riding faster, through smaller gaps, in more hostile traffic, or with less caution in conditions that would otherwise advise it — and cyclists are generally free to ride more furiously if they want to. (Indeed, you may be wanting to cycle faster, in which case go ahead and use a safety feature as a performance benefit if that works for you.)

But that’s only a hypothetical reason to expect risk compensation by cyclists wearing helmets, not evidence that it actually happens. And very little effort seems to have been put into researching that — perhaps because it’s difficult to devise a properly controlled test. A study of cyclists in Spain attempted to test the idea by comparing the rate of helmet wearing in traffic law violators to the rate in non-violators, finding that law breakers were less likely to be helmet wearers, the opposite to what they say should be expected if there is risk compensation. However, this study could not control for all possible differences between the populations (“confounding variables”) — for example, helmet wearers are already a population of safety-conscious conformists, less likely to commit traffic violations, and so a better question to ask would be whether those helmet wearers acted even more cautiously when their helmets were taken away from them, and whether the non-wearers behaved even more recklessly when given a helmet. (This study is, embarrassingly, the British Medical Association’s sole reference for their dismissal of risk compensation.) A more recent study observed a set of participants behaviour with and without a helmet, using speed as an indicator of risk taking and heart rate variability as a proxy for risk perception. This study found that when helmet users had their helmet taken away, the risk taking (i.e. speed) reduced to keep the risk perception stable. However, the study only looked at 35 people, and only looked at proxy variables. Neither study is very convincing — the limitations I describe here are just the tips of the icebergs — and certainly nowhere near strong enough or specific enough to guide policy. We still have a mere plausible hypothesis with no good evidence as to whether or not it’s true.

The authors of the Cochrane review acknowledge the suggestion that risk compensation by cyclists could affect their crash rate, but believe that is unlikely. It’s interesting to see a hypothesis dismissed with the argument from personal incredulity in a Cochrane review.

What is not touched on in the review, and which is potentially far more important (given the fact that crashes with motor vehicles are more likely to kill or seriously injure), is the risk compensation effect not of cyclists themselves but of the other road users around them — i.e., of the motorists. Look again at Hedlund’s rules. Motorists can see whether a cyclist is wearing a helmet; they know that helmets are supposed to be a safety feature; they can potentially find performance benefits — they think they can squeeze through tighter gaps when overtaking against oncoming traffic, or pass more quickly, or shoot in front while turning, because if they hit the cyclist then no harm is done; and there is nothing to stop them realising that performance benefit, since the police, if there even are any, are rarely even aware of the relevant traffic rules, let alone bothered with enforcing them. There is therefore a plausible hypothesis that motorists will take more risks around cyclists who wear helmets than around cyclists who do not.

This hypothesis is made all the more plausible by the fact that, in addition to potentially making cyclists seem less vulnerable, helmets make cyclists look more competent: in surveys of motorists’ beliefs, most assume that cyclists who wear helmets are more experienced and more “responsible“, meaning that they may be driving more carefully around non-helmeted cyclists who they expect to do something silly. And motorists overwhelmingly think that cyclists should be forced to wear helmets — presumably so that the motorists can get the performance benefits of driving more dangerously around them.

The motorist risk compensation theory has famously been tested by @IanWalker in one of the most delightful experiments in the field. Walker rode around Salisbury and Bristol on a bicycle fitted with an ultrasonic distance sensor measuring the effect of a number of variables on passing distance, including rider position in road, type of motor vehicle, and whether he was wearing a helmet. Analysis of over 2,000 passes showed that motorists tended to give on average around 5-10 cm less space when the rider wore a helmet. It’s not much difference, and the effect of motor vehicle type, perceived rider gender, and rider’s distance from the edge of the road were all stronger.

But it’s important to note that there is always a distribution of passing distances — a bell curve. There are a few motorists who give a lot of room, a few who scrape past, and a lot clustered in the middle, giving a little over a metre distance. When wearing a helmet, the bell curve shifts in a little bit. The cautious drivers give a little less space, the average drivers give a little less space, and the dangerous drivers give a little less space.  It’s the latter who are now more likely to drive into you.

Walker’s research, delightful as it is, is itself not without limitations. Most important amongst them is that, when it comes to answering questions of cyclist safety, it suffers the same limitation of measuring only proxy variables: passing distances rather than actual risk of crashes and injuries. But it tells us that there is a very important reason to study more than just the isolated risk of head and brain injury in the event of a crash.

Helmets are a medical intervention, exactly like a drug or surgical procedure. They are a preventative intervention and they are a physical intervention, but neither of those are alien to medicine and to the modern methods of evidence-based medical science. And risk compensation is just a side-effect of this medical intervention, like the side-effects of drugs. The side-effects of drugs that make it to market are by definition outweighed by the beneficial effects; but ten times as many drugs are discarded during development because the research finds that either the side-effects are so big or the beneficial effects are so small that the harm outweighs the help.

The authors of the Cochrane review defend their dismissal of risk compensation by saying “the fundamental issue is whether or not when bicycle riders crash and hit their heads they are benefited by wearing a helmet.” And that’s fine if you’re in the preliminary stages of developing an intervention and you are so far only concerned with whether it has beneficial effects. But the authors go far beyond that early stage in their conclusions, recommending that this intervention be compulsory — despite there being very good reasons to suspect that there are potentially major side-effects of this intervention. They can’t have it both ways. If you haven’t bothered studying the side-effects you can’t license the drug. It might kill people.

Revenge and road danger

Almost all cycling campaigners agree that a cycling society — “mass cycling” — would be desirable. The world would be a better, happier, healthier, wealthier place, and our towns and cities nicer places to live, if far more people cycled and far more of our journeys were made by bicycle.  And there is little controversy left about the barriers to cycling and the fact that fear of traffic and hostile conditions for cycling are the biggest and most impenetrable barriers to cycling in this country.  Large volumes of fast moving and dangerously driven motor vehicles create an environment in which most people never cycle.  This is old ground I shouldn’t need to go over again.

The big disagreement is how we break down that barrier. One set of campaigners want to separate the large volumes of fast moving motor vehicles from cyclists.  The other thinks that there is a better way: separation is unnecessary and perhaps even undesirable.  Their alternative is to tame to motorcar.  They would teach drivers how to overtake properly, how not to park in dangerous places, and how not to drive a tipper truck all the way into the advanced stop box while preparing for the left turn at the change of the lights.  And if they demonstrate that they can’t be taught, ban em and bang em up.  Teach drivers to play nice and the barrier to cycling will tumble, the argument goes.

As a typical cycling forum poster puts it:

I don’t even know why the councils in this country bother with cycle lanes. The money would be better spent educating idiots on the road on how terrifying them driving 6 inches from us at 50mph is.

It’s a response to the road danger problem that I have every sympathy with.  Every time somebody passes within touching distance I want to reach out and touch, and cause damage or inspire a little of the fear and discomfort in return.  I usually can’t watch helmet cam footage: I know that something bad is going to happen and that somebody is going to get away never accepting that what they did was wrong.  I desperately want them to know just what a fucking terrible thing they did.

The world in which tame motor cars roam the streets is a world in which every evil, selfish, or simply ignorant motorist has been made to realise that they have done wrong and made to feel shame and remorse for all those times they nearly took a life.  It’s a world in which we get our revenge on all those individuals who wronged us.

The problem is that road danger isn’t really all about individuals.  Ian Roberts describes this peculiar way of thinking about road danger in The Energy Glut: our focus on individual “accidents” and the individual who is to blame.  The pedestrian who jaywalked, the drunk driver, the person who made The Bad Judgment to cause it all.  And when it costs a life, we want revenge for That Bad Judgment.  This is how we think in the “road safety” paradigm: something went wrong, and we can educate, engineer, or enforce that out.  The Human Being and the Motor Car are perfectly able to peacefully coexist, it’s just that idiot needs dealing with.

It’s a nice idea.  But it doesn’t work.  Revenge won’t solve the road danger problem.  Education can’t solve it.  And “road safety” should have been written off decades ago.

For six decades road deaths and injuries have primarily been reduced simply by the human beings getting out of the way.  Education, engineering, and enforcement have had at best a minor role in cutting the rate of death and injury to cyclists over the year.  What really cut the number of deaths to cyclists was people stopping cycling, leaving only a few of the most confident, assertive, and powerful on the roads. Even those of us left have cut our distance, and set personal limits on the sort of roads we’re willing to ride on.  The Human Being and the Motor Car do not peacefully coexist.  The Human Beings get out of the way.

Why won’t revenge, education, and road safety eliminate road danger and make the roads a nice objectively and subjectively safe place to ride?  Because road danger isn’t all about the individual and their preventable mistakes.  Sometimes the pedestrian wasn’t jaywalking and the driver wasn’t drunk.  The “accident” happened simply because putting metal with that sort of kinetic energy — even the kinetic energy of a 20mph car — right next to soft fleshy people who are going about their daily lives is dangerous in any situation, no matter how well everybody behaves.  Death and injury is an inevitable result of mixing people and motor vehicles.  Idiots can make it even more probable, but it will always happen.  Ian Roberts goes right ahead and blames the car lobby for suppressing any thoughts that the car, rather than a few rogue users, might be an inherently dangerous thing to have around — but you really must read the book for that story.

Even if it were possible to weed out all of the bad apples, there will always be enough road danger to put people off cycling.  But realistically it’s not even possible to weed out all of the bad apples — or to force them to be good.  It is frequently claimed that “strict liability” will enforce good behaviour, and even that it has been proven to work — just look at the Dutch, they have strict liability and there’s loads of cycling there.  It’s another very attractive idea: if you come near me with that thing, you’ll pay.  I think most British cyclists see “strict liability” and salivate at the idea of that idiot, desperate the overtake through that little gap at 50mph, being forced to sit there and suppress his urges.  We taste that sweet revenge again.  But the real idiot won’t wait.  As David Hembrow points out, the Netherlands has idiots too.

That’s not to say that there is no reason for enforcing the rules, punishing the wrongdoing, improving driver education, and ensuring justice for the wronged. Only that those are not the things that will bring us closer to a world where mass cycling can happen.

Vengeance is no way to go about establishing productive policy, no matter how desperately we yearn for it.  Policy needs to be based on what works, and when it comes to establishing mass cycling we can try any number of policies, but as long as we are asking squidgy and snappable humans to share with hard objects possessed of such large quantities of kinetic energy, none of them ever will.  Get rid of those hard objects — separate them off — and we can make progress.

Cyclist comes out of nowhere

Catching up on my millions of saved-for-later google reader items, I was stopped by this press release advertising truck cams.  The provider of the cameras is boasting that one caught a near miss between their client Sibley Material Movements’ truck and a cyclist, which showed the truck driver to be “not at fault”.  Watch it full screen.  There are a few simple facts that can be ascertained from the video.

The video shows the truck driving along a typical two-lane two-way road with oncoming traffic at a little over 40 mph and then braking  in the final seconds close behind a cyclist who was moving across the lane to make a right turn.  The video is sadly too low resolution and wide-angle to see if and how the cyclist checked behind them and signalled.

What one can see is that the cyclist was always in the lane.  The cyclist is described as having “pulled out”, but this merely refers to the preparation for the right turn.  There is no suggestion or evidence that the cyclist was not always in that lane ahead of the truck.  There is no way to enter the road from the left shown in the video, and the cyclist is there in the distance for the duration of the clip.  This is, remember, a two-lane two-way road, with oncoming traffic.

Which leaves a question for Sibley Material Movements, who boast that the video proves their driver was in no way at fault and that the truck was “being driven safely”: what was the driver planning to do had the cyclist not “pulled out”?  Given that this is a two-lane two-way road with oncoming traffic occupying the opposite lane, and given that the cyclist was always there ahead in the truck’s lane, and given that the truck was approaching the cyclist at a higher speed than the cyclist was travelling right up until those final seconds, what was the driver’s intended speed and position in the road at the time where they are instead shown honking their horn in the video?

Given that we can not turn back time and replay things in this hypothetical changed situation, and given that there is no legal definition of “safely”, it is impossible to say that the driver would not have proceeded “safely”.  I’m simply curious to know how, and how the video proves it.

Given the nature of the situation, the Jack of Kent comment rules will have to apply to this post.

A vaccine for road safety

I stumbled upon this infomercial from BBC World while looking for something to entertain me over dinner:

It’s always fascinating to see how a television documentary treats a subject that one has spent some time looking at — in this case, motor vehicles and public health.

The one little specific aspect of motor vehicles and public health that the documentary looks at is the problem of “road safety”, particularly in the poorer parts of the world.  Well over a million people die on the world’s roads each year, disproportionately poor people killed by or in the name of rich people, putting road danger alongside those similarly neglected poor people’s problems, malaria and tuberculosis, in the public health league tables.

The documentary looked at the sort of interventions that can be made to reduce road deaths.  They are interventions that the UN has backed as part of the “decade of action” on road safety, and which the World Bank is now helping to fund.  They seem to fall into two categories: engineering and education.

The reasoning behind an engineering campaign is that it has been observed that some road designs see more deaths than other road designs.  Motorways, with their regimented traffic, central reservations and hard shoulders, have fewer fatalities than roads that pitch opposing traffic head on, separated only by a bit of paint.  Therefore, the World Bank will replace the dangerous streets and roads of the developing world with motorways.  Some of you might already be mumbling something about confounding variables, and safety being achieved simply by driving vulnerable road users away with hostile environments, but shut up you ingrates, it’s a gift, for their safety.

Unfortunately, they are discovering that even when you build these fantastic new eight-lane highways, no matter how much you teach the kids the green-cross code, the bloody fools still misuse them. “The irony is, that freeway is supposed to serve the people, in whatever form that takes.” So the kindly international road safety folk are building pedestrian overpasses. They’re not even going to ask why people are trying to cross their shiny new road. Are they trying to get to their workplaces? Their school, or shops, or market? Their few remaining fields? What kind of a moron builds their house on one side of a motorway and their school on the other?  You might ask whether it’s worth expending money on people who make such an elemental mistake.  But the road safety folk are so nice they will provide a foot bridge just like that — no awkward questions asked.

The reasoning behind an education campaign is that it has been observed that many of the people who are dying are pedestrians and “two-wheeler” users, doing silly reckless things like running from one side of the road to the other, or putting themselves in the way of vehicles without first encasing themselves in armour.  Did you know that in some of these countries they don’t even have hi-viz?  Even some drivers are endangering themselves by not wearing a seatbelt.  The only possible conclusion is that these people are ignorant of the risks that come with running across a motorway, and the benefits to be had from wearing helmets and seatbelts.  If only we could reach out and let them know…

“Enforcing drink driving laws, making people wear seatbelts, toughening up on vehicle maintenance standards, these are all basic affordable things,” the presenter tells us.  If only our own government thought so.

Unfortunately, enforcement seems to be a slip of the tongue.  This doesn’t appear to be about enforcing drink-driving and seatbelt laws, but about educating people about the dangers of drink-driving and the merits of seatbelts.  And simply telling people how to do something that they don’t want to do is at best an inefficient route to behavioural change.  This has been shown time and time again, study after study shows that telling people — whether child pedestrians or experienced drivers — to do specific things in order to be safe on roads just doesn’t work.  (See e.g. the review drawn up for NICE, the UK body which decides whether proposed health interventions are worthwhile.)

The one thing that road safety education does achieve, of course is good PR for the company that is funding it.

The BBC documentary doesn’t say who is behind all this stuff. A few representatives of development NGOs pop up, we visit the UN, who have put their name to the “decade of action”, and we know that the World Bank will be amongst those building roads. But we don’t really hear from the concerned and benevolent folk who persuaded the UN and World Bank to spend all this money on bigger safer roads.

Michelle Yeoh, presenter of the BBC item, is global ambassador for road safety at the “Make Roads Safe” campaign.  That campaign is the public facing side of the “Commission for Global Road Safety”, itself a part of the FIA Foundation.  The FIA Foundation in turn being the independent charity funded by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, the international automobile lobby.

Ian Roberts describes who the commissioners on the Commission for Global Road Safety are:

Canada is represented by an Executive Director at General Motors, Japan by a Board Member of the Bridgestone Corporation, the major trans-national tyre maker. Russia is represented by the President of the Russian Automobile Federation and Italy by a former president of the Automobile Club of Italy. Michael Schumacher represents Germany and France is represented by Gerard Saillant, Deputy President of the FIA Institute, another FIA creation and responsible for the medical aspects of Formula One. The UK Commissioner is the Chief Economist at Lehman Brothers, a US investment bank with financial links to Formula One. The US Commissioner is Director of the Global Road Safety Forum, an organization funded by the FIA and one of the ‘implementation partners’ that the Commission works with. The Commission’s Patron is Prince Michael of Kent, a former racing driver, now a member of the British Racing Drivers Club and the Bentley Drivers Club. Lord Robertson himself is Deputy Chairman of the Board of TNK-BP, a Russian oil company. According to the Lords’ Register of Interests, which shows that the FIA paid for Robertson to attend the 2006 Monaco Grand Prix, the Commission meets at the races.

In a response to Roberts’ paper about the Commission, the FIA Foundation reminded us that it “has no relationship with industry whatsoever”.

At Bath Skeptics, Ian Walker, referring to British road conditions, stated that anybody who has to use the roads as part of their job is working in Dickensian conditions.  Health and Safety regulation means that death in the workplace is exceptionally rare in Europe today, and when it does occur, it is typically followed by extensive investigation to discover what went wrong, whether anybody was to blame, and how to prevent it ever happening again.  Unless the workplace is a road, in which case death is routine, nobody is to blame, and nothing can be done about it.  If you drive as part of your job, you are expendable labour.

One of the reasons that Europe’s workplaces are so safe, of course, is because we have simply outsourced the dangerous jobs.  The poor of Africa and Asia, free from health and safety laws, are mining our minerals and weaving our clothes for pennies, working in real Dickensian conditions, and the World Bank needs to build big roads so that they can drive the products to the docks.  Like Victorian mill-workers, the third world should be grateful for the kindness showed by their new bosses in providing such safe new roads, servants of the people.

Is Dangerous Cycling a Problem? A Look at the Stats.

Cylists are awful. They run red lights, they take up too much space, and they kill pedestrians. Cyclists are so awful that a Private Member’s Bill has been introduced to make dangerous cycling a crime.
So how much of a problem is dangerous cycling? We’ve collated the statistics on pedestrian deaths between 1998-2007 and created a visualisation, showing the relative number of deaths caused by types of vehicle. You can find it here, and play around with it, looking at the total, or the individual years.
I’m not sure the problem is so endemic that it requires a new law, or as much media attention as it’s garnered, and I’m not sure laws that are lobbied for by the families of a lone victim are the best way forward. But the data’s there, in case you fancy some stats to back up your argument.

Just Stay Indoors

How best to get the road safety message to the yoof of today? A catchy hook? A rap? Too passé. A cartoon? Too juvenile. What about zombies. Brilliant. Depict an apocalyptic world populated by undead victims of road traffic accidents. The kids will love it. Or be too terrified to ever leave their homes. But that’s a risk you take if you’re Newcastle City Council. The first line of the council’s new Road Safety website states:

Traffic is the single biggest cause of accidental death for 12 to 16 year olds.

The second is suicide. Being a teen is ace! Alongside gory, gratuitous mocked up photographs of zombified traffic victims, are tabs on cycling and pedestrians. These are divided into facts and, er, survival skills. Because transporting oneself outside of a vehicle is that dangerous. Here are a few of those facts.

• Teenage boys are six times more likely to be killed or seriously injured on bikes than teenage girls.
• Young people aged between 11 and 16 are more at risk of being killed or seriously injured as a pedestrian or cyclist in road accidents than any other age group.
• Wearing a cycle helmet can improve your chances of survival, and reduce the chance of serious injury.

Firstly, your chances of being killed as a cyclist as ridiculously low. Far, far lower, than as a motorist. There were 104 pedal cyclist fatalities in 2009. To begin a section on cycling with the assumption that YOU MAY DIE is to basically scare off a generation of teenagers from forming walking and cycling habits that could become embedded in part of a healthy lifestyle.

In a similar vein, the section on walking warns teens that:

• Young people aged between 11 and 16 are more at risk of being killed or seriously injured as a pedestrian or cyclist in a road accident than any other age group.
• Traffic is the biggest cause of accidental death of 12 to 16-year-olds.
• 1 in 5 teenagers report having been involved in a road accident.

Again, I see this as scare-mongering – in addition to being told that if they walk home late at night they will be kidnapped and murdered, they will now also be mown down by vehicles, unless they drive or board them.

Why are the council ploughing money into an “edgy” campaign that will only serve to turn teens away from cheap, healthy modes of transportation? People who start walking and cycling in their teens, generally keep walking and cycling. I’ve lost count of the number of peopel I’ve met in their twenties who want to cycle, but are unsure of where to start, and wish they had kept it up instead of stopping once they hit 13. Cycling isn’t dangerous, if you teach drivers to look out for cyclists properly, and if cyclists feel safe on roads. Similarly, if pedestrians have places to cross, they don’t get run over.

A savvy website may grab attention, and make the council feel “hip”. Unfortunately, the cost of outreach schemes, when the health service is overstretched due to heart disease rates skyrocketing years down the line is a lot harder to predict.

–Dawn

Unskilled and unaware of it

In the War Bulletin this week I mentioned a study that found drivers to be at fault in 87% of car/bicycle collisions.  According to the press release and coverage, the study included (but was not limited to) giving cyclists in Melbourne helmetcams, and analyzing the footage of 54 “events”, including 2 collisions.  It sounds like the study has a number of limitations — it’s difficult to draw general conclusions about collisions from only 2 of them, and the results were only ever going to apply to the helmet-law and vehicular-cycling environment of Melbourne, and even then only to experienced cyclists who (presumably) were aware that that their own behaviour was being recorded.

The study was conducted by the Monash University Accident Research Centre, who I am sure did a good job.  But unfortunately nothing resembling it appears in their reports and publications, and I can find no evidence that the original research has been made public yet.  (Allowing the world’s media to uncritically churn your press release without being able to see the actual details of the work — and perhaps more importantly, before your fellow academics are allowed to review what you have done — is rather bad form.)  So there’s not really anything more we can say until we can see the study itself, and we may yet find that everything that has been said was wrong.

But the reported findings do fit with what we already know about accident causes and driver behaviour.

The Motorist attitude to their own collisions and near-collisions is a particularly interesting field.  When one suggests that speed cameras might be a good thing, for example, somebody will always pop up to declare that they have been driving at 90mph for decades and never caused a single accident, because they are a perfect driver who knows exactly when speed is appropriate. And it might be true: some people are good drivers and some people are bad drivers.  Trouble is, the driver himself can never know which he is: all drivers believe themselves to be above average.  Everybody is seeing bad driving, but nobody admits to doing it.

In Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt documents the details of the phenomenon of drivers unable to recognise their own lack of skill.  A large part of it he puts down to a lack of feedback.  For example, in the Monash helmetcam study, there were a mere 2 collisions, but there were 6 near-collisions and 46 “other incidents” (the classic Heinrich triangle).  These “other incidents” correspond to those situations where we notice people driving badly.  They occur because the driver failed to spot a hazard or failed to recognise as a hazard something that they did see.  By definition, if they did not see or did not recognise, the driver will never have been aware of the situation.  They will reach their destination assuming that they had done a great job, oblivious to the bad driving that had been recorded.  That’s probably what happened in 52 out of the Monash group’s 54 “events”.

And when the driver does finally notice that they have just been in a near collision, they can congratulate themselves for having the skill to have avoided an actual collision.

Thus reassured of their own driving skills, on the few occasions when they do get some feedback, they find ways to dismiss it.  That horn honk wasn’t aimed at me, or if it was, it must be because the other driver is an impatient egotistical bad driver who wouldn’t recognise good driving like mine.  The police pulled me over because they have a quota to fill, or because they’re anti-Motorist, not because I was driving dangerously.  After all, I already know that I am not a dangerous driver.

And then they crash, and it was an accident, bad luck, a momentary loss of concentration, beyond one’s control.  They couldn’t have caused it, because they already know from their experience and their long record of not causing accidents that they must be a good driver.

The evidence from driving simulation experiments shows that drivers can’t accurately remember what was happening in the lead up to the crash — what they saw and heard, who else was on the road and where and which order and when they appeared; what they were thinking and where they were looking and when they last checked their mirrors.  So they can unconsciously fill in these details with whatever makes them feel the least uncomfortable.

When drivers are shown videos of their driving (from helmetcams, or as Vanderbilt discusses, Drivecam), most of them are surprised to discover that they have many more bad habits than they were aware of.  And that can create some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance for them, with attempts to deny or justify their behaviour, or, as with speeding, attempts to redefine it as safe.

It’s important to know these things about driver psychology if you’re trying to create a marketing campaign to make drivers be nice, or design ways to rehabilitate careless and dangerous drivers (how does sending a dangerous driver on their way with a £60 fine help anybody when the driver doesn’t have the skills to figure out what they are doing wrong?), or wondering whether to send your helmetcam footage to Roadsafe to be passed on to the offending driver.

And it’s important to know these things about driver psychology when deciding whether motor vehicles can ever share nicely with vulnerable road users.