It's not just me, SWOV also thinks "safety in numbers" is untrue

The phrase "safety in numbers", as applied to cyclists, comes up a lot on this blog. It was discussed in this post and this one and this one. It's discussed here a lot because it has been a core belief of many UK cycle activists, and in particularly, organisationally, of the CTC, who never loose an opportunity to promote the idea as basically the "solution" to cycle safety in the UK. Get lots of cyclists on the roads, they say, or imply, and it will all be OK, very safe, without needing to change anything else fundamentally in the road environment.

I must acknowledge some change of tone from the CTC of late, for example, in this letter to the The Guardian written by their Campaigns and Policy Director Roger Geffen, in response to the Guardian article that I also criticised in my last post. Here Geffen does mention the role of road design in creating safe conditions for cycling, while (as usual) stopping short of calling for proper continental-type cycle infrastructure. But in general, CTC has always espoused belief in the "safety in numbers" effect as being key to generating a bigger, safer cycling culture. From this seems to flows their concentration on promoting training for cyclists (though they first started to promote training in the 1930s, long before "safety in numbers" had been heard of). If you train cyclists to cope with our road conditions, you get more of them on the roads, so the argument goes, so it becomes safer, and that encourages more cyclists out, and so on. And from the CTC's concentration on training comes the government's concentration on it. Whenever the government is asked what it is doing about cycling, basically what it talks about is training for cyclists.

There is a counter-view, that I espouse, as have others, particularly Freewheeler, and David Hembrow. This is to look at the post-war history of cycling in the UK, and to note that we have had 60 years of training for cyclists, corresponding to an ongoing collapse in cycling. In our view, training simply is not the solution. The international experience shows you do not get significantly more people on bikes without major changes to the road environment. Cycling in the UK fell from its immediate post-war modal share of about 15% to about 1% today, despite 60 years of training, for reasons that are not going away. You can encourage and train and enthuse as much as you like, but those reasons continue to hold our cycling rate to a very low level, even in the cities that are currently said to be experiencing a "cycling booom" such as London, where cycling is now (2010 figures) up to the dizzy height of 2% modal share.

The modern vogue of the "safety in numbers" theory for cycling, in the English-speaking world (and it does seem to be largely confined there), seems to be mostly down to a rather vague piece of research published by an American, P L Jacobsen in 2003, in the journal Injury Prevention. Here Jacobsen stated his conclusion:

The likelihood that a given person walking or bicycling will be struck by a motorist varies inversely with the amount of walking or bicycling. This pattern is consistent across communities of varying size, from specific intersections to cities and countries, and across time periods.

I describe Jacobsen's research as "vague" because (and you can read the full paper if you like), though it is full of statistics, it lacks sufficient discussion of the radically differing contexts of the figures from different places and times to make its conclusions meaningful. It has no proper discussion of cycle infrastructure, despite the fact that it uses statistics from the Netherlands, where the effects of segregated cycle infrastructure surely cannot be ignored. It says:

The Netherlands has implemented a range of policies to encourage people to walk and bicycle and make them safer. These efforts have succeeded in increasing bicycle use and decreasing risk.

without going into the details of these policies further. But it is these details that are critical.

It also says:

The possible explanations [for changes in cyclist casualty rates] are changes in human behavior, roadway design, laws, and social mores. However, insofar as the changes seen in the time series data occurred rapidly and with both increasing and decreasing amounts of bicycling, it is improbable that the roadway design, traffic laws, or social mores, all of which change relatively slowly, could explain the relationship between exposure and injury rates.

Here is a key unsubstantiated assertion: why is it improbable that changed roadway design could lead to rapid safety change? Surely changing roadway design is by far the fastest method of changing both behaviour and social mores and, consequentially, safety.

In Jacobsen's defence, it may be noted that his final conclusion is simply to say that:

Policies that increase walking and bicycling appear to be an effective route to improving the safety of people walking and bicycling.

And it is fair to say that that may be how it "appears" if one takes a rather blinkered, infrastructure-excluding view of the problem. And he does not say what those policies should be, he does not specify that they should be training or publicity as opposed to road redesign. But unfortunately this work has been often used as evidence for an idea that the good safety record of the Netherlands and Denmark is not due to their well-designed infrastructure, it is due to their having large numbers of cyclists.

Clearly Jacobsen only demonstrated a statistical link, not causality. His conclusion is open to the obvious objection that the causality may be (in fact, seems, on a wider view of the contextual evidence, and also on a common-sense view, far more likely to be) the other way round, that larger numbers cycling are due to higher perceived safety, which is linked to real safety, which is linked principally to road design (and users' behaviour as influenced by road design).

Anyway, all this is a just pre-amble to tell you that the Director of SWOV, the Dutch institute for road safety research, agrees with me on this. His discussion on the subject is contained in a column on page 3 of the Autumn 2011 Research Activities published by SWOV in English. I would rate Fred Wegman, Director-manager of SWOV, as the world's greatest expert on cycle safety, on the principle that you listen to those who have achieved rather than talked about a goal. I quote his article in full:

Safety in numbers: more cyclists, lower risks?

A swarm of birds or insects, a school of fish, a flock of sheep, a pack of wolves. Language has many possibilities to indicate a group of animals. Biology has taught us that a group offers protection and increases safety for the individual members of the group. It is more difficult for a predator to attack a group than one single animal. For this reason a predator uses the strategy to isolate an animal from its flock before attacking it.

This is also the thought that occurred to me when studying cyclist safety: why not compare the safety of one individual cyclist with the safety of a group of cyclists. The risk of the one single cyclists is greater than that of a cyclist who is part of a group. The American
researcher Jacobsen compared the casualties among cyclists in different countries and
tried to establish a relation with the amount of bicycle traffic. He concluded that “Policies
that increase the numbers of people bicycling appear to be an effective route to improving
the safety of people bicycling”. In other words: add more cyclists to traffic and cyclist
safety will increase. This is a popular idea among those who put effort into stimulating cycling and therefore Jacobsen’s conclusion is quoted frequently in these circles. However,
I believe that this conclusion is not correct. I will try to explain why.

If there is much cycling in a country, the risk for cyclists is indeed lower. Comparison of
statistics of different countries offers conclusive evidence. The risks in countries that have
a lot of cycling like the Netherlands and Denmark are (much) lower than in countries where cycling is a less important mode of transport. The explanation may be twofold. Firstly,
there are the expectations of the other road user. If a driver does indeed expect a cyclist
on the road, as is the case in the Netherlands and Denmark, the risk is lower. But a second
explanation is conceivable: if there are more cyclists, more safe cycling facilities will be
constructed (which in turn make cycling more pleasant). We have sufficient evidence that
cycling facilities (like bicycle tracks) reduce the risks of cycling. Not only do the Netherlands and Denmark have many cyclists, there are also many cycling facilities. 

I do not expect that just a greater number of cyclists will on its own result in a risk reduction for the cyclist. On the other hand, I do expect that more cycling facilities will lead to lower risks. Policy that only focuses on an increase in cycling and at the same time ignores the construction of more cycling facilities, will not have a positive effect on road safety. Unless, of course this policy also takes care of cyclists only cycling close to one another: in a swarm, school, flock, or pack of cyclists.

This is the clearest statement I have seen in print that Dutch road safety experts do not agree with the simple "safety in numbers" idea, despite the fact that Jacobsen's work relied heavily on Dutch statistics. Wegman is very clear:

We have sufficient evidence that cycling facilities (like bicycle tracks) reduce the risks of cycling. Not only do the Netherlands and Denmark have many cyclists, there are also many cycling facilities.

And as I have often pointed out, the real clincher to the argument is that there are no counter-examples. There is nowhere that has achieved good cyclist safety and mass cycling without these facilities (like bicycle tracks).

Elsewhere in this interesting publication, we read SWOV's opinion on the correct way of dealing with the lorry danger problem, source of so much grief in the UK:

In SWOV’s opinion, the ultimate solution for the blind spot problem is a structural separation of trucks and cyclists. How this must be organised and what the economic consequences will be, requires further study. For the time being, the solution can be found in separating cyclists and trucks at intersection[s], both in time and position.

On Trixi mirrors mounted on signal posts, the devices that are being promoted in London at the moment as a method of addressing the lorry blind-spot problem for cyclists, SWOV has this to say:

This mirror has been found to barely influence truck driver behaviour and is only effective while the truck is stopped in front of the mirror.

The overwhelming impression from the whole document is of the extraordinary seriousness with which the Dutch take cycle safety, and how, far from being satisfied with already having the safest cycling and highest cycling levels in the world, they are continually spending money researching, applying and evaluating better solutions. It is clearly this attitude that lies behind their cycling achievement. "Safety in numbers" is a too-simple concept that in no way summarises the complexity of the problem and the interlocking effects which occur that influence cycle safety.

Yes, if you are talking about the flock or the herd, there is safety in numbers. I was in the Vismarkt, Groningen city centre in September, on a study tour led by David Hembrow. I was sitting there at a café table with David and the others from the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, looking at the scene, which was this (video by Stabiliser):

Yes there are huge numbers of cyclists here, "flocks" of them, and it feels very safe for them. But why are there such huge numbers here? It is because urban planning over the whole city has made it difficult to drive here and very easy to cycle. There are no separate cycle facilities here, but that is because they are not needed here. If you look at the rest of the city, as we did, you see the massive network of segregated cycle tracks and traffic-free paths that make it both subjectively and objectively safe to cycle from the suburbs and surrounding villages to the centre, whether there are many or few cyclists cycling around you, resulting in this massive concentration of cyclists in the centre, where all the routes converge, where there is no longer need of segregation. A person parachuting in from Mars, or London, to this spot, might say "Cycle facilities, what cycle facilities? No need, as it is so safe, as the place is full of cyclists". But they would fundamentally misunderstand the context. Similarly, Jacobsen's simplistic comparison of cycling safety with cycling levels critically overlooked context.

Segregated cycle track on a main road leading to Groningen city centre

Happy new year. Let us hope 2012 will be a safer year for cycling in London than was 2011.

Picking cherries and other low-hanging fruit

There are plenty of videos on the internet showing large numbers of people cycling in high-cycling towns and cities. Here's a nice example from Copenhagenize, showing morning traffic on Nørrebrogade – allegedly the busiest cycle street in the world.



There always seem to be people of a certain persuasion, writing on the internet in English, who react to these videos with the cry of cherrypicking. You are creating a distorted impression of the scale or nature of cycling in these places, they claim, picking deliberately unrepresentative locations or times at which to make these videos.

Of course anybody making any kind of political point cherry-picks what they present. When the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain decided to go on a study tour this year, we cherry-picked the nation of the Netherlands to visit. We did not pick Russia, or Berkshire, or Los Angeles. And there was a reason for this. And, strangely enough, a staff team from the London Cycling Campaign soon after cherry-picked the Netherlands to go to, to study cycling policy as well. Coincidentally – nothing to do with me. Surprising?

The point about cherrypicking surely is this: one can only do it where there are cherries to be picked. The sort of cherry seen in the Copenhagen video can only be picked in a couple of countries in the western world. There is nowhere else this could have been filmed, that's the point. There is something special going on here, that those other countries, where this could not have been filmed, need to understand.

One needs to look for what is common to those countries, regions and cities, where this sort of scene can be witnessed at all. I've stressed this before, but it seems to be one of those things that needs saying again and again. So here is the graph again, a few years old, it has to be admitted, courtesy of CTC, "The UK's National Cyclists' Organisation".

From CTC's Safety in Numbers

It's a pity I can't find a more up-to-date presentation, and one that includes Germany and Switzerland, which have both developed their cycling cultures in the last few years. But here we see how the Netherlands and Denmark stand out "by a mile" (or 1.61 km) as Europe's leading cycling nations, despite being not all that culturally similar. We see how the other Nordic countries, plus Austria and Italy, cluster far behind, but still significantly ahead of the others.

And we note that what these high to moderate-level cycling nations all have in common, across major cultural differences, and differences of climate and physical and human geography, is the provision of networks for cyclists separate from motor traffic. Cycle paths and cycle tracks, as you see in the video. And we see there is a perfect correlation. The Netherlands and Denmark have far more cycle-specific infrastructure than the other countries, and they have far higher cycling rates, and genuinely safer cycling. The cluster of nations further to the left all have a significant amount of quality cycle infrastructure, but far less than the Netherlands and Denmark. The nations on the left of the graph have hardly any proper cycle infrastructure (though the city of Paris at least seems to be making some progress on this).

The CTC wanted to demonstrate in this graph a relationship between cycling safety and numbers of cyclists, which clearly does exist, but they have largely ignored the most important lesson of this data, which leaps out from it: that you get safety and high cycling numbers simultaneously from high quality dedicated cycle infrastructure. Their document from which this graph is taken has nothing to say about infrastructure!

I can't cherry-pick a scene in London to video, comparable to the bicycle rush-hour on Nørrebrogade . The closest I can get is this scene in Bloomsbury, which I have shown before. And, funnily enough, the infrastructure in this picture, exceptionally for the UK, looks a little bit like Dutch or Danish cycle infrastructure.



But, such rare exceptions notwithstanding, the UK, by and large, continues on a strange cycling path of its own, a path of trying to "promote" cycling rather than actually accommodating it. Here's some "low-hanging fruit", that I snapped in my garden in June:

Low-hanging fruit in Brent

What's this got to do with anything? Well, here's another picture from this summer. It shows a slightly sad stall that Gerhard Weiss of London Cycling Campaign was manning for Transport for London at the Gladstonbury Festival in Gladstone Park, Brent.

"Catch up with the bicycle", Gladstone Park, Brent, London

The family-friendly bikes and bike attachments on display here are things not often seen on the streets of Brent. I didn't see them getting much serious interest from locals either. When I asked Gerhard what the purpose of this was, he replied that TfL were paying LCC to take this stall round various community festivals in London, particularly in the outer London Biking Boroughs. TfL's purpose here was to target families with children in these suburbs as "low-hanging fruit", as they chose to put it: people who needed just a little nudge, perhaps as little as being shown the existence of the right type of family-friendly gear, to get them cycling.

Well, with no criticism intended to Gerhard or the other staff of LCC, but plenty of criticism intended for TfL, I have to say I think this is utter bunkum. When bureaucrats come up with crappy phrases like "low-hanging fruit", you know you are in fantasy-land. They should have taken cognisance of what Griet Scheldemen of Lancaster University said, commenting on the  Understanding Walking and Cycling study of which she was a part:

Regrettably, we did not find this mass of people on the threshold of change, who only needed a little push to start cycling as a daily means of getting around...

For the truth is there is no way that many families are ever going to cycle the main roads of Brent with their kiddies in these cycle trailers or child seats, without an infrastructure revolution in London of which there is absolutely no sign. There is no way these families using these contraptions will "take the lane" through the deadly concrete tunnel in Neasden under the North Circular Road, or ride on the equally terrifying motorway-style flyover across the North Circular at Staples Corner: the junctions on that road that lie immediately to the north and west of this park. And, if they want to go the the areas of Brent to the north and west of this park, if they live in Neasden, Wembley or Colindale, these two roads are where they are going to have to cycle. Because there are no other crossings of the North Circular Road for miles in either direction that you could get these bike trailers through.

Staples Corner

Because the only other crossings of the North Circular near here are a footbridge that you are not allowed to cycle over, between Kenwyn Avenue and Neasden Recretion Ground, and a preposterous "shared" pedestrian/cycle tunnel at Neasden Lane. Here is the first of these:

The approach to the footbridge across the North Circular Road at Kenwyn Avenue

It wouldn't be legal, but just try cycling your bike trailer loaded with its precious cargo round the tight square bends on the ramp up to that footbridge. Just try to get your bike and trailer there in the first place, round those (perfectly legally) parked cars which thoroughly block access to the ramp from the road. And if you do manage to get across, and you land up on Neasden Recreation Ground on the north side, try getting anywhere else from there without cycling on pavements. You will find you get sucked into the Neasden northern roundabout, a nasty place, of which more later.

Here's the second off-road option I mentioned, the horrible Neasden cycle/pedestrian underpass. Try getting your Bakfiets or Christiana round those barriers and corners. The lady with the pushchair is having enough trouble.

The pedestrian/cycle underpass of the North Circular Road at Neasden Lane

If you just have a normal bike, which you can squeeze past these barriers, and you try to access this underpass from the south, from Neasden shopping centre, you find you have to cycle the wrong way along a stretch of slip road coming off the North Circular, as in this picture. The entrance you are aiming for is marked by the archway in front of the white house.

One-way slip road at Neasden shopping centre that makes it impossible to legally cycle to the official bike underpass of the North Circular

If you take this route, by illegally cycling on the pavement, or wheeling your bike, or ignoring the no entry sign and hopping a kerb, and negotiate the barriers, curly ramp and steep slopes, you end up in this delightful tunnel. The pink slippery tiling is the part specially reserved for cyclists (the part you see all the pedestrians on). I met a woman who had broken her shoulder through a fall from a bike in this tunnel, as the paving is treacherous when wet.

The shared pedestrian/cycle tunnel under the North Circular at Neasden

Supposing it is not too wet and you make it through here without injury or collision with pedestrians, what do you get when you emerge from this tunnel on the north side of the North Circular  Road? You get this:

The Neasden cycle/pedestrian underpass exit into Neasden Lane North

You can't rejoin the road here because (1) there is no dropped kerb, (2) there is no way to cross this busy section of Neasden Lane North, which feeds southbound traffic from Neasden Lane North on to the North Circular eastbound and eastbound traffic from the North Circular off it in various directions, and, (3) if you did cross the road and tried to go north you would immediately be fed on to the northern Neasden roundabout, a terrifying, fast, multi-lane gyratory, seen here in a view from the north, with Neasden Lane North and the underpass exit in the distance. 

Neaden northern roundabout

There is a theoretical alternative to all this, indicated with short green and purple lines on the TfL London Cycle Guide No. 3, which is to take another leg of the the underpass diagonally under the Neasden Lane North–North Circular junction, and then a footbridge to a small road called Vicarage Way, which at least gets you on the correct side of the Neasden northern roundabout, though you still end up very close to fast heavy traffic, to its left. But (wait for it) there are a couple of problems with this: (1) you are not allowed to cycle into and out of this exit from the underpass, as shown by the sign in the view below, and, (2) you are not allowed to cycle on the footbridge leading to Vicarage Way.

Exit from Neasden cycle/pedestrian underpass on the west side of Neasden Lane North

In any case, with your tagalong child bike, or Christiana, or Bakfiets, that you have bought, inspired by the TfL Catch up with the Bicycle display, I'll wager you won't be able to negociate any of this pathetic "infrastructure". You'll HAVE to use this road, that we are looking down on to here. THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE.

The Neasden North Circular Road underpass , looking north-west

This is the view looking from the non-cycling footbridge into what Brent cyclists call "Death Valley": the vehicle route, the A4088, under the North Circular at Neasden for all traffic heading north-west from the Willesden area. The picture was taken with a good camera in good daylight, but look at the motion blur on those vehicles. Do you fancy keeping to the right of the traffic turning left on to the slip road with all your family in tow? And, by the way, there is another slip road that merges from the left, coming off the North Circular, at the other end of Death Valley. And, if you are going this way, cycling north or west from Gladstone Park, Neasden Station or Willesden, this is not the first barrier you will have encountered, for to get to Death Valley, you first have to negotiate the southern Neasden roundabout, seen in the background in this view, looking the other way from the same footbridge.

Neasden's "Death Valley" looking towards the southern Neasden roundabout

If you make it through the southern roundabout, and Death Valley, with its slip roads, in one piece, you are then led onto the next section of Neasden Lane North, where you are crammed into two narrow lanes of heavy traffic:

Neasden Lane North junction with Verney Street

To continue north-west to Wembley or Kingsbury you carry on over the River Brent, where this road becomes Blackbird Hill. This is another route to which, in Brent, the borough of infrastructural Thatcherism, there is no alternative. For this is where the tiny stream of the Brent (plus the Grand Union Feeder Canal) is first bridged downstream of the Brent reservoir, and this bridge, Kingsbury Bridge, which has stood here since Saxon times, and was last widened for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 (for which the old Wembley Stadium was built), still carries all the traffic between the north and south parts of the borough: another great environment to cycle in with your kids on their tagalong bike.

Blackbird hill, the meeting-point of Neasden, Wembley and Kingsbury

And beyond that... well, "the world's your oyster". As you would expect from Brent, there are a few nasty junctions and viscious mini-roundabouts at the top of this hill where routes fork between Wembley to the west and Kingsbury to the north, but I think that is enough of this safari, you'll have got the idea by now. And that ideas is: 

It is not the slightest bit surprising that families cycling with children are seen round here less frequently than UFOs.

Much less frequently, in fact. If anybody wanted further explanation of why, as mentioned in my last post, the wards of Brent to the north of the North Circular have true cycling mode shares probably below 0.5%, here it is. When TfL come up with this crap about just needing to put a bike trailer under the noses of their "low hanging fruit" of Brent parents who are just dying to cycle their kids on these monstrous roads, or trying to negotiate these impossible, crappy, tenth-rate cycle "facilities", I have to despair.

What the Dutch and the Danes teach us is that, with cycle facilities, you have to engineer for everybody to make it work for anybody. You have to build your cycle infrastructure to a quality that works safely and efficiently, simultaneously, for 8 year-old children on their own and fit young adult commuters and for everybody inbetween, including every kind of bike and bike trailer. If you under-engineer, or try to cheaply adapt already inadequate pedestrian facilities with just a bit of lining or surfacing, or try to get away with something that some idiot in the council thinks might be "OK for slow cyclists or novices or those afraid of the traffic", you just get unusable rubbish. If TfL can't get together the money and political resolution to implement sensible, safe cycling infrastructure, they should stop trying to promote cycling at all with these ridiculous tents at community festivals. For doing so is simply a waste of money.

The Dutch do not seem to waste their money in this way. They actually build things. They are strange, like that. The nation of dyke and dam and sluice builders and drainers of polders actually build stuff all the time. While the infrastructure of Brent, and most of outer London, seems frozen in a time-warp as it was left by the road and flyover builders about 1972, with seemingly all further change impossible, or impossible to afford for the UK, the eighth richest nation in the work, apart from putting in the odd stainless steel anti-cycling barrier, or putting down of two colours of slippery paving in a narrow, wet, horrible pedestrian subway, the Dutch constantly build high-standard bridges, tunnels and underpasses everywhere, from one end of their country to the other, to separate cyclists from motor vehicles and pedestrians and let cyclists travel in safety, speed, and style, to all the places they could want to go. If the North Circular Road were in the Netherlands, cyclists would go under it like this:

Dual carriageway and two-way cycle track go under a motorway in Assen, Netherlands

Or they would be taken over it like this:

Cycle bridge over a motorway in Groningen, Netherlands

But, to end with, I'll indulge in a little fantasy. Maybe we could soon get a decent crossing for cyclists of the North Circular Road in Brent: something the Dutch would recognise as cycle infrastructure. Because the North Circular Road–A5 junction at Staples Corner is due to be rebuilt – and not with public money. The developers of Brent Cross Cricklewood have to pay for a total rebuild of this junction, as part of their new out of town shopping centre regeneration scheme. The main company behind the Brent Cross Cricklewood scheme is Hammerson PLC. Hammerson's Development Director during the planning of this scheme was Michael Bear, who now has been elected Lord Mayor of London. (That's the largely ceremonial Mayor of the financial "square mile" of the City, not the post held by Boris Johnson, for my foreign readers.) And he seems to have got quite keen on cycling.

So are Hammerson going to give the cyclists of north-west London something like this? I'm afraid I'm not holding my breath.