Time to Stop the Killing

Tomorrow, Monday, sees a vigil and die-in at Bank junction in London at 5:30pm to mark the deaths of Ling Tao, killed there on 22 June by a tipper truck, and Clifton James, killed the night before on Forward Drive, Harrow by a car. There has already been a large protest at Bank organised by London Cycling Campaign on Wednesday morning. Whether or not you went to that one, I urge you, whatever your usual mode of transport, if you are interested in making London a more civilised city thast tries harder to protect its people from the dangers of the roads, to attend the vigil and die-in tomorrow.

I've attended this year two similar events in London organised by the group Stop Killing Cyclists. This group has developed, under the leadership of the admirable Donnachadh McCarthy, into a powerful and well-organised 'conscience' for road safety in London, operating in the capital in a complimentary manner to the London Cycling Campaign, separate from it and with different methods, but similar goals. Where we used to get ghost bikes placed by a few anonymous souls at the site of a cycling fatality, and little else, we now get a significant demonstration with speeches from the relatives of bereaved and from campaigners, and then a protest that involves people lying in the road with bicycles for several minutes. We now have this very time there is a cycling fatality in London. It is systematic, and London's authorities now know it will happen every time, and that the movement is likely to grow until these unnecessary deaths stop.

I did not attend the event that marked the death of Esther Hartsilver in Southwark on 6 June, so I'll not discuss that one here, but I will write about the previous two Stop Killing Cyclists events, both of which I attended, commemorating Michael Mason and Moira Gemmill, as they illustrate starkly and respectively the twin issues the UK must address to make cycling (and walking) safe: road justice and infrastructure.

Michael Mason was given fatal injuries on 25 February 2014 by a driver on Regent Street who simply ran him over from behind. He was a cyclist with half a century of experience doing everything right, and he was just struck down on a busy central London street by a driver who just claims she 'didn't see him' and can't explain why. The police believe they have insufficient evidence to prove a charge of causing death by careless driving, and so no action has been taken against the driver at all. No case has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service.

It would be had to imagine a clearer case of failure of road justice. The Metropolitan Police's response to a complaint over their failure to prosecute shows their mentality: rather than taking an objective view, they themselves construct a one-sided 'case for the defence', seeking to try to invent inadequate and incoherent reasons why the driver 'did not see' Michael Mason, whose visibility was was obvious to witnesses, rather than putting the case before a jury to decide. They say (my comments in italics):

• Mr MASON (Deceased) was wearing dark clothing, the collision having taken place during hours of darkness. (Irrelevant. He had bright lights)
• An independent witness at the scene (Neil TREVITHICK) stated that with the sea of brake lights, flashing lights and movement it would be difficult for a driver to pick out anything. (What? 'Sea of lights and movement'? This is what a busy shopping street is always like in the early evening. This is what road users have to cope with all the time. Drivers have to have adequate sight and responses and control of their vehicle and their speed must allow them to react to everything occurring on the road. This is a pathetic attempt to abrogate responsibility from the driver. It might be something that a non-expert accidental witness might come up with, but it has no place as a justification in a police report.)
• CCTV traced corroborated how busy the area in general was, with both motorists and pedestrians. (Same comment as above)
• All witnesses traced could not describe in any detail the lead up to the collision. (Irrelevant. As they were not involved in the collision, this is no surprise.)
• Mr MASON was not wearing a cycle helmet, the cause of death being head injury (A helmet may or may not have saved his life, but this is irrelevant to deciding whether the driver was culpable for the collision that killed him.)

Of  course a jury may have taken the same view as the police, but at least a trial would have tested this view. The view will probably now be tested by a private prosecution of the driver by the relatives of Michael Mason, that is being funded by the Cyclists Defence Fund, to which I urge readers to donate. If this is allowed to stand without further legal or political challenge, the position seems to be that any good and responsible cyclist cycling in every way within the law can just expect to be be killed by a driver running them over from behind, there need be no rational explanation of the incident, and the driver may just walk away from such a killing with no legal procedure following and a blameless record.  The implications are quite horrific for all who cycle on our roads.

Stop Killing Cyclists vigil for Michael Mason in Regent Street on 13 March

The vigil in Regent Street on 13 March saw Michael's daughter give a moving tribute to her father and an account of the desperate situation for the family that the police's unfair and unbalanced treatment of the case has created. There were also speeches from Donnachadh McCarthy and Nicola Branch of Stop Killing Cyclists, Cynthia Barlow of RoadPeace, Caroline Russell of the Green Party and Roger Geffen of CTC. Following this the police facilitated the protesters to lay themselves and their bikes down in the street for two minutes. Here is part of Donnachadh's speech:

Sadly police incompetence in this case continued beyond this point. An announcement that had been made that the the case was in fact going to be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions, which was seen as most likely a response to the protest and publicity, was then reversed, without apology, and with a further effect on the family that can only be imagined.

The vigil and die-in held on 20 April for Moira Gemmill was even more impressive. Moira,  an acclaimed museum designer distinguished for work at the Museum of London, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Collection was the fifth cyclist to be killed riding in London in 2015, the fifth to be killed by an HGV, the fourth by a construction lorry, and the fourth woman. There was an additional big issue in this case, though, apart from the usual one of the danger of lorries and their drivers' blind-spots and the apparent statistical extra vulnerability of female cyclists. The Millbank and Lambeth Bridge roundabout, where the crash occurred, is known as an especially dangerous junction.

Crashmap.co.uk for Millbank and Lambeth Bridge junction, crashes 2005–2113. 'Too many incidents to display'

If you have ever tried cycling round this roundabout you will know why it is one of the most dangerous in London. It has heavy traffic volumes and is a terrible design that encourages speed and aggression. It was identified as a junction requiring urgent work by Transport for London in 2012. It was also a focus of a conference in October of that year nearby at Church House in Westminster entitled the Love London Go Dutch Cycle Conference, sponsored by the Kingdom of the Netherlands and involving the London Cycling Campaign, Dutch consultancy firm Royal HashkoningDHV, Transport for London and others, and attended by then Under Secretary of State for Transport Norman Baker.

There was a working party consisting of campaigners and Dutch and British roads experts sent on the morning of the conference to examine the Millbank roundabout and come up with better designs. The better design proposed was a Dutch-style roundabout with a priority cycle track and parallel zebra crossings. There was discussion on this in the afternoon. I remember the bafflement of the Dutch representatives who couldn't quite understand the objection to their tried-and-testyed standard Dutch design from elements of the local contingent that it would not be able to cope with the number of vehicles that the roundabout currently does. They understood that to create a safe cycling environment and an attractive city for walking you have to reduce traffic to reasonable levels with designs not calculated to maximise motor throughput! They couldn't, at a fundamental level, understand why people would actually wish to have in the historic centre of a city and close to a world heritage site a motorway's worth of polluting, noisy, aggressive, fast and dangerous cars and HGVs.

Transport for London subsequently went away on worked on designs for the roundabout, and came back with something one-one much liked. It was a classic two-track provision compromise with shared pavements for "less-confident cyclists" and on-road cycle "awareness-raising" markers for the others, with raised tables under zebra crossings at the entrances and exits. It was roundly condemned by LCC and the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain (but not by CTC, who seem to think "tightening-up corner geometries" was all that was required).

TfL's 2012 design for Millbank roundabout

It appears Westminster council had their own reasons for opposing TfL's proposed changes, though what their argument was never publicly made clear. TfL announced finally that they would not processed with the proposed changers, and would not do anything else to the roundabout in the short term, but that they would trial a Dutch-style roundabout at the Transport Research Laboratory in Berkshire. The trial roundabout was indeed built in Berkshire in 2013, but no results from this trial have yet been published. Following the publication of The Mayor's Vision for Cycling in London in March 2013, Andrew Gilligan, the Boris Johnson's Cycling commissioner, often publicly suggested that temporary emergency changes could be made to known danger-spots for cycling on the road network, but no such action was ever taken, anywhere in London. There was clearly a lack of political support for this common-sense view.

The memorial for Moira Gemmill at Millbank roundabout

I can't report on the speeches that were made at the vigil and die-in for Moira Gemmill on 20 April, as the demo was so huge I could not get within (amplified) earshot of them. During the die-in the entire junction became a human and bike interlaced carpet, the low spring sun shone, and the tulips in the centre of the roundabout went a deep shade of crimson. There was a special quaity of silence, and this brief tweet with accompanying picture I made seemed to strike a popular chord, as it had 126 retweets and 47 favourites.

Genuinely amazing scenes. Lambeth Bridge #MoiraGemmill #StopKillingCyclists

Sea of cyclists on the Millbank roundabout commemorating Moira Gemmill during the die-in on 20 April. Maybe Westminster or TfL thought that "Dutch-style roundabout" meant planting lovely red tulips on it.

 Hints are about now that Millbank roundabout may finally get a re-working as part of the Mayor's 'Better Junctions' programme, but that cannot now happen before 2016, and in the meantime it remains as deadly as ever.

Another junction that is well known as dangerous is the complex Bank intersection in the heart of the City of London. Bank junction has been admitted by the local authority, the City Corporation, to have "One of the poorest road safety records in the City, particularly in relation to injuries to pedestrians and cyclists" and they further, shockingly, state  "The junction does not work well for any mode of transport" Their head-scratching has been going on over this since at least October 2011, with seemingly no end in sight. The City have an extraordinarily leisurely project timetable in which

Our next task will be to build a computer traffic model to assess what is likely to happen if traffic is prevented from crossing the junction for example in certain directions or times of day. Information from pedestrian and cycling movements will also help to develop solutions. This is likely to be a big piece of work and will take some time to complete but it is very important to have credible options for alterations to the junction. We hope to have this work completed by early 2016.

So that's just building this model by early 2016. No actual building of anything on the ground. The latest from the Corporation suggests they will not have finished building whatever new design they eventually come up with before 2020 or even 2021!

Mark Treasure asked in July 2014:

Rather than just building a hugely complex model from scratch to find out what happens when a junction is closed to motor traffic, couldn’t the City just do it, on a trial basis? If the result is genuine chaos, then the trial can quickly be abandoned. 

There are good reasons for thinking a trial of this kind – closing roads at Bank temporarily – would not result in chaos. The main one is that the area is ringed by major arterial roads, composed of London Wall to the north, Aldgate and Tower Gateway to the east, and Upper Thames Street to the south.

All are designed to carry large volumes of motor traffic, and all lie very close to Bank itself. These are the roads that should be carrying through traffic; the area around Bank should, realistically, only be carrying private motor traffic that is accessing the area. Certainly, the Bank junction should not be carrying through motor traffic in an east-west direction, as there are two major roads to the north and south – just a few hundred metres away – that were built for this purpose. 

So – why not just try this? Try it now, rather than spending eighteen difficult months building a model from scratch. You’ll get results that correspond to the real world, and much more quickly!

One can draw a sharp contrast between the London approach and that of New York under Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, with her mantra "Do bold experiments that are cheap to try out". While New York is certainly not yet any kind of cyclists' or pedestrians' paradise, the radical changes achieved in locations like Time Square and Broadway with quick and temporary infrastructure used to experiment with concepts that can later be made permanent represent a possibility that seems anathema to the lumbering structures of London government.

While these structures, the boroughs, the City Corporation, TfL, and the Department for Transport, continue to quibble, delay, and argue about what should be done to known dangerous junctions, the dead bodies metaphorically pile up. Ying Tao, a 26 year-old management consultant was crushed at Bank last week, the eighth cyclist to be killed in London this year, the seventh by an HGV, the sixth by a construction lorry, and the sixth woman. About 12 hours earlier 60 year-old Clifton James became the second male cyclist to be killed in London this year, dying from head injuries caused by a car on Forward Drive, Harrow, a bad suburban rat-run on which traffic regularly exceeds the 30mph limit, furnished with two confusing mini-roundabout junctions on which drivers often fail to give way to cyclists. This death is quite local to me, and in fact I have written about the corridor on which Mr James was killed before, pointing out the uselessness of painting "awareness-raising" cycle symbols  on rat-run urban roads. It's funny how these places that the cycle campaigners and bloggers keep writing about as dangerous but which don't get changed are the places where we see the deaths.

I've written also before (2011) about King's Cross, where the same type of cycle fatality has been repeated in the same place, likewise (2013) the Holborn gyratory. While we have seen tinkering, we still have seen not seen substantive changes that remove the specific dangers in these locations. It is all getting quite tedious.

I was speaking to a friend yesterday who is a professional scientist and a cyclist, but not involved in cycle campaigning. He asked me, "Why can't we analyse the incidents in which cyclists die, and put in place measures that prevent the repeated occurrences of the same kind of incident? There is a body of information out there, there must be inquests on every death, why isn't this used more systematically?" Why indeed. I've written long ago about how our system of inquests in the coroners' courts is treated as a mere ceremony of legal closure typically achieving little in road death and other cases. More enlightened societies, like Sweden, have a 'Vision Zero' concept where they do attempt to carry out an investigation, analysis and remedial process systematically for every crash, with the ultimate aim of reducing road deaths to zero.

In the UK it seems priorities lie elsewhere. The best way to challenge this is to make a big fuss on the streets after every death until priorities do change. The stark language of the "Stop the Killing" movement takes its cue from the successful Dutch 'Stop the Child Murder' campaign of the 1970s. I believe we will eventually succeed with this in the UK as well, but we are far behind. The more people we get to events like tomorrow's vigil, the more publicity we generate, the harder time we  give the politicians and civil sevants responsible for the current mess, the sooner we will approach our own Vision Zero and also make London and other British towns and cities safe, pleasant and attractive place to cycle and to walk.

There is a more detailed history of the Millbank roundabout saga by Alex Ingram here.

What should we learn from the Advertising Standards debacle?

I didn't cover Scottish Cycling's regressive, victim-blaming Niceway Code advertising campaign of last year at the time, partially because this is a London-focused blog and partially because many other bloggers gave it a good thrashing anyway (in fact it actually spawned new blogs and Twitter feeds that came into existence just to attack it), but mainly because it was the type of thing we get from time to time that goes away quickly, leaving the world no different for it ever having existed, so it didn't seem particularly worth while.

Four months after this dismal campaign ended, the affair came back in a new form. The wheels of the Advertising Standards Authority had turned slowly, and they had assessed the hundreds of complaints the Nice Way Code's dreadful adverts had generated. And they had decided to uphold one complaint (made by five separate people, apparently), with the effect that the absurd and dehumanising "Think Horse" commercial could not be broadcast again, despite the fact that Scottish Cycling had no intention of broadcasting it again, as the money for the campaign had run out long ago.

So a dreadful commercial was banned by the ASA. That's good. Except their reasons for banning it were crackers, based on ignorance of cycle safety, ignorance of accepted cycle training, and ignorance of the Highway Code, and, more worryingly still, showed ASA executing bizarre "mission creep", attempting to police the media according to their own completely arbitrary concepts of "Health and Safety", rather than sticking to their job of determining whether adverts are truthful or legal:

We considered that the scene featuring the cyclist on a road without wearing a helmet undermined the recommendations set out in the Highway Code. Furthermore, we were concerned that whilst the cyclist was more than 0.5 metres from the kerb, they appeared to be located more in the centre of the lane when the car behind overtook them and the car almost had to enter the right lane of traffic. Therefore, for those reasons we concluded the ad was socially irresponsible and likely to condone or encourage behaviour prejudicial to health and safety.

This set a terrible precedent, so suddenly cyclists were at the barricades again, this time defending Cycling Scotland's advert, with a massive campaign of emails, blogs and Tweets directed to getting the ASA to change their minds, that extended to MPs and attracted sympathetic comment even in the right-wing press.

The ASA's judgement was so obviously bonkers that it clearly could not stand, and it hardly lasted a day before they announced:

The ASA has withdrawn its formal ruling against a Cycling Scotland ad pending the outcome of an Independent Review. That followed a request from Cycling Scotland, in which it argued that the ASA’s criticism of the positioning of the cyclist was incorrect. The decision to withdraw was made by the ASA Chief Executive in light of a potential flaw in our ruling. Once the Independent Review process is complete we will publish our decision on our website.

This may or may not be the end of the matter. Roger Geffen of the CTC argues, with some justification, that

It would be wrong to start celebrating prematurely. 

It is noteworthy that the ASA’s announcement only references a "potential flaw" in their ruling on the cyclist’s road positioning, without mentioning their non-use of a helmet or other ‘protective equipment’. 

.....what if the ASA is looking to ‘save face’ by backing down on road-positioning, while sticking to their guns on helmets, citing the Highway Code Rule 59 in their defence? 

If we end up with the ASA imposing de facto censorship of helmet-free cycling on TV, that would be an appalling blow to the promotion of cycling as a safe, enjoyable, aspirational and (above all) perfectly normal way for people of all ages and backgrounds to get around for day-to-day journeys or for leisure.

Well it certainly would not be good. But I'd like to take a step back from all this agitation about one stupid and insulting advert.

For the initial crime was Cycling Scotland's anti-cycling Nice Way Code campaign. Just because they had one of their adverts struck down by people with even less idea of how to build a safe cycling culture than them did not make them into Good Guys worth in any way supporting or defending, and I'm not going to start doing that.

Furthermore, the whole furore around this just shows how far we are away from concentrating on what is important in building a safe cycling culture. That's physically building an environment where cycling works for anyone who wants to do it. Adverts and PR and image-making aren't actually all that important. They are a  side-show. Cycling in the Netherlands and Denmark does not work because everybody has the right attitudes, and cycling has the right image, it works because they have built the correct physical environment. The image is better there as well, yes, and attitudes are slightly different, but this follows from the engineering of the physical environment and the consequent democratisation of cycling. Britain at this particular historical period, however, has lost sight of her past engineering prowess, and since the 1980s has become obsessed with spin, advertising and image, thinking these more important, and this extends into the cycling world and is manifested in the attention given to this whole controversy. The energy directed into this would probably be better spent elsewhere: in campaigning for tangible change (as indeed LCC is doing with its Space for Cycling campaign).

Though I'm totally against the use of helmets for normal cycling, I've never discussed the subject here. Why? Because the whole subject generates more heat that it's worth. People can wear whatever they like. What I'm campaigning for is an environment so safe and so conducive to cycling that the suggestion that cyclists should normally wear helmets in that environment would be dismissed as absurd by any average person, as it is in the Netherlands. Just as the suggestion that people walking should normally wear helmets would be dimissed as absurd by any average British person now. I consider that we will get to that point through campaigning for infrastructure change, not by talking about helmets.

So infrastructure change remains resolutely my focus. We'll get the right attitudes when we have enough people cycling, that it's no longer in any way a niche activity, and we'll get that when conditions are subjectively safe enough, guaranteed by concrete infrastructure, not by hopes of good behaviour. Then the attitudes that ASA demonstrated in their ruling against Think Horse, as well as the attitudes enshrined in the Niceway Code campaign itself, will be as generally unacceptable as racism and homophobia.

In the present environment though, the conclusions that ASA came to first, before they rowed back, are perfectly understandable. They are, in a sense, correct; ASA is, or was, merely reflecting common understanding of how the roads should work with respect to bikes and motor vehicles. Their ruling showed up various pieces of hypocrisy not of their making, and therefore it is wrong to blame them wholly for it.

I wrote before of The problem with assertive cycling. My argument in that post was essentially that cycle training in the Bikeability sense embodies a lie, which puts cyclists "between a rock and a hard place". The lie exists in the fact that the government would never impose a statutory duty on motorists to overtake cyclists in the manner recommended by the Highway Code, and enforce that. Motorists would regard it as intolerable that they were held up by cyclists all the time, and always had to dawdle behind them, if they had to allocate them a whole lane, and change lane to overtake them.

The ASA were just interpreting practice on the road as they found it. We can shout and shout about how cyclists should be taking the primary position and motorists should have to change lane to overtake, but in the real world, most of the time, this does not and cannot happen. The road situation shown at 0:35 of Think Horse strikes me as hugely untypical: the width of the road, the lack of oncoming vehicles. the space available. The cyclist actually seems to have no reason to be riding so far from the kerb. It's not a realistic scenario, and has nothing to do with the problems I encounter every time I get on a bike in London, which are about how you get through without intimidation on multi-lane roads full of moving vehicles, or on parked-up residential streets that are effectively only one lane wide, and where nobody can overtake or pass anybody without squeezing through, and I'm not clear what anybody was ever supposed to learn from it. If they'd shown a realistic situation of conflict, where a motorist is forced to wait for a whole minute or two while a cyclist gets to the end of a road where safe overtaking is impossible, and told us what we are supposed to do there, that would have been different. But this is no help at all.

What's supposed to be going on here, and what is anyone supposed to learn from it?  0:35 from Think Horse

Someone in the ASA thought that this cyclist was in a funny position in the road (which, actually, they are) and thought it showed somebody doing something "socially irresponsible" (not that any car advert approved by ASA ever showed anyone doing anything socially irresponsible, of course). But this is just how most members of the public would probably regard it.

With the helmets issue, the problem lies more clearly with the Highway Code itself. This says cyclists should wear helmets. You and I know there is important distinction in the Code between places where it says should and places where it says must, but this will be lost on most people, and clearly was on the ASA adjudicators. There's a "common-sense" argument which could have run, in their minds: "The Highway Code says cyclists should wear helmets, therefore there must be some good reason for it to say that, therefore it must be unsafe and socially irresponsible of cyclists if they don't heed that advice, therefore we should ban this advert for that reason". There's a parallel here with the "not guilty" verdicts that juries often come up with in road death cases, that campaigners find deeply unacceptable. The actual purpose of juries is to take a "common-sense" view of the case, whatever that means, and in a car-oriented society, where the cyclist is regarded as a distinctly peculiar creature by most, and majority sympathy lies with the motorist, the result will be these miscarriages of justice that we see.

What's the real problem here? The problem is that the Highway Code mentions helmets at all, and uses this word should. The Highway Code should be clearer. It should be a set of rules that everyone must obey at all times on the public roads, punishable by law if they do not. It has no business getting into dubious behavioural recommendations, like helmets for cyclists, high-vis clothing for walkers or luminous leads for dogs. If Parliament wants those things to be law (which it does not), it should make them the law.  The Department for Transport should throw all the shoulds out of the Highway Code. Every one of the shoulds is just a way of transferring a little bit of blame on to those not responsible for road danger, but who suffer disproportionally from it. The shoulds, in their quasi-legal, quasi-rescriptive character,  just confuse the public, and ASA is merely reflecting that confusion. A great number of people, including me, would dispute that cyclists should wear helmets. There is a great raft of data and argument against it, so familiar, I am sure, to readers of this blog, that I will not go into it. I don't think it is particularly surprising that ASA are confused about this subject, which is not their speciality, when the DfT is so confused.

It's correct to point out, as CTC do in the link above, that ASA never try to enforce in advertising any of the other Highway Code shoulds, such as high-vis for pedestrains at night, and therefore they are clearly singling out cyclists for dicriminatory treatment. But clearly, also, there is no reason for all shoulds to be considered equal. It would probably appear as "common-sense" to the ASA adjudicators that clothing for pedestrains is just a matter of personal choice, but that there are serious safety issues invoved in the attire of anyone getting on a bicycle.

This is the sort of discrimination we have to combat, and, in the end, I suspect it will persist until we can normalise everyday utility cycling into British society. This can't happen until we get a massive re-engineering of our roads and streets such that it ceases to be the case that the only pleasant and practical way to use them is in a motor vehicle. I can't get too het up about the banning (or not) of one silly advert based on an argument between two sets of people, both of whom have regressive attitudes. Let's put the effort into getting real change of the streets. So often I hear people say, "We need to change the attitudes now, as it will take too long to get decent infrastructure in". Well, it only seems to take a long time to get decent infrastructure in because we never really start. Getting that start should be the focus of our efforts.

The London Assembly and Safety in Numbers

Last Tuesday's meeting of the London Assembly's Transport Committee, which included its second session examining cycling safety, was quite fascinating. The previous session had allowed a considerable number of people to have their say, including representitives of the LCC, CTC, British Cycling, and the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain (including me). In this second session the speaking guests were restricted to a few "experts": Dr Rachel Aldred, Director of the Sustainable Mobilities Research Group at the University of East London; Karen Dee, Director of Policy at the Freight Transport Association; Ben Plowden, Director of Planning for Surface Transport at TfL; Steffen Rasmussen, Head of Traffic Design, Municipality of Copenhagen; and Roelof Wittink, Director of the Dutch Cycling Embassy. 

To have had these two last mentioned addressing the Aseembly Members was I think particularly remarkable. For people like me have been saying to London local government for decades that we need to get some experts from those European countries where very high cycling rates have been achieved to explain to us what is actually needed (if not to put them actually in charge of making the necessary changes, which would be even better). This was the first time, to my knowledge, that something like this has actually happened: that any level of UK Government has sought advice on cycling from experts from the continent. This is a very welcome and long overdue development.

The exchanges can be heard on a (very long) webcast available on this page*. Another blogger has already commented on the contribution to the debate of Richard Tracey, Conservative AM. I'm not going to give a full account of the session here, but I've transcribed, in a very approximate style, missing a lot out, but keeping, I hope, a fair essence of what was said, a few points that I felt were highly significant from around the 1 hour 50 minutes mark to the 2 hours 10 minutes mark.

In this section of the debate, Assembly Members were asking the experts about trends in cycling levels and cycling safety in London and elsewhere, and about the concepts of "Critical Mass" and "Safety in Numbers". Ben Plowden, questioned at length on the London statistics, had held to the the view that safety for cyclists in London was getting better over time, taking into account the increasing number of cyclists, with the particularly large number of deaths last year (16) being possibly only a statistical "blip".

Darren Johnson AM, to Roelhoff Wittink: 

In the Netherlands there's been a growth in cycling, but there hasn't been a comparable growth in casualties as there has been in London. Could you say something about that? 

Wittink: 

Cycling grew in the 70s and 80s because of our policies, and safety increased along with it. It has to do with the level of cycling but also with the measures that you take. 

Johnson: 

Do you put it down to a critical mass of cyclists on the road? 

Wittink:

That's a very important  explanation, but, also, if you move people from driving to cycling, you have fewer people causing the troubles for cyclists on the roads. Segregation where you have more than 30km/h is very important. We also disconnect the main routes for cyclists from the main routes for cars, so you have less intersections where you have both high volumes of cyclists and high volumes of cars. I had a look at some your roundabouts, some kilometres from here. The roundabouts we have in the Netherlands slow drivers down but your roundabouts allow drivers still to have a speed of 40km an hour – that's really impossible for cyclists. 

[Steffen Rasmussen is asked to comment] 

Rasmussen: 

There might be something about a critical mass of cyclists, we need more reasearch on the issue of critical mass, I don't know of any research specific to Europe. Infrastructure is extremely important, and we have a lot of work still to do in the City of Copenhagen. 

[Comments are invited from others, and Racheal Aldred speaks] 

Aldred: 

You expect trends in deaths to get better year on year because health care gets better, but when you compare modes, you see it's becoming safer year on year for those in cars, but for cyclists the improvement is much less. I think it's important to compare casualty rates for different modes of travel. The casualty rates for London per kilometre is 30 times greater for cyclists than for car drivers. That's a very big disparity. Comparable figures from the Netherlands (from SWOV) gives you a figure of 4 to 1. It's around 25 to 1 for the UK as a whole. There's an issue there, as we are trying to get people to switch from cars to cycling. In the Netherlands last year there were 4 right-hook deaths in the whole of the country, with their much higher cycling rate. They are doing something much better.  

I want to say something about "Safety in Numbers". This idea has been much discussed. A paper by Jacobsen in 2003 was the original use of the term "Safety in Numbers". He used five data sets, but three of them are cross-sectional, so there is a methodological issue; you can't tell whether you are getting the number of cyclists from safety or the safety from the number of cyclists, because it's at the same time. He used two other data sets that are longitudinal that give you a better insight into that. One of them was from the Netherlands, where he found as you got more cyclists, you did indeed get safer cycling, if you look at at a time series. Interestingly, the other data set was from the UK. He found but data for the UK was very different. It was all over the place; it wasn't showing a consitent improvement in safety related to the number of cyclists. I could talk about this at much greater length than I think you want to hear. There are many mechanisms likely to be going on. I don't think you can say more cyclists always leads to safer cycling. There are different mechanisms going on. It depends on the culture, the infrastructure, the legal context. 

Johnson: 

Could it be that the cycling rate is still too small in London to make a difference, we haven't reached that critical mass where the risk becomes acceptable? 

Aldred: 

What is an acceptable risk level is decided socially. Do we say that at 1%, 2% 5% cycling it gets acceptably safe? It's confounded because as you get more cycling you get more pressure for better cycling conditions, so that will feed into safety. There's a lot of things going on. 

Ben Plowden: 

I've been cycling in London for many years. You used to see hardly any other cyclists on the road, but it's very different now. I think you can get a "virtuous circle" where you get more cyclists, and improved behaviour by road users, leading to a "tipping point" where things change significantly. Now I see in some places 40 cyclists at every cycle of the lights. That must be having an effect on people's perception. 

Aldred: 

I think it is worth noting that Jacobsen's original idea of "Safety in Numbers" was in terms of presence on the roads, not in terms of a log-term cultural shift. In Grays Inn Road, when you've got 40 cyclists around you during rush-hour, it might be relatively pleasant, but late at night, when there are no other cyclists on the road and the traffic is flowing freely, it's a very different experience. You need continuity and consistency.

So, to sum up, it seems that the Director of Planning responsible for cycling in London, and perhaps the Green Assembly Member, expect cycling to automatically become safer as more people do it. On the other hand, those who have studied the subject in detail, and have real experience, know that cycling has to be made safe though the provision of infrastructure that separates cyclists physically from dangerous and intimidating motor traffic.

Personally, having studied the Netherlands, I think there is such a thing as a "critical mass" of cyclists. But it is something quite different to what all these people are thinking of. It is a phenomenon that occurs far further down the line of cycle growth than the regime they are considering. It's not at 2% modal share, or 5%, or 10%. And it's not a physical, "presence on the road" thing, it's the political phenomenon that Rachael Aldred alluded to. It's the "Dutch Effect": what happens when you have, probably, more than 51% of the entire population cycling regularly: a point that was passed in the Netherlands long ago (it is possible participation has never been below this level in the last century).

When you are in this happy situation, absolutely anything is possible for cycling. No expense is too great, no rearrangement of the urban or rural fabric too extreme to be worth doing for the comfort and convenience of cyclists, because virtually everybody wants it, there is little controversy about it, it is accepted, rather like massive state funding of health, railways, and roads for cars are accepted and non-controversial in the UK. I think that until we reach that happy state, politicians who wish for more cycling are going to have to be very pro-active and visionary. It will be vain for them to hope for a magical "tipping point" at some far lower level of cycling uptake, where it will all become easy and semi-automatic. It won't be like that. It will always be a struggle.

As a  post-script to this discussion, I quote from a recent post on the CTC blog written by Roger Geffen, the CTC's Campaigns and Policy Director. He writes about a report on cycling safety in various European countries by the European Traffic Safety Council (ETSC):

ETSC rightly recognises though that you cannot measure cycle safety simply by looking at casualty numbers. Comparisons should be based on the risk of a casualty per mile cycled (or per trip, or per hour – but at any rate, it should be relative to some measure of cycle use). Otherwise you fall into the trap of claiming that Dudley and St Helens are far safer for cycling than Cambridge(!), or, even more absurdly, that Britain is far safer than the Netherlands (as Road Safety Minister Mike Penning claimed in Parliament), simply because places with low cycle use obviously have fewer cyclist casualties. That doesn't mean they are "safer" - indeed, CTC's "Safety in numbers" evidence shows the exact opposite. 

ETSC then shows that Britain is one of only 3 EU countries to measure cycle use at the national level on an annual basis – the others being (you guessed it!) Denmark and the Netherlands. Two others, Sweden and Norway, also measure it reasonably frequently. ETSC compares cycle use and cycle safety in these five countries and, once again, finds clear evidence of the “safety in numbers” effect: cycling is safest in the places with highest cycle use. 

CTC has documented this relationship in the past, based both on a comparison of EU-wide data from a wider range of dates, and of figures from within Britain. However, until now our only source of comparable data on local cycle use within Britain was the national census, which only comes out every 10 years and covers cycle commuting only. It was good enough to show the “safety in numbers” relationship exists, but not to compare how local authorities are actually performing. 

Unsurprisingly, ETSC’s report shows that Britain is performing worst of the 5 countries in their comparison, in terms of both cycle use and cyclists’ safety. But hey, at least we are measuring this!

Here's my question: I've pointed out before how the Director of the Dutch state road safety organisation, SWOV, has said that the simple interpretation of "Safety in Numbers" – that simply having more cyclists automatically gives you safer cycling – is wrong. You have read the exchanges above. You may even have read this essay on the As Easy As Riding A Bike blog on the subject. And you may have read Freewheeler's biting satire Minutes of the Crapborough Cycling Campaign:

Also in Holland they have safety in numbers. Sam said if we could just get more people cycling in Britain then everyone would become as safe as in Holland.

Sam then showed a very interesting diagram showing how safety in numbers works in Holland. Here we see a typical Dutch street scene where a lorry driver pauses before turning. Dutch lorry drivers are used to being surrounded by lots of cyclists, which is why they take extra care at junctions.

My question is:

Is Roger Geffen of the CTC the only person in UK cycle campaigning who still believes in the simplistic nonsense of "Safety in Numbers"?

*Unfortunately the GLA website uses a Windows Media format for its videos that doesn't normally play correctly on Macs (it may be silent). The solution I have found is the free, open-source program VLC, which does play these videos correctly on the Mac.

In which I "dangerise" cycling again

On Thursday I attended the session of the London Assembly Transport Committee on cycle safety. Some of the things I and another Cycling Embassy of Great Britain member, Tim Lennon, said in the debate have been reported here. I won't give a general account of the debate, in which representatives of London Cycling Campaign, British Cycling, CTC and Sustrans all said some very good things which I hope will find their way into the committee's ultimate report, and influence the Mayor and Transport for London. But I will mention the opinions of one Richmond councillor, their "Cycling Champion", no less, Conservative Katherine Harborne, and I will put here, in more detail, the response that I gave to her in the debate, and this will inevitably lead me into a discussion, again, of the danger of cycling in the UK.

I broach this subject again not because I wish to dwell on bad things, but because I believe, and have believed for a long time, that realism on this subject is critical to generating the environment of honest debate that must be the necessary foundation for a real political movement to restore cycling to the major component of our transport system that it once was, and needs to become again, if we are to deal with the environmental challenges of the very near future, of which the greatest is probably global warming.

I don't need to quote what Katherine Harborne said in the debate because she issued a press release in response to the Transport committee's consultation beforehand which said very similar things. I have linked there to Richmond Cycling Campaign's website, and it is interesting to read there of the other correspondence that RCC have had with her. Anyway, her press release says:

Katharine Harborne is the Cycling Czar for the London Borough of Richmond, where she is also a councillor. 

“We have no family car and never have,” she says. “Cycling gives freedom to me and my family – and keeps me fit. My teenage son is working to get on the Olympic cycling programme. 

“But we are still some way from getting cycling accepted – and more people on their bikes. In fact research from British Cycling found that nearly a million women would like to start riding a bike, but many are put off by safety concerns. 

“Despite millions of pounds being spent making our roads from 2009-2011 less dangerous, safety fears have in fact increased by half in that period. 

“A 2011 report reveals that almost half [48%] of occasional cyclists think safety is a big issue and yet less than a quarter [23%] of regular cyclists think it is. 

“So if we want to encourage more people to cycle maybe we should stop going on about how dangerous it is because, frankly, it isn’t and we’re just putting people off. 

“Making London more cycle-friendly isn’t just about cycling superhighways or giving tipper trucks and skip lorries a lot of respect at junctions – 24% of people who commute in London could cycle, but don’t. 

“Many don’t because they would get to work sweaty and have nowhere to shower or get changed. So why not encourage employers to provide more shower facilities or encourage businesses that are better equipped to Share A Shower – allowing cyclists from other firms to use their facilities?”

Lets forget about the funny business at the end of proposing that lack of shower facilities is a reason why our children, parents and neighbours don't cycle on London's roads. Does anyone think that every Dutch or Danish person who takes a 2 km bike trip at 15 km/h in their normal clothes on their sit-up-and-beg bike has a shower at the end of it?

Let's think about the meat of this whole approach, which is, and has been, shared by many others, including many prominent voices in prominent cycling organisations:

“So if we want to encourage more people to cycle maybe we should stop going on about how dangerous it is because, frankly, it isn’t and we’re just putting people off. 

Other politicians who have told us in recent times that "Cycling is not dangerous" are transport ministers Norman Baker and Mike Penning, as I reported in a previous post on a session of the Commons Transport Select Committee, at which they grievously misused statistics to try to suggest, incredibly, that the UK is doing a good job on cycle safety, better even than the Dutch. The link just quoted, to Jim Gleeson's statistics blog (Drawing) Rings Around The World, gives the truth of the matter, that cycling in the Netherlands is more than twice as safe per km travelled than cycling in the UK as measured from the official KSI statistics (Killed and Seriously Injured) issued by the two governments. But there is far more to it than this, as Jim Gleeson's subsequent post showed.

For cycling is so widespread across all age-groups in the Netherlands that a very significant number of the KSIs in that country categorised as cycling casualties are one-person incidents: basically, as I mentioned once before on this blog, Dutch cycling conditions are so safe that an awful lot of elderly Dutch people just drop dead on their bikes, or have crashes causing injury that involve no other vehicle, and these are in the statistics. We really need to look, as Jim Gleeson does, at the rates, per km travelled, of death and serious injury of cyclists who are in collision with a motor vehicle to properly assess the safety records of the two countries, in regards how it should influence decision-making on street engineering and the segregation of bikes and cars.

When we do this, the results are astounding. There are 508 KSIs involving motor vehicles per billion km cycled in the UK, compared with 61 in the Netherlands, a ratio of 8.3.

Cycling, in regards interactions with motor vehicles, is really 8.3 times safer in the Netherlands.

Their record is not just better, it is fantastically better. And fantastically better with a far wider demographic cycling, including large numbers of old, frail people who are far more likely to be killed or injured as a result of a given impact with a motor vehicle, or the ground, than the young, fit people who make up most of the British cycling demographic. And, one also might note, these are just the people, along with children, who could not be expected to mitigate danger in a purely vehicular cycling environment (that is, space shared with fast motor traffic) by cycling fast and assertively in Cyclecraft-recommended manner. So the Dutch cycling safety space is clearly a different world to that of the UK.

Apart from comparing cycle safety between different countries, which represents a contrast that will not actually be felt by British people unless they actually try to cycle in those countries and here as well, we can also compare safety of different transport modes within the UK, describing a contrast that they can feel, and react to, on a daily basis, in making their decisions on transport mode.

In the Department for Transport's Annual Report on road casualties for Great Britain 2009 (the last year for which full details are available) we discover (Table 1g) that the rate of cycle casualties (KSI) in that year was 880 per billion vehicle miles. In Table 1i we find that the rate of car user casualties (KSI) was 45 per billion vehicle miles. 880/45=19.55. Note that these are figures per billion vehicle miles, not person miles. Because average car occupancy is greater than 1, the rate per occupant is lowered, while for bikes the vehicle mile figure is the person mile figure. UK average car occupancy is 1.6. Therefore the danger ratio per person mile, bikes to cars, was in 2009 about 31.

It's about 30 times more dangerous per mile to cycle than to travel by car in the UK.

Now it is often held that the casualty rate per mile is not that important in comparing transport modes, because different modes have different uses. We expect, generally, to make longer journeys, covering therefore more miles, at least for the average person, by car or train or plane than by bike. Yet consider this. One of the main arguments you constantly hear advanced in cycle promotion is something along these lines:

Half of all car journeys in Outer London are less than two miles in length, equating to a journey of about 10 minutes by bike. 

(Cycling Revolution London, TfL, 2010)

So there's the suggestion that people in general should be perfectly happy and willing just to swap the car for the bike for all these many short journeys they do. That's telling people not to live their lives in a different way, travel less or do anything else differently, that's just telling them to go on doing exactly all the things that they are doing now, but to use a mode of transport that is 30 times more dangerous than the one they are using! Telling them just increase their risk of death or serious injury on the road, by their own choice, their own actions, by a not insignificant factor of 30!

I don't think that makes sense, frankly. I think that's treating people as idiots, as I said in the London Assembly debate. People are just not going to respond to this message. They are not going to cycle under current conditions unless they really want to cycle, or they really have to (e.g. for financial reasons), and if they really want to cycle, because they love cycling, and thus can put up with the risk, they will be doing it already. But if people with some power like Cllr Harborne stop telling people cycling is "safe", and instead do more to make it safer, then more people will give it a go, even though it will never, judging from the Dutch experience, be as safe as travelling in a car. (And the Dutch have really tried, big-time, to make cycling "safe", reducing the cycling to driving casualty ratio per km to 3.5.) Cllr Harborne, bear in mind, is she who was dismissive of the need for wider 20 mph zones in Richmond in a letter to Richmond Cycling Campaign least year.

If we are to ever make progress on this, I think the advocates of cycling need to stop treating the public like idiots who cannot correctly judge what is or is not an unacceptably dangerous activity for them to engage in. I think they can judge. I think those for whom cycling would be massively dangerous under current conditions generally make a correct judgement not to do it, and even for those who judge that it is not unacceptably dangerous, it's still far more dangerous than doing the same journey by car, and their doing it at all depends on their sense of enjoyment, judgement of convenience, and sometimes, a financial incentive. Only motorcycling is significantly more dangerous per mile than cycling (about 4 times). The danger of walking is comparable to that of cycling (Annual Report 2009 Chart 1e), but we expect journeys by foot to be shorter, and everybody walks, not a restricted demographic.

There is another argument that floats around this area, that is, that people gain in years of life from cycling, due to avoidance of heart disease and other illnesses associated with obesity, more, on average, than they loose due to death in crashes. So it's kind of healthy to cycle, even if it's dangerous. The British Medical Association have been arguing this since 1992, and the report they produced then, authored by Mayer Hillman, now out of print, but re-quoted in their 1997 document Road Transport and Health, held that:

Even in the current hostile traffic environment, the benefits gained from regular cycling [are] likely to outweigh the loss of life through cycling accidents for the population of regular cyclists. One calculation has shown the ratio to be around 20:1.

I suspect there is a lot of uncertainty here, implied in the phrase "one calculation", as there would be a lot of factors to take into account. Would, for example, more cycling mean that people walked less? In any case, this has always struck me as a rather weak promotional argument. This is, in the first place, because it involves people thinking about remote imponderables in their lives. It involves them needing to agree to make an exchange of a very clear, tangible threat in the present, of getting knocked off a bike on the road, for a promised benefit in the far future which they may well not accept as being very real. They might argue "Well if I don't die of that, I'll probably die of something else soon after", or, more rationally, they might argue that they can, and prefer to, get exactly the same health benefit from another choice of exercise or strenuous activity, whether that be running, swimming, going to the gym, or gardening, without the risk or injury or death in traffic that comes with cycling. So I don't think trying to frighten people into taking up cycling with the threat of heart disease decades down the line gets as much traction as many would hope it might.

I think we actually can get more people cycling in three ways. We can make it:

• Relatively safer
• Relatively more convenient (or faster)
• Relatively cheaper

The last of these is the only one we are really doing in the UK at the moment, and more by accident than design, with rising costs of fuel and public transport. I think this is the main factor that has been driving the modern increase in cycling in London. But if we get more people on bikes by this method, we get more deaths and injuries. As even Chris Peck of the CTC acknowledged at the Assembly debate, in the last couple of years, casualty increases have outstripped the increase in cycling, despite the CTC generally in the past having been rather fervent advocates of the "Safety in Numbers" theory. I don't think that's a great policy success. I want more people to cycle, for all the health and environmental and social benefits I think it would bring, but I don't want to go back to the 1930s situation, when we had plenty of cyclists on the streets (quite how many it is difficult to tell, as I have never seen any transport statistics for the pre-war period), and eleven were being killed every week in London, about 35 times the current death rate.

I don't think non-cyclists are much influenced by how dangerous people like me or Cllr Harborne say cycling is or isn't. They do what they feel is sensible for them. No political movement ever gained any traction by telling the vast majority of the population that their basic, gut feelings about what they should do are wrong. We shouldn't expect anything different in respect of cycling. And even if that rule were proved false in this case, and the masses responded to Cllr Harbone's message (and those of others  like her) and started cycling just because they are told they should, without other policy changes to make the roads safer for them, I don't think there would be any social or moral progress there, and it's not a thing with which I would want to be associated. I want more people to cycle because they really find it pleasurable, relaxing and safe, not because they are told they should, or are dragooned into it through lack of other affordable choice.