Not dangerous

In 2013, we’ve heard a lot about the dangers of cycling. So, as the year comes to end, it’s time for a brief reminder of some things that aren’t dangerous.

Riding a bike without a helmet is not dangerous.

Riding a bike without hi-viz clothing is not dangerous.

(Even when it’s a bit gloomy.)

Riding a bike while keeping yourself dry with an umbrella is not dangerous.

Riding a bike while someone else keeps you dry with an umbrella is not dangerous.

Giving someone a backie is not dangerous.

At any age.

Giving a newly-purchased grill a backie is not dangerous.
Giving someone a backie while they tow a suitcase is not dangerous.

Listening to music while riding a bike is not dangerous.

Listening to music and drinking coffee while cycling is not dangerous.

Taking the dog for a walk by bike is not dangerous.

Even with plants from the garden centre.
Adjusting your iPod while cycling is not dangerous.

Riding a bike with a child on your handlebars is not dangerous.

What can make cycling dangerous is the physical environment. Tellingly, all these pictures show people cycling in places where they are insulated from danger – where they are separated from motor traffic.

As Chris Boardman so often states, cycling is not an intrinsically dangerous activity. If we truly want to make it safe and attractive, we need to focus on changing the physical environment, not on the way people dress or behave. Let’s remember that in 2014.

 

Some statistics from the latest Travel in London Report

Transport for London’s latest Travel in London report was released just before Christmas, and, as always, it is packed full of statistics. One of the most telling graphs comes early in the report –

The decline in motor vehicle distance travelled in London

The distance travelled by motor vehicle has fallen fairly consistently across London since the year 2000. The sharpest decline has been in central and inner London, but even in outer London there has been an 8% decline. It should also be noted that the ‘central London’ count does not correspond precisely to the congestion charging zone – TfL tell us that the fixed counters here are mostly outside of this zone (for instance, on the inner ring road). So the red line suggests motor traffic is declining even in places where you might expect it to have been displaced following the introduction of the charge. Transport for London also supply this titbit of information –

The traffic data considered in this section run only to the end of the 2012 calendar year. While it is too early to draw firm conclusions, it is interesting to note at this stage that observed traffic data for 2013 are showing increases in traffic relative to 2012. If sustained, this could signify a break with the now long-established pattern of slowly declining levels of road traffic in London.

That is, they seem to think motor traffic will start rising again in 2013. Certainly motor traffic in outer London (the green line) did rise by 0.3% in 2012, and this area accounts for 70% of all of London’s motor traffic. Time will tell.

Another graph that tells a story is this one –

Average traffic speeds

What is noteworthy is the remarkable consistency of vehicle speeds in the different areas of London over the last seven years. It just hasn’t budged, despite ‘smoothing traffic flow’ and all the attempts to fiddle with signal timings. There’s been no change – average traffic speeds in central London still hover around 9mph, and around 12mph for inner London. The biggest changes are actually seasonal, with speeds increasing in the summer as demand dips.

The picture for cycling isn’t particularly pretty. Slow but steady growth in outer London (the black line) has tailed off, while cycling levels in inner and greater London (green and red) actually declined last year.

Cycling mode share in London (and Britain – the blue line)

There were 582,000 cycle stages on an average day in 2012, which represents just a 1.8% increase on 2011.

The table above suggests that the growth in cycling from 2000 is tailing off; the large percentage increases (from an admittedly very small base) in the noughties have been replaced by much slower growth from 2009 onwards. This is something acknowledged in the Report itself –

The majority of indicators of cycling in London suggest a slowing in 2012 of the recent high rates of growth.

followed by a list of excuses –

There are a number of reasons for the slowing in cycling growth. In addition to the weather, which can impact on cycle flows, delivery of new cycling infrastructure slowed in 2012/13 in the run up and during the Games period, following a moratorium on new project construction. Further, the implementation of the Better Junctions cycle safety review has impacted on the pace of delivery of major new cycle programmes, including both the Barclays Cycle Superhighway and Better Junctions programmes.

Weather doesn’t seem like a particularly convincing explanation, as the Report concedes that

the overall trend in cycle flow has been upwards across the time series despite annual average temperatures remaining broadly stable. In particular, cycle flows increased considerably in summer 2011 despite average temperatures being lower than the three previous years [my emphasis]

and also that there is no clear relationship between rainfall and cycling levels.

The mode share figures for cycling across London are not impressive. In particular there seems to be a major problem in outer London, where cycling’s mode share is actually lower than that for Britain as a whole –

Some serious work is clearly needed even to attain the Mayor’s unambitious target of a 5% cycling mode share (for London as a whole) by 2026.

The final issue is safety. As @geographyjim pointed out on Twitter, the Report reveals that

Pedal cycles accounted for two per cent of daily journeys, but 22 per cent of KSI casualties in London in 2012

which is a shocking statistic for a mode of transport that is not intrinsically dangerous. The report also includes this interesting graph, showing the casualty rate per distance traveled, by mode of transport in London, broken down by age group.

By this measure cycling (represented by the green dots) is more hazardous than any other mode of transport, bar motorcycling, for all age groups. The casualty rate is particularly bad for teenagers cycling.

The number of pedestrians who were killed or seriously injured (KSI) rose 15% in 2012, up to 1,123 from 980 in 2011. And the picture is just as bad for those cycling, with KSIs in 2012 up to 671, an enormous rise of 18% on the figure for 2011 – just 571. In fact, cycling KSIs in London are now up 55% on 2009, when there were 433 cycling KSIs.

Obviously we should take into account the fact that more people are cycling, but it is now clear that the number of KSIs is outstripping the increase in trips. The risk of a cycling KSI per trip is now higher than any time since 2003, as this graph shows.

Graph from GI Centre

The changes of policy that are proposed in the Mayor’s Cycling Vision are coming at exactly the right time, with danger increasing, and cycling levels apparently starting to stagnate. The question is now whether they can be delivered.

How failure to design properly makes death more likely

Back in late 2011, I wrote a post about how the TfL policy of ‘smoothing traffic flow’ is antithetical to the creation of space for cycling. Creating ‘smooth flow’ means attempting to push as many motor vehicles through a green signal phase as possible, either through longer phases, or more stacking lanes. A ‘100% efficient’ junction is one at which all the queuing motor vehicles manage to pass through the junction on a green signal; the queue disappears at each signal phase. So taking some of that space away for cycling, or allocating more time for pedestrians to cross, will inevitably mean ‘flow’ is ‘less smooth’, when flow is measured purely in terms of motor vehicles.

The context for this post was the death of Deep Lee at the King’s Cross gryatory in October of that year, and a public meeting in December at which TfL representatives tried to justify doing pretty much nothing at all to adjust the layout of the junction where she died. They argued that taking one of the two queuing lanes away and replacing it with protected space for cycling would cause ‘considerable queues’.

In the short term, this would probably have been true. Queues would lengthen around King’s Cross, as the amount of time allocated to drivers to pass through the junction would have been reduced. But this assumes a static volume of motor traffic, that can’t be adjusted.

People are not stupid. If congestion on the road increases, they will switch to other routes, or more importantly switch to other modes of transport, if those modes of transport are sufficiently attractive. By contrast, demand for driving in cities is so high that however much space and time you allocate to it, that space will become filled with vehicles.

The A40 yesterday. 5 queuing lanes, filled to capacity

We know from cities around the world that taking space away from driving does not result in congestion, or increased journey times. It results in better cities. The private motor car is an extremely inefficient mode of transport in built-up areas, and the space in our cities can be used far more efficiently.

But even if it were true that more congestion would result as a consequence of changes to junctions like King’s Cross, should that matter if people on foot or on bikes are being seriously injured, or dying, because of compromised layouts? Is it acceptable to trade off queueing times for drivers against the risk of death? I argued in that 2011 post that

Transport for London have chosen minimizing queueing times for motor vehicles over the safety – indeed, the lives – of vulnerable road users on their network.

That’s even more clear from the details that have emerged from this week’s inquest into Deep Lee’s death. She was stuck in traffic, unable to progress forwards, trapped just ahead of the HGV that was to kill her.

In this picture of the junction, taken while some minor changes were being made in 2012, you can see a man on a bike (just visible on the left) filtering his way forward through the two stationary lanes of traffic, like Deep Lee would have been doing.

She had the misfortune to find her progress forward blocked by two vehicles, a bus and a minicab (close to each other thanks to the narrow lanes here), precisely while she was stranded just ahead of an HGV, apparently in its blind spot. This much is clear from Andrea Casalotti’s summary of the inquest, particularly this detail –

Deep Lee did nothing wrong, nor dangerous. She was unable to reach the ASL, because there was no feeder lane, because TfL was and is still unwilling to take one lane out. The lanes were too narrow and she became bottled in. Even if she had been able to reach the ASL, it was occupied by two vehicles.

Quite obviously, she would not have found herself in such a dangerous position had there been a safe, dedicated cycling route to the head of the junction. Providing two narrow lanes for queuing motor vehicles, instead of an approach that takes the safety of people on bikes seriously, demonstrably leads to dangerous situations like the one that resulted in Deep Lee’s death.

The report in the Camden New Journal notes

TfL head of capital development Nigel Hardy told the court there was a plan to introduce cycle lanes in Pentonville Road and Caledonian Road as part of a second-phase re­vamp of King’s Cross expected to begin next year. Despite calls from the London Cycling Campaign, which attended the hearing, a cycle lane will not be set up at the junction where Ms Lee died.

So it seems that while there will be some adjustments elsewhere in King’s Cross, this junction will remain unchanged. However, the details for the Central London Bike Grid, released yesterday by Transport for London, suggest that the North-South Superhighway will run through precisely this location.

Deep Lee was cycling north on the blue line, the proposed Superhighway route.

So there should be serious, substantial change here – the kind that is desperately needed. What form it will take, time will tell.

The Nag’s Head scheme – are TfL paying any attention at all?

On 6th August 2011, Samuel Harding was killed on Holloway Road in north London. As he passed a parked car, the driver opened his door without checking, striking him, and sending him into the path of a passing bus, which crushed him. From the reports, the dooring and subsequent collision appeared to occur at approximately this location.

In the days after Samuel Harding’s death, his father pleaded for improvements to the layout of Holloway Road.

Retired teacher Keith Harding said he did not blame anyone for the death of his son, Sam, 25, in a collision with a bus in Holloway Road on Saturday afternoon. But he added that as a society we are encouraging more people to cycle while not providing sufficient safety.

“Something needs to be done for cycling,” he said. “It may be reducing the speed limit to 20mph or dedicated cycle lanes. But some of our roads are not designed for cyclists.”

Two years later, and TfL are now consulting on some changes to Holloway Road – ones that will ‘improve road safety for pedestrians and cyclists’. Not at this precise location, but only a few hundred feet to the north, between the Camden Road and Seven Sisters Road (two large one-way roads that run in opposite directions).

What is being proposed? Here’s a section of the plans –

A new loading bay (previously just a portion of the footway), with a cycle lane running outside it. And on other side of the road, a cycle lane is being painted, again right next to the outside of the existing parking bays.

So the existing, deeply inadequate, cycle lane will be extended along the road, running close to these parking bays on a fast road with heavy traffic.

The current arrangement

If you were seeking to encourage the kinds of conflict that resulted in Samuel Harding’s death, just a short walk down the road, this is precisely the design you would put in place.

Now of course responsibility lies with the driver to ensure that when he or she opens their car door, they are not endangering someone (the driver in this case was charged – and cleared – of manslaughter). But some responsibility must also lie with those who design streets where the consequences of inattention will be serious injury or death.

It is clearly unacceptable to propose cycle lanes running down the outside of parked cars on Holloway Road, purely on grounds of objective danger, to say nothing about the attractiveness of such an arrangement for the people who don’t currently feel able to cycle in London.

Transport for London have a concrete example of how lethal it is for people to cycle in this position on the road, in the tragic form of someone’s death just yards away, only two years ago – yet, apparently oblivious, they are creating a design that makes this kind of death more likely than doing nothing at all.

Holloway Road is enormously wide in this area. Six lanes in total, with a median, and parking, and fairly substantial footways.

The obvious answer here is to move the parking out and to create a protected cycle track on the inside of any parking or loading bays, instead of just painting a 1990s-style stripe down the outside, and hoping for the best. That’s not good enough any more.

This is an area of significant bus movement, so a cycle track would have to run behind large bus stop islands on both sides of the road. The principle of bus stop bypasses is already in place on Stratford High Street, and it can be implemented here, with the design failures of that approach ironed out.

TfL are also proposing ridiculous, tokenistic ASLs across the front of three lanes of motor traffic.

The example on the left is quite interesting, given that you can’t turn right at this junction – it seems that these ASLs are being installed purely to create a semblance of something being done.

As Shaun McDonald wrote yesterday, many aspects of this proposal are actually dangerous; the cycle lanes directly outside parking, or the ASLs that encourage you to squeeze up the inside of vehicles. These are not proposals that should be seeing the light of day in 2013. If TfL can’t design properly yet, then they just shouldn’t bother here. This is a waste of time.

The consultation is only open over the holiday period, until the 6th January 2014 – please have your say.

Not culture, not history – physical change

I was struck by two details from yesterday’s blogpost by Mark Wagenbuur, about early protests for child-friendly streets in Amsterdam in the 1970s – details that highlight the importance of the quality of the physical environment for enabling cycling, over and above any prevailing national culture or attitudes.

The first instance was the contentiousness of the changes being proposed to the streets in Mark’s post. One Dutchman, surrounded by children, argued that it was ‘impossible’ to create a street without motor traffic on it. You can see this in the video, about 2:30 in.

These were residential streets, which now have motor traffic filtered out, as Mark describes in his post. This is an almost universal treatment across residential areas in the Netherlands now, but back then, the notion of doing this was evidently completely foreign to this gentleman. These streets were for driving. (These attitudes were reflected elsewhere in the video, as a man attempting to drive down the street turns violent as his passage is obstructed).

The second thing that struck me from Mark’s post was that while the side streets have now been calmed, the main roads in this area haven’t really changed at all, and are still hostile and unpleasant today, with a seven-year-old girl killed while cycling on Cornelis Troostplein just last Friday.

These details bring home how the Dutch have been through the battles we need to go through. Their marvellous environments for cycling did not appear out of nowhere – they are not some innate condition of being ‘Dutch’. Back in the 1970s, Dutch residential streets and main roads had the unpleasant quality of their British equivalents, and were getting worse. The physical environment in Dutch towns and cities had to be changed. And this has all happened relatively recently.

When I cycled around Utrecht and Amsterdam earlier this year with Mark, and Marc van Woudenberg, they were at pains to point out to me the bad bits of their cities, the areas that haven’t got around to being changed yet. These are quite ‘British’ in their appearance, with no cycle infrastructure to speak of, or that disappears when you need it, or with parked cars that have to be negotiated out and around, and relatively fast motor traffic in close proximity. Principally, these were main roads.

Zeilstraat, Amsterdam. A cycle lane ends just as you approach parked cars, on a busy street

Heemstedestraat, Amsterdam. Another busy main road, with nothing for cycling

Junctions in Amsterdam will occasionally leave much to be desired too.

But these aren’t locations that have been forgotten about, or that are seen as acceptable. They are places the city has not got around to fixing yet, or where political battles are still being fought.

In Utrecht Mark showed us a striking example, on Adraien van Ostadelaan. The southern end of this street has cycle tracks, protected by kerbs.

But at the northern end – just a few hundred metres away – this same street looks rather British.

No cycle tracks here – you have to cycle in the carriageway, outside parked cars. The reason is quite simple – the city are waiting for this part of the street to be renewed before they put in the bike infrastructure, as part of the twenty year cycle of renewal and repair. The southern part of the street has been upgraded; the northern part is still waiting, and looks much like it did forty years ago.

There’s another nice example in Amsterdam too, which I found on Streetview. In 2008, Amstelveenseweg looked like this –

But just a year later (and one click forward along the street) –

The crap roads in Dutch cities are slowly being eliminated, one by one.

The important point in all this is that Dutch roads and streets would undoubtedly be just as hostile to cycle on now as British streets are, if these changes had not been made. Their streets are attractive for cycling because of physical changes, to create safe space.

A long history of mass cycling in the Netherlands would have counted for very little without these changes. Their urban roads and streets would have continued to fill up with cars, and people would have continued to abandon cycling as a mode of transport, as their streets became more and more unpleasant. Children would increasingly have been kept indoors, and would have been driven around, instead of cycling independently. It is emphatically not ‘culture’ or history that explains why the Netherlands has very high cycling levels today, but rather these measures that have been implemented in the last forty years. Without them, the Dutch would have a driving culture rather similar to our own.

Of course it may well prove to have been much easier for the Dutch to have done this than it will be for us. Cycling was still a familiar mode of transport for a larger percentage of the population, and in that sense the Dutch did benefit from their history. But the point remains that these physical changes had to happen if cycling was not to be eroded in the Netherlands, to levels approaching those of anglophone countries. It might even be argued that we have one very specific advantage over the Dutch, in that we can see how their solutions have worked out. Back in the 1970s, closing off streets to motor traffic was clearly particularly radical and contentious, even for the Dutch, and they had no-one else to point to, to show how it could be done, and how it would work. They were pioneers, while we can copy.

Safe, attractive conditions for cycling don’t simply fall out of the sky. They are not the inevitable result of history, or of culture. They have to be fought for, and argued for.

The opinions of a TfL board member

A question from TfL board member Eva Lindholm at today’s board meeting.

Posted without comment.

Something struck me when I was reading [item] 2.2 on cycling accidents. Now this may be more of a philosophical point, and not fit for discussion today.

You mention a number of campaigns that are underway, targeting both drivers and cyclists, highlighting that every road user must look out for themselves, and each other, and follow the Highway Code to remain safe. Now of course drivers, through the licensing process and the Theory Test, demonstrate a knowledge of the Highway Code.

And we have drivers and cyclists intermingled on some pretty dramatically occupied roads like the Embankment, where you wonder whether it’s right to have such an imbalanced equation, with only one part of the population using the road demonstrating the knowledge of the Highway Code, and the other part of the population not.

And so my question is – as we’re all encouraging and expecting more cycling use – are we happy to live with this imbalance, and deal with the cyclist population in a purely voluntary way? Or are we thinking of it in some other way? Because it just strikes me as quite imbalanced.

Analysis of this welcome below.

How about you just don’t injure me?

Spotted in a local newspaper –

I remember a debate on cycling helmets. People were writing to the Times newspaper stating that, statistically, helmets were not effective in the reduction of injuries. And then one correspondent cut through all the crap with one simple letter.

It was along the lines of: “To all those claiming cycling helmets are ineffective, I have a challenge for them. We can meet up and I’ll hit them round the head with a plank of wood. And, before I do it, they can choose to wear a helmet – or not.”

That says it all really. Let common sense prevail.

Let common sense prevail. Let common sense prevail.

Looked at objectively, this obviously isn’t a meaningful test of whether a cycling helmet is actually ‘effective’, unless the author is suggesting that such a helmet should be worn at all times. A helmet will protect your head – a bit – from someone wielding a plank, whether you happen to be on a bike or not. The fact it is a ‘cycling’ helmet is rather irrelevant here. Why minimise your risk of plank-related injuries only while you happen to be cycling? Wear a helmet all the time.

Nor does it make a particularly compelling case for why helmets, alone, are necessary items of safety equipment, but not other pieces of protective equipment. For instance, I doubt you would be persuaded by

For all those claiming bulletproof vests are ineffective, I have a challenge for them. We can meet up and I’ll shoot them in the chest. And, before I do it, they can choose to wear a bulletproof vest – or not.

as an argument for the wider use of bulletproof vests by the general population. Or, similarly –

For all those claiming shin guards are ineffective, I have a challenge for them. We can meet up and I’ll kick them in the shins. And, before I do it, they can choose to wear shin guards – or not.

as an argument for the mandatory use of shin guards by pedestrians. You would probably say, quite reasonably – don’t kick me in the shins or shoot me.

But precisely this same insane logic appears to be so persuasive to the author he presents it as an ultimate, winning knock-down argument for the use of bicycle helmets.

Why? It’s hard to hazard a guess, but I suppose an answer might lies in the notion that being ‘in the road’ is an activity that involves an innate acceptance of danger, like entering a war zone. You wouldn’t enter a war zone without a bullet proof vest, so why cycle in the road without a helmet? Being in the road is where random acts of violence similar to being hit by a plank could occur, so it’s just obvious you should take action to protect yourself. By contrast, walking on pavements is somewhere we don’t tolerate risk, and we don’t expect to have to wear shinguards in case people come flying out of nowhere to kick us in the shins.

So, in a way, the fact that arguments like this appear so often, without any reflection on what they actually imply, is a nice little window onto the established British view of the road environment, where danger is accepted as normal, and the only way to address it is to clad your body in protective equipment, rather than minimise or remove that danger at source.

This recent news story from Australia – where helmets are indeed compulsory – represents almost a textbook example of this kind of attitude –

A HAMILTON cyclist’s life was saved by his helmet after he was hit from behind by a car on Saturday morning. The impact thrust the 63-year-old man backwards on to the car windscreen before landing on the roadside. Yesterday, he was in a stable condition in Melbourne’s The Alfred hospital with multiple fractures.

“Had he not been  wearing his helmet it would have been a different story,” Sergeant Darren Sadler said. “The helmet’s taken the impact when he hit the windscreen. Fortunately the driver was travelling below the speed limit. It’s a timely reminder for all cyclists to wear a good quality helmet when they are riding.”

The accident happened in a 100km/h zone on Nigretta Road about 9am. Local crews called in the ambulance helicopter to fly the man to The Alfred for emergency surgery. Sergeant Sadler said investigations were continuing and no charges had been laid.

Multiple fractures, hit by a car travelling at around 60mph, and yet the story here is entirely about a polystyrene helmet, not about whether human beings mixing with metal objects travelling at that kind of speed is sensible or even sane.

The disturbingly similar British version of these attitudes often manifests itself in response to the injuries of children in the road environment. Earlier this year the Ryan Smith case attracted a huge amount of publicity, as the family campaigned for – you guessed it – compulsory helmets after Ryan was left in a coma after a collision with a van (while cycling, not while walking).

And more recently we have the Put Things Right campaign, set up in the wake of the death of 15-year-old Harrison Carlin, hit while cycling by a driver travelling at or above 60mph, and 12-year-old Jeff Townley, a pupil at the same school, again killed while cycling. Put Things Right is also campaigning for compulsory helmets, as well as more education.

Depressingly it seems that campaigns like this can’t conceive of any other way of approaching the issue of reducing serious injury and death, beyond shifting responsibility onto the vulnerable parties, and doing little or nothing to tackle the physical environment. We need a different kind of common sense to prevail.

The difference between walking and cycling safety

At the end of my last post about ‘dangerising’, I mused about why, despite the presence of many pedestrians – and speeches from pedestrian campaigners – at the Die In last Friday, nobody appeared to voice any concern that people might be put off walking by talk of the deaths and serious injuries of pedestrians, unlike the concern expressed about people potentially being put off cycling.

Of course part of this is due to the fact that the pedestrian aspect of the protest did not feature much in the news bulletins at the time; it just didn’t seem to get the same amount of coverage. It was a ‘cycling’ protest, as far as the superficial observer was concerned. Nevertheless, there were interviews with Tom Kearney and Nazan Fennell on BBC News, and the danger posed to pedestrians was a major element in the material and publicity surrounding the Die In. The list of people killed in recent years, read out by Living Streets campaigners, included both people walking and cycling at the time of their death.

Now it would be quite odd, I think, to worry that protests about pedestrian safety are ‘dangerising’ walking, and making it seem like something unsafe; to worry that people might be put off walking to the shops because of protests like Die Ins. Indeed I noticed that Copenhagenize linked – apparently approvingly – to a splash about pedestrian death and danger in New York, barely 24 hours after he had criticised the Die In for putting people off cycling. The headline of the New York Post article is ‘Don’t Walk’, with the text reading ‘Looking both ways isn’t nearly enough when crossing Big Apple streets’. Pointing out the dangers posed to people walking in cities, it seems, does not require any angst about whether others might be discouraged from walking at all.

The complete opposite is true of cycling, where every British campaign or protest that mentions danger is nearly always accompanied by nagging concerns and doubts about whether we are ‘putting people off’. This policy of avoiding the negative seems to have a long history in Britain. David Arditti remarked during a conversation with me on Monday that the Tour du Danger in 2011 was the first time in a long while that the risks and dangers associated with cycling were explicitly referenced in a campaign. Danger was, traditionally, something not to be mentioned. Ghost bikes should to be tidied away quickly in case people were put off – an idea that got me a bit annoyed before the Tour du Danger. Sunny optimism about how ‘you’re better off cycling than not cycling’ was the way forward, with the familiar tired story of how, despite the casualties and deaths being reported, you are statistically likely to live two years longer if you cycle.

I think a decisive break has been made with that kind of approach, probably because of a recognition that it wasn’t getting us anywhere, and also a greater understanding of the reasons why people don’t cycle. Statistics about how safe cycling is, objectively, are not persuasive when you are faced with road environments that feel threatening and hostile. As I argued in my previous post, campaigning that focuses on danger is at worst merely repeating the way most people already feel about cycling – they don’t want to do it, but would do it if it felt and looked safer.

This gets to the heart of why nobody is really concerned about pedestrian safety campaigns putting people off walking. Unlike cycling in Britain, walking is (with notable exceptions in rural areas) a subjectively safe activity. Pavements do go pretty much everywhere, from door to door, and your interactions with motor vehicles are carefully controlled. Indeed, it is in places where there aren’t pavements, particularly in rural areas, where walking can feel as unsafe as cycling, if not more so.

This is not to say the pedestrians aren’t exposed to actual danger, both with and without pavements – the deaths and injuries documented recently demonstrate this – it’s just that walking is not an activity where you actually feel threatened by motor vehicles, in a way you do while cycling. You can walk along roads and streets that are incredibly unpleasant to cycle along in relative comfort, without concern for your own safety.

Mile End Road. Hostile and unpleasant to cycle on. Fine for walking

There is of course inconvenience involved in walking, particularly when you encounter junctions, or where there simply aren’t facilities or conditions that allow you to cross the road where you want to. But the threat you feel while cycling is rarely present, even if pedestrian casualties are a serious problem in reality. As David Arditti has written –

People who get on bikes in traffic quickly realise they have no protection other than their own physical capabilities and wits. They discover that they are totally on their own. Nobody and nothing will protect them, not the Highway Code, not the police, not the Crown Prosecution Service, not the courts. And the roads are often designed to make things as dangerous as possible for them. This utterly uncontrolled, socially anomalous danger of cycling is what makes it unique as a legal activity. Being a pedestrian can sometimes have a similar character, but not for so long, as pedestrians are mostly segregated from traffic. Cycling, for a normal activity, that we would hope would be an everyday one, as opposed to a special one like mountaineering or skydiving, is tolerated by our society as uniquely dangerous.

When we talk about the lack of subjective safety while cycling, what we are really driving at is that cycling does not feel as safe as walking in Britain. People will continue to walk even in the wake of hypothetical campaigns that highlight and focus on the dangers people walking face, because as a day-to-day activity, it does not seem dangerous. The concern about putting people off cycling stems from this discrepancy; we are implicitly acknowledging that cycling is something that is fragile, that can easily be discarded as people switch to other modes because it just isn’t very attractive or pleasant. Walking is, by contrast, a much more robust mode.

One of the main functions of Dutch-style infrastructure is to address this issue. Cycling in the Netherlands feels as safe as walking does here, if not more so, because you are insulated from interactions with motor traffic in precisely the same way you are while walking on pavements. I think a useful test (but obviously not the only test) for whether you are providing a genuinely suitable cycling environment is to ask whether you would be willing to walk where you are expecting people to cycle. If the cycling environment corresponds to a walkable one, then you are enabling cycling for all.

When cycling feels like walking.

It is this difference between the way cycling and walking currently feel in Britain that explains why ‘dangerising’ is such a concern about the former mode of transport, but not for the latter. The difference suggests that talking about danger really isn’t the problem; it’s the physical environment, and the way people respond to it.

Post updated to reflect points made by Jack Thurston that walking feels particularly unsafe in many rural areas

Dangerisation

The subject of ‘dangerisation’ – the idea that we are discouraging people who might be tempted cycle in London from doing so by talking about danger and safety – is back on the agenda, following the ‘Die In’ outside TfL headquarters and a poll from the BBC, and the responses to both.

I think it is important, first of all, to remember what has actually put danger on the agenda. It wasn’t bloggers and campaigners suddenly deciding to talk about it. It was a series of deaths and serious injuries in a short space of time. It’s impossible to keep that kind of story out of the news, and to a large extent anything campaigners have been saying and doing after it made the front pages of newspapers and the headlines on TV is pretty irrelevant. Asking campaigns, specifically, to moderate the message – as it appears Andrew Gilligan is doing – is largely pointless, because our reach with the general public is pretty much non-existent (I wish it were otherwise, but it’s probably true). The general public has heard about cycling death and injury in the last month not from campaigners, but from the newspapers, the radio and from TV – they haven’t discovered this story from the London Cycling Campaign, and other campaigns (I think the one exception here is the ‘Die In’, about which more below). And it’s not reasonable to expect media outlets to not report or investigate this sequences of deaths.

I did short interviews with both ITV News, and with BBC London’s Tom Edwards, who asked me for comment during that sequence of deaths. I couldn’t reasonably say that cycling in London was fine, because it plainly isn’t. It is unnecessarily hazardous, and we know the reasons why, and have done for some time – I tried to put those reasons across in the interviews. I tried to explain, in particular, how we have junctions with large motor vehicles turning left, and people on bikes moving ahead, and the reasons why collisions occur. It would not have made much sense for me to talk about anything else.

Did this surge of media interest in cycling and cycling danger put anyone off cycling in London, who might have been on the cusp of doing so? It may have done so, but I’d argue that the effect is so superficial it should not even be a matter of concern. It’s tempting to imagine, if you are an optimistic cycle campaigner or official responsible for increasing cycling levels, that there is some huge cohort of the population that just needs a small bit of persuasion to start cycling, just a little nudge to get them onto two wheels. But the reality is that the people watching the news, or reading newspapers – ordinary Londoners who in the main would not even dream of cycling on London’s roads – have already firmly made their minds up about the attractiveness of cycling in this city. London, like most cities in Britain, is divided between the tiny percentage of people who are happy to cycle within it, and the huge majority who won’t even consider it.

At the same time, that tiny percentage of people who do already ride in London are not likely to be affected much by media reporting. If they were put off by danger, and talk about danger, well, frankly, they wouldn’t be cycling in London at all in the first place. In the main, they probably know the issues, and the dangers posed by HGVs. The fact that cyclists get killed and seriously injured is not news to people who cycle in London. It’s entirely reasonable to suppose that a solid majority of the people who already ride in London are not going to give up their bicycles on the basis of media reporting and campaigning on this issue.

Now it may be the case – hypothetically – that discussing the dangers of cycling may dip cycling levels in London down a few tenths of a percent, if perhaps as many as ten percent of all the trips made in London by bike are simply abandoned. (We have a poll, commissioned by the BBC, which purports to show some abandonment of  cycling  following the recent deaths, but the question appears to be vaguely phrased, and doesn’t actually ask why people have stopped cycling – it may be due to the onset of cold weather).

I don’t think such a degree of cycling abandonment is at all likely, because as I’ve just argued, people cycling in London are familiar with danger already, and reporting about what they already know is not likely to change their minds. But in the context of where we should be aiming – double digit cycling levels – and the policies that are required to take us there, even this kind of ‘worst case scenario’ is completely trivial. We should focus on sorting the roads out, and making them safe and attractive to cycle on, for anyone – concerns about scaring people off should rightly pale into insignificance if these changes are happening.

From acquaintances, people do not give up cycling because of media reporting – they give it up because of a bad incident, or a series of bad incidents, that they experienced themselves directly. Or they simply find other modes of transport relatively more attractive, and choose them instead. Concerning ourselves over how media reporting and campaigning frames the issue of danger is an irrelevance, when set against the broader picture of how pleasant cycling actually is.

This brings me to the ‘Die In’, which was a (limited) media event, and which, it has been argued, presented cycling as dangerous to the general public – something that wouldn’t have happened if the event hadn’t taken place. One of the most forceful critics appeared to be Copenhagenize, who wrote

Everything – absolutely everything – that tells people that cycling is dangerous is the stupidest form of advocacy.

And

In the UK today, a couple thousand people convinced tens of thousands of their fellow citizens never to ride a bicycle again. Well done.

Well, frankly, I think that’s a ludicrously overblown statement. The idea that tens of thousands of Britons will never ride a bicycle again because of one protest is deeply silly, especially when we consider the actual, documented barriers to cycling uptake in Britain. Now of course perception of danger is a serious obstacle – if not the most serious obstacle – but that perception has not appeared out of thin air. It is grounded in the reality of the way Britain’s roads and streets look and feel to the people who walk (and indeed drive) along them.

Is it protests that are discouraging people from riding bikes here? Or something else?

It has not arisen from protests about the way the roads and streets are hostile for cycling, for the simple reason that people can already see for themselves that roads and streets are hostile for cycling. This is why – for the most part – they don’t ride bicycles on them. Protests like the Die In are, at the very worst, only confirming what people already believe, and just as importantly,  the absence of Die Ins won’t change anyone’s mind about the attractiveness of cycling – we cannot market the unmarketable.

It is interesting to note that a significant part of the Die In was devoted to the issue of pedestrian safety, with several speakers, including Tom Kearney and Nazan Fennell, relating the consequences of death and serious injury while walking. Tom was hit by a bus on Oxford Street, and left in a coma with serious injuries. Nazan’s daughter Hope was killed by an HGV while crossing the road with her bicycle. Pedestrian safety is a serious issue, with pedestrians being killed or seriously injured in large numbers in London. It is entirely appropriate that the protest focused on this issue alongside that of cycling safety, because I think walking and cycling should have a great deal in common, and the way in which people walking and cycling are exposed to danger is very similar.

Crucially, however, I haven’t seen anyone complain that the Die In ‘dangerised’ walking, and discouraged people from walking.

This might be partially explained by the fact that the walking aspect of the protest was not really covered by the media, at least as much as the cycling aspect was. But the absence of concern about ‘dangerising’ of walking is probably more likely due to the fact that walking is a more robust mode, and cycling is currently inherently fragile. Everybody walks every day, and does so without real concern for their safety (despite the fact that danger is posed to pedestrians). By contrast, the danger experienced while cycling is subjectively much more real, and apparent. These issues – the difference between walking and cycling safety, and why we get concerned about dangerising cycling, but not about dangerising walking – are something I am going to explore in my next post.

Response to LTDA: Analysis of signal compliance, by mode

I thought I’d do a quick rough-and-ready analysis of the Licensed Taxi Driver’s Association videos that are doing the rounds today, which purport to show that people on bikes are serial lawbreakers.

Their analysis is based on two separate hour-long videos, one filmed in Camden, the other in Hackney. I obviously haven’t had time to sit through two hours of video, so I’ve just focused on the first fifteen minutes of the Hackney one. I will extend the analysis if anyone wants me to – the results probably won’t be very different, although the sample sizes will be larger, and make the result more statistically significant. Patterns of motor vehicle compliance will emerge which haven’t done so in this instance due to the small sample size.

My method is a direct copy of Chester Cycling’s own analysis of junctions in Manchester last year; go to his excellent post if you want more detail on the approach taken.

Here are my results, from the first fifteen minutes of the LTDA video.

Figures for signal compliance by mode, including opportunity to progress

Clearly, the picture is very different once we start to look at compliance relative to the opportunity to commit an infraction. Huge numbers of people on bikes had the ability or option to jump lights once they arrived at them – about 36% of all the cyclists in the first fifteen minutes of the video. This is obviously not true for the drivers of motor vehicles, most of whom simply did not have the opportunity to commit an infraction, because they are in a queue. Only 5 car drivers, for instance, had an opportunity to drive through the junction on a red signal, so it is not surprising that none did. This is a very small sample size.

It’s also worth noting that bicycles are, by far, the majority vehicle on the road at this particular junction, around 62% of all vehicles in this fifteen minute section of the video. Inevitably law-breaking is going to be more obvious when you are the majority road user.

When you also consider that signals are only necessary for motor traffic – pedestrians and cyclists are quite happy mingling through junctions without traffic signals – the fact that so many people, either on foot or on bike, are held at signals for the benefit of the minority road users is really quite unjust.

However, if we are looking simply at stop line/ASL compliance, cyclists are actually the best behaved out of all groups, expressed as a percentage of opportunity. Just 26% of those who had the opportunity to cross the stop line did so; there was far worse compliance with the ASL line by motorists, particularly motorcycles, 83% of whom entered the ASL when they could do so. Car drivers, HGVs and vans fared no better.

The bad news is that around 20% of those cyclists who had the opportunity to progress through the junction did so – this is the ‘full’ red light jump. I’ll leave you to watch the video to see how hazardous this is at this particular location. But based on this data, motorcyclists are actually worse – a third progressed through the junction with the signals on red (with the caveat, again, that this is a very small sample size).

Red light jumping also seemed to be a ‘copycat’ behaviour; if the ASL already had 3 or 4 people stopped in it, then it seemed to be the case that most other cyclists would stop. Conversely, slipping ahead through the junction seemed to occur more when others were already doing it.

Finally, this analysis does not include ‘amber gambling’, which seemed to occur on nearly every phase of the first fifteen minutes, irrespective of mode – this is something drivers and cyclists indulge in alike. There is a particularly bad example by an ambulance driver at 11:55 – this does not show up in this table, unlike the far less hazardous creeping across the junction by cyclists under a red signal. Only pure red-light jumping is included here, regardless of the actual potential for harm.

Make of this what you will – I thought I’d just add the broader statistical picture to the silly headlines.