Why people advocating personal solutions to social problems annoys me

This post was triggered, as are many posts, by a Twitter exchange. This started because the City of London Twitter account announced:

We've teamed up with #taxis & .@CleanAirLondon to help #Londoners avoid air pollution bit.ly/1E7lxJZ .@TheLTDA pic.twitter.com/Mx4ATzvjOV

They were promoting an app where you can "choose from the user groups below to receive advice tailored for you on polluted days". So the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association was advising us on us how we can attempt to avoid the pollution that they are in large part responsible for. Great. A bit like Henry VIII advising his wives to steer clear of men with axes.

In reply to this, Schrödinger's Cat tweeted:

.@cityoflondon Is that advice simply "Leave London"? @CleanAirLondon @TheLTDA

Now the story gets more curious, because Clean Air London is a respected pressure group campaigning for air pollution to be cleaned up in London. They replied to my re-tweet of Schrödinger's tweet,

@VoleOSpeed You can reduce exposure without leaving London. @HealthyAirUK video

They linked to this video, from Healthy Air, another anti-pollution campaign:

This over-long video presents essentially two contentious ideas. The first is that those cycling and walking receive less pollution than those in cars. This is contentious because, although the concentrations of some pollutants have been measured to be higher in cars than around the heads of those walking and cycling on the same roads, it does not take into account the rate of absorption due to exercise and respiration, nor the time spent exposed to the pollution. Now, there's nothing wrong with advising people to cycle or walk (except that such advice is likely to be ineffective until the environment is changed to make that behaviour easier), but let's not advance scientifically-shaky arguments for it.

The second contentious idea is that those walking and cycling can reduce their pollution exposure by chosing 'quieter routes'. This is problematic in many ways. For one thing, there's nothing in general to stop motorists from very sensibly heeding the same advice, and chosing the quieter routes to drive on themselves, so making those routes anything but quiet and tending to level-up air pollution everywhere (a process that the sat-nav devices are expediting). For another, the advice is impractical, whether we talk about walkers or cyclists. They need to go to where the things are that they need to get to, which tend to be on main roads. Also, the main roads usually are the direct, shorter routes, the socially safer ones, and the easiest routes to find and navigate without spending a lot of time in research.

An actual example: yesterday, I nededed to wheel my partner, who is in a wheelchair, from the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London WC1, to King's Cross Station. We had decided to create less pollution by walking and taking the tube than by taking a cab. We could have walked between those points on a slightly quieter and ldess polluted route than the one I chose, which was via Russell square, Tavistock Place and Euston Road, some of the most polluted roads in London, but in fact we needed to go via shopping streets as we needed also a bank, and we desired an eating-place as well. She, being low down in the chair, would have received the worst of the pollution.

In general if you try to navigate in any town avoiding the main roads, you soon find that you are taking much longer routes, you are taking complex, time-consuming detours (which might lead to you even absorbing more pollution as you are in lower levels for longer), you are probably going up and down more hills (which also may lead to more absorbtion), as main routes tend to be the flattest ones in hilly areas, and you require more planning to take in the facilities you actually need to get to.

The truth is that everybody has a limited amount of time. Main roads are the main roads because they go through. Minor roads don't, you get lots of kinks in your route trying to use them, or you find yourself trying to navigate obscure paths, through housing estates or other obstructions, and in places where the space is tight and infrastructure poor. Many back streets have narrow pavements in a bad state of repair or with strange gradients or changes of surface, or are full of street furniture obstructions that make them impossible to get a wheelchair along. I have tried to use, for example, Stephenson Way NW1, as an alternative to a section of Euston Road, and found it is quite impossible with a wheelchair, for these reasons. You can only have a reasonable level of confidence that you are going to encounter reasonable, pedestrain and disabled-friendly infrastructure, with good junctions, pedestrian signals, smooth surfaces, proper dropped kerbs, and enough space, by sticking to big roads, where the pollution is.

But what I really object to is not being told all this nonsense about 'quiet routes' in itself. I can put up with it if I am told it by institutionally hypocritical governmental organisations, or people who are part of the problem, like the Licensed Taxi Drivers' Association. What I really object to is being told it by organisations that claim to be there to campaign for better conditions: for actual solutions to the problem of pollution. Because, I don't understand why they are doing this. It's like they are undermining their own work. They are causing a distraction from the big, real social problem, that they are supposedly there to address, and its real, collective, structural, permanent solutions, by towing, or in any way supporting or publicising, this 'personal solution' line. It's just very convenient for the organisations on the 'other side', like the chronically conservative, anti-democratic mediaeval excrescence that is the Corporation of the City of London, or the polluters themselves, the taxis, that campaigners collaborate with this kind of thing.

It's parallel to the cycling case where, for so long, cycle campaigners have got wrapped up in the idea, and the systems, of trying to train people to cycle in motor-dominated conditions, as a personal solution to the big social problem, that, basically, cycling can't flourish unless it is given workable motor traffic-free space. This is a similar distraction, playing along with the 'solution' advocated by those who want to keep the environmental, infrastructural status quo. It absorbs so much energy that should be spent campaigning for the actual change in conditions that is needed.

In another area in which I am interested, the quality of the night sky and the issue of light pollution, it is like campaigners for darker skies telling people they should get dark skies by driving to dark places (producing more pollution on the way, of course), rather than by getting better, more appropriate lighting solutions in their communities, in the places, and at the times, at which they are genuinely required, and not elsewhere.

It's also like rape justice campaigners saying a part of the solution is for women to be more careful and not get drunk, or put themselves in risky situations, or wear the 'wrong' clothes.

I am irritated by these people promoting personal solutions to social problems because they are wasting time and energy on these things, they are letting 'the authorities' and those otherwise in powerful positions 'off the hook', and in general, they are giving out patronising, unhelpful, poorly-thought-through advice to boot.

It's not a practical solution to try to avoid air pollution by cycling or walking on quiet routes. It's not a route to mass cycling to try to train everyone to ride on roads full of motor vehicles. It's not a solution to light pollution to tell anybody who wants to see the stars to drive to a place many miles away. It's not a solution to rape to advise women to avoid risky situations – which will – hey! lead to them avoiding quiet streets, which is where they are supposed to go to avoid the pollution, and not cycle, which seems to be regarded as an act of sexual provocation by many men, and avoid the places where they might be able to silently contemplate the stars.

For these personal 'solutions' to social problems just lead to a mass of patronising, contradictory advice and nonsense. They are not short-term solutions to 'tide us over' until the policies can be sorted out, they are part of the problem themselves; they form a part of the environment of ideas in which the real solutions are just put off. My take-home message: if something is wrong, campaign for the policies to fix it. Don't tell individuals to change their behaviour. Don't even start.

Fear and loathing

I listened to a good programme on Radio 4 today which got me thinking. This programme, "I'm Suzy and I'm a Phobic" dealt with phobias: chronic fear of certain situations or things. Phobia is what we call it when the normal, natural, and helpful emotion of fear gets out of control in everyday situations, and needs to be treated as a medical condition. It is estimated that 10% of the UK population have some sort of phobia.

You can listen to the programme on iPlayer (for the next 7days). I was arrested by the opening lines:

Fear can save you life. If you are being chased by a tiger, or standing on the ledge of a tall building, or you simply want to avoid being hit by a car in the road, fear is you friend.

Of course, this got me thinking about the psychology of cycling on the road, fear of traffic, and how natural this is, and how it fits in with the wider spectrum of fear, rational and irrational, helpful and unhelpful, and how it should be dealt with socially.

Again, interestingly, the programme did deal largely with a phobia, that of the narrator, Suzy Klein, that was transport-related. She has claustrophobia, and, in particular, she has been terrified of being on trains in tunnels, and terrified of going into the London Underground, both into stations and onto trains. Part of the treatment, or therapy, featured in the programme, involved Suzy being taken on to the Underground with the therapist, and trying to overcome this fear. She did succeed in getting on a train.

Elsewhere in the programme there was discussion of to what extent phobia really is an illness. There was an attitude from the Daily Telegraph's medical man James LeFanu that the great increase in the number of people diagnosed with phobias in modern Britain is due to an increasing tendency to medicalise conditions which are in the normal range of human behaviour and emotion, which he thought might be driven by potential profits to be made by the drug companies. There can be no doubt, however, that phobias are a major problem for many people, seriously impairing their lives.

So how does all this connect with cycling? Well it's clear I think. We know that most people won't cycle on our roads full of motor traffic, because it makes them, rightly or wrongly, rationally or irrationally, scared. Cycle training programmes aim to get people to overcome that fear, a bit like the cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), and exposure therapies, featured in the programme on phobias. CBT gets people to analyse and deconstruct the reasons for their fear and their reactions, and hence aims to help them to overcome the fear. But, as LeFanu told us, it is not all that clinically successful, with only a 30% success rate. It needs to be combined, he told us, in most cases, with exposure therapy: actually getting the phobic person to do or get in contact with the thing of which they are frightened. Which of course what cycle training aims to do as well. As the very well-written Cycling Embassy of Great Britain response to the London Assembly's current investigation into cycling puts it (page 4):

... cycle training [–] attempts to help people to scale the barrier to cycling, rather than to remove that barrier; to enable cycling it requires acquiring a confidence in traffic which many will never attain. 

(There is much more to what the Embassy has to say, and I recommend you to read it all.)

I have been caused to think about these relationships before in my cycle campaigning career. Sometimes I have been told that I am over-emphasising the dangers involved in cycling, and I was once told by a very well-known exponent of cycle training, and a very well-known figure on the London cycling scene, that he thought this was actually a personal, psychological problem that I had. He thought I actually had a phobia, or an insecurity that manifested itself in an emphasis on the dangers of cycling in motor traffic  – despite the fact that I was, at that time, cycling over 3,000 miles a year in London traffic.

So this is an interesting problem, this fear and behaviour thing. Because fear of a big mass of hard metal with a lot of kinetic energy coming into contact with your flesh is surely a very right and natural and helpful fear, as the radio programme suggested at the outset. And perhaps even fear of being in the same space as that mass of metal with high kinetic energy is also rather natural and helpful. But that covers all cycling on the road. Do we medicalise all the people who won't cycle under current conditions in the UK? Do we attempt to treat them for a phobia?

Paul Gannon wrote about this very well, in discussing the arguments for and againast "Shared Space" treartment of roads. I've quoted what he wrote before, and I'll do so again:

The facts of power and status on the roads – which people understand tacitly – is what lies behind people saying that cycling is dangerous. The effectiveness of the cavalry attack depended on the horse and rider, individually or in a mass, approaching at a high speed and with weight. If a square of soldiers could withstand the shock of the attack, they could survive; if they dithered and cowered, or as individuals, they never stood a chance. The psychological component of the weapon was intimidation, playing upon the natural human inclination to get the hell out of the way when a half a ton of fast-moving mass is coming straight at you. The modern equivalent of the charging horse is the motor vehicle (and not just the 4x4) because it uses the same effect as the charger to establish its priority by fear of ‘flesh to metal interaction’. 

This can be seen by referring to the recent discussion about pedestrian priority at junctions, as per Highway Code, and vehicle priority, as per reality. Pedestrians did not give up that priority willingly, saying to car drivers, ‘no, no, you go ahead, please’, but in stepping back from potential bodily damage from an approaching mass, eventually established the ‘standard’, with only a fossil memory somehow still preserved in the Highway Code. 

The simple fact of the matter is that people do not want to have to be put in the position of constantly having to face the life and death decision of "Do I carry on or give way?". When the odds are so heavily against you in the event of an error (in terms of asymmetric physical consequences for cyclist/pedestrian and vehicle driver), factors of power are unavoidable.

It seems to me that James LeFanu, though, is on to something with his discussion of the significance of numbers and population proportions who are diagnosed with a problem. You can't medicalise an entire population. Diagnosis of a disorder depends on it being a small minority suffering from the disorder. 

There was some discussion I recall, also from Radio 4, I think it was in their programme All in the mind a year or two ago, about the actual proportion of the UK population with, or who had suffered at some stage in their lives from, any kind of mental illness. An advertising campaign for a charity (that had put adverts, incidentally, on the London Underground) had spread about the claimed statistic that "One in four people in the UK had suffered from a mental illness". But the discussion raised a large amount of disagreement amongst experts as to whether this was a justifiable statistic. There are many was of defining mental illness, and, under the broadest, it turns out from studies, the proportion of the population that ever suffers from mental illness is higher than this, more like one in two to one in three. But the idea was put forward that the one in four figure had been promoted because it was more politically acceptable, though it doesn't seem to correspond with the results of any authoritative study. It "sounds about right", and the higher figure will seem, to most people, as an exaggeration of the problem, or an over-broad defining of illness, or medicalising almost the entire population, which most people find unacceptable.

So with Suzy Klein's fear of going into the Underground, and its practical implications. Let's imagine for a moment a world in which everybody suffered from her form of claustrophobia. Or, let's say, 90% of the population, a proportion which I guess to be similar to the proportion of people who now find traffic on the streets too scary to cycle in. Would we build an underground railway system as we have it, and then try to treat with psychotherapies all the people who are too scared to use it? I don't think we would. We would not build it. It wouldn't be worth it. Treating people is too expensive, difficult, intrusive and uncertain. We would instead demolish some buildings and put all the railways at street level, or have a tram system, like many other cities. The reason the lady who is afraid of being in tunnels was given psychotherapy was that she was in a small minority of the population with her particular phobia. In that situation, it is easier and cheaper for our society to put railways underground in an urban area like central London, and treat a few people for a phobia.

You can draw your own conclusions from all this. You can claim, based on whatever statistics you want to give, that cycling is "dangerous" or "not dangerous". I've discussed that recently, and in earlier blog posts. My point here is more about what it is actually practical for society to do, to solve a structural problem connected with transport, that is also bound up with human feelings and fears. An approach to attempting to increase cycling that relies largely on training, as I think our government's does, it seems to me is trying to do an extraordinary thing, trying to treat the mass of the population rather as doctors and therapists normally treat people with rare and unusual conditions. It's an approach which would not be used in any other comparable context.

As Joe Dunckley of At War With the Motorist put it in an excellent post The definition of madness, going into this subject from a slightly different angle (and by madness he does not mean mental illness):

The idea that somehow physical engineering is difficult and expensive and unpopular, while changing human behaviour is quick, easy, cheap and effective, is one that the British are remarkably strongly attached to.

But it's one the British are attached to only in certain contexts. For we have promoted car travel by making it fast and safe through good engineering. We have made it much faster to travel between towns by car than it was when I was born, and that was achieved through government policies. My father spent a lot of time travelling around in a car for business. When I was very young it took him 4–5 hours to do the 100 miles exactly from Christchurch to London. Now it takes 2 hours. The increase in speed was achieved by building motorways, bypasses round towns, and trunk roads. In other words, it was achieved using engineering, not psychology. It was not achieved by trying to educate drivers to overcome their fear of driving at 70 mph on twisting narrow country roads, trying to get them to treat their journey as a slalom race, and training up their skills of vehicle control to the level of a racing driver's. On the contrary, such antisocial use of the roads was discouraged using law-enforcement methods. The increase in speed was facilitated by infrastructure. To say this is so obvious, it sounds stupid.

My point in the end is about the contrast in approach between mass activities and issues and minority activities and issues. Driving is a mass activity. Mass activities and issues we address with infrastructure, minority activities and issues we address with education, training and therapy. The approach we take with cycling is both bound up with, and key to, its continued minority status.

The problem with assertive cycling

From Cycle of Futility:

I cycled down Queen Victoria Street towards Blackfriars Bridge: [picture] At this narrow point, I decided to “take the lane”, as I’ve been overtaken by buses here before and it’s a little close for comfort.

A black cab driver behind me became very angry, aggressively revving and trying to squeeze past. At the end of this section (about 15 seconds after the beginning of it), he leaned out his window as he overtook me and said, “Who do you think you are? I’ll slit your fucking throat.”

There was a police car stopped at the next set of traffic lights. I knocked on their window, reported what the taxi driver had said, and one of the two officers within asked both me and the driver to pull over.

.....

PC Jeffreys then told me that I should not have been cycling in the middle of the road and that both parties were in his view in the wrong. He said that in future if I felt intimidated by a taxi driver behind me, the correct action would be to pull over to the side of the road, dismount my bicycle and wait until I no longer felt at risk.

All very routine stuff for this city of vehicular cycling, except for the involvement of the police. Outside the tiny area of the City of London one would have been unlikely to find any police with the time to get involved in an incident like this.

This account points up a major problem with the UK's officially-promoted doctrine of "assertive cycling", or "Cyclecraft-style cycling", or "Bikeability-style cycling", or whatever you want to call it. This problem has been noted before, in this perceptive piece on As Easy As Riding A Bike:

And this brings me to the other problem I have with the ‘primary position’. No-one seems to have told U.K. drivers about it. Putting yourself out in the middle [of the] road can, in my experience, appear to some drivers as an act of deliberate provocation. They don’t have a clue what you are doing.

Exactly. The problem with assertive cycling and the primary position is that they are techniques that are understood as correct and sensible road behaviour only by a tiny minority of road-users, those cyclists who have been trained in them. Nobody has told motorists about them, nobody has told police about them, and, in the unlikely event of an incident coming to court, nobody has told magistrates about them. They are not mentioned in the Highway Code, nor mentioned in the driving test. They are against "common sense" and against the expected norms of the road to the vast mass of road-users, who are likely to regard cyclists applying these principles as either obstructive, bloody-minded, "superior", or suicidal.

There is a fundamental difference between driver training, as in the driving test, and Bikeablilty. The driving test teaches people to obey road norms which are generally understood. Bikeablilty and Cyclecraft teach people, at least in some respects, to try to go against the norms of the road. They are therefore based on a kind of lie. Because there is no point in society training one minority set of people to do one thing, while not having the guts to impose on everybody else the duty of allowing that minority set to do that thing. It is a glaring inconsistency, and just a recipe for conflict and aggression. As the blogger mentioned above puts it, assertive cycling is just a scheme that puts UK cyclists using it "between a rock and a hard place". Really, it is no way to promote cycling.

The phrase "primary position" itself embodies a dishonesty. The phrase, I believe, originally came from motorcycle training. But as applied to cycling, it doesn't make the same sense as it does in motorcycling. The "primary position" cannot be the primary position for cyclists on roads where the speeds are almost always far in excess of most people's top cycling speed. Some fit, young cyclists can cycle at 20 mph on the flat, but few of our roads have a 20mph limit, and in the more normal 30-limit urban areas, typical speeds are up to 45, in reality, where the roads can take it. So even fast cyclists stand little chance of maintaining the primary position most of the time. A more normal cycling speed, even with the current cadre of cyclists, would be 10–15mph. For them, in being sold this "primary position" theory, they are clearly being sold a lie. And this is to say nothing of the currently largely-excluded groups that we want to get on bikes: children, the unfit and the elderly, who are not going to do more than about 8 mph.

I'm not trying to discourage people from cycling on the roads – far from it. And I am not trying to encourage people to cycle "in the gutter", or to be overly deferential to motorists, or to put themselves in the dooring zone, if they can possibly avoid it, or put themselves in the position of being dangerously overtaken, if they can possibly avoid it. People should cycle on the roads using some of the techniques drawn from Cyclecraft and Bikeability, and using their own experience, judgement, and common-sense, and try to keep as safe as possible. I am not criticising anyone for cycling in any particular way, or for training anyone to cycle in any particular way. But I am pointing out, as many bloggers have pointed out before, that we have a big problem with the way we are trying to get people to cycle on the roads, trying to fit them in around a driving culture that is, in a basic way, not compatible with any type of cycling, assertive or otherwise.

For the risks are never entirely within the control of the cyclist, no matter in what style they cycle. Cycling in primary position reduces the chance of dooring incidents, and many junction incidents, but it increases the chances of being hit from behind, which are not negligible, and, in preventing some dangerous overtakes, increases the likelihood of aggressive behaviour from many motorists when they are encountered elsewhere on the journey.

One result of the aggression and hostility they encounter on the roads is that too many people give up cycling, whatever training you give them. The effects of promotion and training are offset by recidivism. A report from Transport for London published in December 2010, Analysis of Cycling Potential, drew attention to this (p. 44):

Evidence suggests that the growth in cycle travel between 2001 and 2008 was largely caused by cyclists increasing their cycle trip-making. There is no evidence of a net increase in the number of cyclists overall, although this disguises a level of "churn", so that some people stop cycling whilst others start. LTDS [London Travel Demand Survey] showed an increase of only 3 per cent in the number of people who ever cycle between 2005/6 and 2008/9 but an increase of nearly 50 per cent in the proportion of cyclists who cycled frequently. A very small number of cyclists account for a large proportion of trips – recent analysis of LTDS found that around 2% of London residents cycle as their main mode of travel to work, yet this group accounts for around half of all cycle trips made in London (for all trip purposes). So, although many people have taken up cycling in the past decade, a similar number have stopped cycling - i.e. there has been "churn" but no change at an aggregate level.

The report further noted, on p. 45,

Research exploring the barriers to cycling and the factors which would encourage people to cycle more found that frequent cyclists were more likely to be put off by their experiences with traffic and other road users and to mention practical barriers, such as a lack of suitable parking or shower facilities (TfL Cycling Behaviour Survey 2010). For all groups, including frequent cyclists, safety was the most significant barrier to cycling in general and for specific trips. This suggests that, in order to realise the remaining potential from existing frequent cyclists, practical measures to increase safety and improve the provision of facilities will be the most effective.

So even "frequent cyclists", whom one would suppose would be the "hardened" ones, are "put off by their experience with traffic" and need "practical measures to increase safety and improve the provision of facilities".

I would agree with all TfL's report says, and only question why TfL and Boris Johnson are not doing more to put into practice what it so clearly says about the need for "practical measures to increase safety and improve the provision of facilities". But we do need to stop pretending that Bikeability-style training, trying to fit cyclists in around the dangerous behaviour that is the norm on the roads at the moment, is any real solution. 

The theory that training people in assertive cycling techniques can play any significant part in reviving cycling in the UK is in error in a similar way to the ideas around Shared Space that I have criticised quite a bit on this blog. The thing in common is that word I used (or coined, as it is not recognised by my computer's dictionary), ahistorical: meaning that the theory holds little water when viewed in the context of historical change, and the reasons for that change. The recent history of cycling in the UK, and many other western countries, is that cyclists have been driven off the roads by the increase in volume, speed and power of motor vehicles and aggression of their drivers. The claim that cyclists themselves can undo this damage merely through changing the way that they cycle – cycling assertively, as compared with however they used to cycle in the "golden days" of cycling – which is, in the end, what the claim is, that underlies the push for ever more Bikeability-style training, is decidedly far-fetched.

It is so far-fetched as not to be credible. And it is not backed-up by the evidence, which is that, as TfL's report says, there has been no change in the actual number of people cycling, despite the big training push of the last decade. However you try to train cyclists to deal with traffic, the frequency of the type of incident with which this post began means that most people will continue to give up under current conditions. The answer, as we know from extensive international experience, is the provision of facilities that separate cyclists from fast and aggressively-driven motor traffic. Training cyclists to pretend to be motorcyclists is not the answer.

Lorries and cyclists, then and now

I have just been sent the following by LCC:

Dear fellow cyclist,

Thank you all for signing and supporting LCC’s biggest ever petition. Over 10,000 signatures were presented to London Assembly members on Wednesday 18 May 2011 at City Hall.

We are really pleased with this progress, however the campaign still has a way to go. LCC urgently needs more donations to keep up the pressure. We are pushing for “on bike” training for lorry drivers to be approved nationally. Then we can urge all 33 London councils to deliver it.

Since I had handy the October 2002 London Cyclist, as I referred to an article I wrote in it in this post, I was leafing through that. In it is an article Be alert to blind ignorance, headed with this preamble:

Matt Seaton explains why both cyclists and lorry drivers need educating about each other's road requirements and practices, and considers the effectiveness of awareness-raising initiatives

Yes. The effectiveness of "awareness-raising" initiatives is very much the point. For I expect in every year of publication of London Cyclist, down more than 30 years, one could have found a similar article calling for these "awareness-raising" initiatives to educate cyclists and lorry drivers about each other's needs. This is one problem, like so many others in the relationship of UK cyclists to other road-users, that just seems stubbornly insoluble, despite all the campaigns and initiatives. If anything, the problem is getting worse. Lorries still account for a majority of cyclist fatalities in London, and, as Futilitarian points out, there is statistically no evidence of any increase in safety through larger numbers of cyclists on London's streets in recent times. (I dealt with the "safety in numbers" theory in an earlier post).

Here is a list of the sub-headings in the 2002 article:

Three mirrors not enough

Putting the stats into context

New awareness camapign

But do the initiatives work?

A change of emphasis

What more can be done?

It's a well-written article, but it all seems so wearyingly familiar. Plus ça change, c'est la même chose.

Well, now LCC is calling for on-bike training to be given to lorry rivers by London councils. As I understand it, even if completely implemented, that scheme would only get the training to those drivers who work for the councils, and maybe to council contractors as well. So not to the majority of HGV drivers, and not to the statistically most dangerous drivers, those of tipper trucks, skip lorries and cement mixers. I don't think it will make much difference, to be quite honest.

And what about all this other awareness-raising, on the other side: campaigns to explain to cyclists what it is like to drive a lorry, by, for example, getting them to sit in the cab of one, on one of these cycle "event days" that proliferate at this time of year? How many cyclists can such exercises ever actually reach? And isn't this tending to put the onus on the cyclist to get out of all possibility of danger, letting drivers "off the hook", ignoring the fact that many lorry deaths are caused by dangerous overtaking manoeuvres that the cyclist is powerless to prevent? (This is what I suspect, though it is an unproveable assertion, as, in such cases, the cyclist is dead, and can't give an account of what happened.) Isn't it all too close to vicim-blaming? Danny (Cyclists in the City) clearly had similar thoughts while writing his post of Tuesday but didn't put them so explicitly. For the truth is, the only way that cyclists can avoid all possibility of being crushed under a recklessly-driven HGV is to leave their bike in the garage and choose another method of transport. No amount of training and "awareness-raising" will protect cyclists from some combinations of hazards.


"Awareness-raising" is one of the great rallying-cries of what I called in a previous post "the environment-issue avoidance industry" that is much of British cycle promotion and campaigning. My question is:
Isn't this all part of a wrong approach, a demonstrably, over time, failed approach, putting all the emphasis on trying to get behavioural change though education, either of cyclists or of drivers, against all evidence that it just doesn't work?


That brilliant servant of the public health agenda, Dr Ian Roberts, of London's School of Hygene and Tropical Medicine, had this to say about road safety education and awareness-raising in a slightly different, but related, context, that of road safety in the Third World:

The problem for public health is that the safety policies the car lobby promotes are not particularly effective in preventing injury.

Their favourite policy is road safety education. Despite decades of evaluation research, safety education has never been shown to reduce road injury rates, a point emphasized by the WHO in the World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention. Road user education is favoured by the car lobby because it places the responsibility for road traffic injury squarely on the victim and has no impact on industry profits. Its primary purpose is ideological. It sends the message that road space belongs to drivers, and that pedestrians and cyclists must look out or die. This also applies to children, who account for 300,000 of the 1.2 million road deaths each year.

Awareness campaigns are another favourite. The [Global Road Safety] Commission is currently promoting the ‘Think Before You Drive’ campaign, supported by the Bridgestone Corporation, which reminds drivers to use child seats and seatbelts and to check their tyres. Sensible suggestions though they may be, such exhortations have no discernable effect on road safety. On the other hand, the campaign may improve Bridgestone's corporate image.

So, to return to lorries on the streets of the UK, and their interaction with cyclists, what else can be done, apart from education and awareness-raising? Well, we could start looking seriously at the infrastructure and planning. We could learn from counties that do this better (for example, The Netherlands, which has the best road safety record in the world). We could start to end the situation where cyclists are forced to share road space with big lorries because they have absolutely no alternative. We could put in place more advanced, safer junction designs where cyclists have separate phases and are not mixed up with HGVs doing turning manoeuvres in tight corners. We could take out lethal, cyclist-trapping guardrailing at junctions. We could restrict the movements of large lorries in our cities more, and enforce those restrictions rigourously, though technology. We could put in place schemes on a town and city basis for distributing goods in dense urban areas using the most appropriate vehicles for the purpose, co-ordinating deliveries between businesses, and putting them at times when they will pose least risk to cyclists and pedestrians.

Now this is all a bit more complicated than organising an event where cyclists are asked to get into the cab of a lorry. It takes more organisation, political will, money, planning, and time. And there will be those who will say, "Yes, but the infrastructure and planing changes take decades to make a difference, surely we should be doing now all that we can through education to reduce the number of these incidents in the short term?" The answer is that this is what we have been doing, for decades. simultneously with not making the changes that could, by and large, solve the problem for good. Might that be because campaigners have not lobbied consistently or hard enough for those changes, because they have been so distracted by the awareness-raising agenda?

Cyclists keep dying under lorries. How long before we change tack?