On Civil Rights

Q. How do you turn educated, affluent, young, white males into a downtrodden minority group?

A. Give them all bicycles.

NB I promise to not use the phrase "I have a dream" anywhere in this post....other than just there of course. Not least because it would seem rather bad form to have a dream that calls for segregation of the minority.

Before I begin and due to the usual sensitivities that we must take account of I want to say I am not directly likening cycling to the Civil Rights movement, but there are similarities it might be useful to explore.

First up, what is a minority in the political sense, for speed we'll turn to Wikipedia which quotes 

Feagin (1984) states that a minority group has five characteristics: (1) suffering discrimination and subordination, (2) physical and/or cultural traits that set them apart, and which are disapproved by the dominant group, (3) a shared sense of collective identity and common burdens, (4) socially shared rules about who belongs and who does not determine minority status, and (5) tendency to marry within the group.

So how does cycling stack up against those criteria?

1. Cyclists have nominal equality before the law, although I would be interested to learn if they really do receive equal protection and redress. However cyclists definitely have to play a subordinate role to the motor vehicle if for no other reason than their sheer vulnerability and they have to contend with persistent intimidation.
2. Cultural traits...which are disapproved of by the dominant group, simply being on a bicycle seems enough to get a lot of drivers' backs up.
3. Yes.
4. Ride a bike? You're in.
5. I don't believe there are enough female cyclists to go round, but if one were interested it would certainly count in her favour.

So we're definitely in the ballpark. Add to all that the 100+ cyclists killed every year and the thousands injured due to deliberate acts of violence, or, more commonly, drivers not giving a crap, and the issue becomes rather more serious.

Anecdotally, a cycling buddy was knocked off his bike a year ago, he was on our local A-road minding his own business when some white van man took an exception to him. The van went to overtake him and swerved into the side of him, he kept his balance and a torrent of abuse was yelled from the window of the van. White van man came back for another go and this time did a proper job. Buddy was thrown from the bike and landed face first on the tarmac his helmet smashed to pieces as did several of the bones in his face. The van driver was convicted of dangerous driving and warned to go home and prepare for a custodial sentence, he did a bit of begging though and it was reduced to 12 month ban, has to pass an anger management course before he can reapply for a provisional licence. Fined £1200, 140hrs community service.

Then just a week ago a friend of a friend was riding along when somebody lent out of a passing car window, pushed him off his bike and into a ditch.

I can't imagine that either of these situations would have ended in violence if the victim was walking, driving or even riding a scooter.

The one advantage the cycling fraternity has going for it though is its demographic. I'm in a not so great part of Liverpool, but even here the majority of cyclists fit in to the white, male, young-middle aged, educated and affluent categories. The greater portion of my commuting buddies comprises 4 doctors and a surgeon, all white, one female. Cycling is also quite Londoncentric and on 'our side' we have lots of city boys, journalists, politicians, a Lord, even Rupert Murdoch for christ's sake! Seriously, if this group of people can't get something done the next step must be to employ the Iraqi Information Minister to do our PR.

Back in the 70s the Dutch went through the era of protesting and campaigning for safer streets, a battle they largely won, watch this wonderful video brought to you via BicycleDutch

Notice also the campaign posters

There's a similar theme here

Through direct action, civil disobedience and plain old making a racket they got the best cycling infrastructure in the world. Largely segregated from motor traffic and with laws to add weight, strict liability and priority for traffic going straight on. The Civil Rights movement using similar tactics won its early battles and secured an amendment to the US constitution

How might the UK's battle be won? Feel free to make your own suggestions in the comments. While you think, here are a few of mine, I'm sure you'll do much better...

• A cyclists' strike - all cyclists in London hang up their helmets for a day and get on the tube. Add more overcrowding to an overcrowded network. Alternatively, anyone who can drives to work, adding more congestion. Give people a taste of how bad it could be if nobody bothered to cycle.
• A nationwide cycle to work day - if your company could be persuaded, have them support a cycle to work day whereby anyone who cycles to work on that day gets breakfast bought for them.
• Much of the Dutch protest was an appeal to the heart to stop the deaths of children. Along similar lines and with permission from families, a campaign of posters, flyers or balloon releases with details and photos of people killed while cycling.
  

  
  

What if the HSE ran the DfT? part II

In the previous article I looked at the hierarchy of risk control and the sorts of things the HSE might expect to be considered when attempting to reduce risks for cyclists.

In this section we are going to get rather cold hearted I'm afraid. If we are to continue imagining how the HSE might approach the topic of road safety then we must familiarise ourselves with one of the basic characteristics of their method, 'reasonably practicable'.

We would like to prevent all road deaths however it would not be practicable to do so. You would either

• Have to ban all motorised transport.
• Spend an incredibly huge amount of money to prevent as many as possible.

The plain fact of the matter is that society doesn't value a life high enough to justify the amount of spending that would be required. When we say value, we mean just that, cold hard cash, a few years ago the HSE did some research and found that we're willing to spend just over £1m to prevent a fatality. Add in the other costs such as emergency services and loss of output and the figure we arrive at is £1,778,000 per non-motorway fatality. The cost of serious injuries is £208,000 and the cost of slight injuries is £22,000. These figures are known as the Value of Prevention of Fatality/Accident. It's a tricky concept, the HSE describes it as...

VPF is often misunderstood to mean that a value is being placed on a life. This is not the case. It is simply another way of saying what people are prepared to pay to secure a certain averaged risk reduction. A VPF of £1,000,000 corresponds to a reduction in risk of one in a hundred thousand being worth about £10 to an average individual. VPF therefore, is not to be confused with the value society, or the courts, might put on the life of a real person or the compensation appropriate to its loss

This spreadsheet kindly tells us how many cyclists are injured. Multiply it all together and the figure we arrive at is £1,067,746,000 quite a large number. I'm willing to agree that approximating a true VPA/VPF figure is very difficult, so if we strip out the guesstimated part for a minute leaving only the actual costs of cycling accidents we get the figure £292,849,372. Of course government doesn't bear all the costs of an accident but eventually 45% of everything flows through the government's coffers, which would be £131m of our £292m. So depending on which figures you choose it would be considered reasonably practicable to spend between £131m and £1.067bn on cycling infrastructure.

Alternatively the HSE might say an amount proportional to the quantity of cycling should be spent, this article says £13.4bn was spent on roads and we know that cyclists account for 1% of distance travelled which means spending should be £134m (remarkably similar to the figure of £131m above). However, the government is trying to encourage cycling so we might expect them to spend a disproportionately high amount on cycling. Rather than distance though we could use a time spent travelling equivalence, in the previous article I used 12mph average speed for bicycles and 30mph for cars, both guesstimates, but it bumps the spending requirement up to £335m, kind of in the ballpark of the £292m mentioned earlier.

Even the HSE might blanche at spending £1bn per year on cycle infrastructure but a lower bound of £130m up to £300m seems reasonable, or indeed, reasonably practicable.When you consider that an accident is money down the drain year after year, but infrastructure spending keeps giving back, year after year and that what is good for cyclist will also be good for pedestrians to an extent, then the figures look even better.

What if the HSE ran the DfT?

As someone who had some H&S training and responsibilities in a prior life I would like to apply some of that thinking to the cyclesafe debate.

The Health & Safety at Work Act 1974 (HASWA) sets out some basics, Wikipedia sumarises them pretty well...

Duties of Employers

• Provision and maintenance of plant and systems of work that are, so far as is reasonably practicable, safe and without risks to health;
• Arrangements for ensuring, so far as is reasonably practicable, safety and absence of risks to health in connection with the use, handling, storage and transport of articles and substances;
• Provision of such information, instruction, training and supervision as is necessary to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety at work of his employees;
• So far as is reasonably practicable as regards any place of work under the employer’s control, the maintenance of it in a condition that is safe and without risks to health and the provision and maintenance of means of access to and egress from it that are safe and without such risks;
• Provision and maintenance of a working environment for his employees that is, so far as is reasonably practicable, safe, without risks to health, and adequate as regards facilities and arrangements for their welfare at work.

Duties of Employees

• Take reasonable care for the health and safety of him/herself and of other persons who may be affected by his/her acts or omissions at work; and
• Co-operate with employers or other persons so far as is necessary to enable them to perform their duties or requirements under the Act.

I hope that's fairly clear. For the purposes of comparison the employers is the authority in charge of the highway and the employee the user of the highway.

So the authority has to ensure the design, construction and maintenance of the highway is safe and the employee has to use it responsibly.

The next thing we would need to do is undertake a risk assessment. We know that ~3000 people die on the roads each year but it would be useful to know the rate at which they die to help us to know where to allocate resources.

This tells us how many deaths per billion vehicle miles, but due to greatly different average speeds it's not that helpful so by using some guesstimated average speeds I've converted it to an average based on time exposed to danger

• Pedestrians - 37 per billion miles at 3mph = 111 per billion hours
• Cyclists - 36 per billion miles at 12mph = 433 per billion hours
• Motorists - 3 per billion miles at 30mph = 90 per billion hours

From this we see that cyclists are the most at risk of the main different types of road user (this is comparative data, I'm not saying cycling is dangerous). We might then decide that protecting cyclists should be given a proportionately higher priority due to this higher risk.

Next we'd go on to look at how we might reduce the risk to cyclists for this we would turn to the hierarchy of risk control

The beady eyed amongst you might notice (with a wry grin) right away that PPE is at the bottom of the hierarchy, due to it's ineffectiveness and reliance on mitigation rather than prevention.

Let's briefly run down the hierarchy and try and apply its teachings to the public highway

Elimination
I don't think it is either desirable or practical to eliminate all motor vehicles from the highway but we could certainly eliminate some journeys, close off more roads from motorised traffic or even reduce available parking spaces. Alternatively it could mean the elimination of cohabitation, by providing roads for non-motorised vehicles we eliminate the hazard, we could call these cycle lanes!

Substitution

Through a system of positive and negative incentives people can be persuaded to change their mode of transport. A very simple example would be the tax system as money talks better than most incentives. 

• A positive incentive might be an incentive for using cycles while commuting as I have discussed previously
• A negative incentive might be an increase to the marginal cost of motoring by scrapping VED and applying the cost to fuel duty, this would raise the cost of a litre of fuel by 10p

I don't think it would make a huge difference but it would have an effect.


Engineering
This is probably where most of the work can be done, cycle lanes, redesigning junctions, traffic flows, traffic lights, good engineering solutions won't let people make mistakes. From the HSE's guidance

Separate the hazard ... by methods such as enclosing or guarding dangerous items of machinery/equipment. Give priority to measures which protect collectively over individual measures.

There we find something the HSE is very keen on collective protection, it's good because it is usually fit and forget, if you want to protect people working at height you fit safety nets rather than relying on individuals to use their fall restraint harnesses correctly. Similarly, you build a segregated cycle lane rather than relying on drivers not to hit cyclists and pedestrians.

Administrative & Behavioural
Begin with training, tell people how they need to behave, provide laws and regulations as a framework, then provide supervision and discipline. This comes towards the ineffectual end of the hierarchy because it is largely self policing, drivers aren't constantly supervised so we have to trust them to behave well.

Personal Protective Equipment
At the very bottom of the hierarchy is the thing so many people seem to think is the answer to cycling casualties. Here's what the HSE have to say about PPE 

Only after all the previous measures have been tried and found ineffective in controlling risks to a reasonably practicable level, must personal protective equipment (PPE) be used.

The two types of PPE associated with cycling are

1. Hi viz clothing. The need for hi viz clothing just proves all the other parts of the hierarchy have failed. The risk has not been eliminated, substituted or engineered away, the cyclist is still placed in a risky area, and administrative solutions have failed because drivers don't concentrate enough to see a cyclist not wearing hi viz.
2. Helmets. Anyone who suggests helmets are the primary way to prevent cyclist injuries has obviously never had their granny tell them prevention is better than cure. As a cyclist I'd rather not get hit in the first place than rely on a helmet to protect me. Unfortunately, because the risk hierarchy is almost never implemented by road designers, I do have to rely on one.

The other side to this is what the HSE calls reasonably practicable, would it be reasonable to spend X to prevent Y. Would it be reasonable to spend £1m to redesign a junction to prevent 1 cyclist death? I'll look at that next time.

Edit: Part II available here

Cyclesafe debate - Hi viz and Helmets

I didn't have the opportunity to watch today's debate on cycling safety, but it is available online now, so far I have made do with reading The Times' live blog of it. It seems like a good show all round.

The best quote I have read so far is

"Wouldn't it be great if you didn't *have* to wear all this safety clobber, and you could just go out your front door, jump on your bike and go. Wouldn't that get more people cycling, if it were just safe to do so?"

Which pretty much sums up the entire thing. I shouldn't have to dress like a twat because someone else can't be arsed to look where they are going. Hi viz and helmets is not a solution, it's what you have to resort to when you don't have a solution. Just ask any Health & Safety professional, personal protective equipment is at the bottom of the risk control hierarchy and should only be implemented when no other solution can be found.

I'm sure everyone has their own ideas of ways of improving things and what they would put in their own cycling manifesto and if I could pick one thing that I've not heard much about that I would include it would be....

1. The proposed cycling commissioner would have to approve every road being built and every junction being redesigned and that every junction being redesigned must include a "Dutch" level of cycle provision whenever possible.

If they have to redesign the junction anyway it's not going to cost much more to lay a few extra kerbstones or red tarmac to segregate cyclists and motorists. That way we wouldn't have to put up with substandard proposals such as the recent example from Liverpool.

Cycling while Pregnant

 Not something I'm ever likely to do I admit, I particularly like this...

I also expected that at some point I just wouldn’t want to bike anymore, but as my belly grew it became much more comfortable to bike than walk.

via Girls and Bicycles


I've never really thought about it along those lines, but for many people who have trouble walking, cycling can be a means of getting about normally. I know on the occasions I've had back or leg muscle injuries it has rarely stopped me cycling even when I could barely stand up straight to get on the bike.

Tax Incentives for Cyclists

The UK has the Cycle to Work Scheme which I have used twice now to purchase bikes, keeping about £900 out of the grasping hands of the tax man and in my pocket. However as with so many things velo related our near neighbours have taken it a step further, the Netherlands and Belgium in particular give tax relief on cycling to work

Netherlands

Bicycles - The employer is allowed to provide a tax free payment for commuting by bike of again €0.18/km (23 US cents). Employers are also allowed to provide employees with a new bike, but only once every three years. The value of this bicycle is treated as income, but if ite is used for commuting, the value of the bike is fixed at €68 ($US89) for tax purposes. This applies to bikes up to a maximum value of €749 ($US976). Employers may also providebike accessories (e.g. maintenance, clothing locks etc.), this is tax free up to a value of €250 ($US326).

 Tax treatment of employer commuting support: an international review

Belgium 

In Belgium, companies and public organisations are likewise allowed to pay their employees when cycling to work with an amount of 0.20 € per kilometre per day (no more than 15 kilometres a day). The supplement is tax free for the employees and the employers get tax credit for the expense.

Tax incentives for bike commuting

Commuting distances
We can see on table 7 that 20% of commutes are under 2 miles and 46% are under 5 miles. Of those 12% of car commutes are under 2 miles and 40% of car commutes are under 5 miles.
Commuting and business travel factsheet tables – April 2011 (XLS – 211 KB)

Table 11 says average occupancy is 1.2, so many people could change modes without affecting travel partners.

We'll go for a middle ground of 3 miles because it is roughly the length of my commute. Cycling 3 miles is achievable for most people I reckon. 5 miles is perfectly doable by many. At these sort of distances people are probably travelling on 20/30/40mph roads, a fair bit of stopping and starting, a three mile commute might take 7 minutes by car or up to 14 minutes by bike. It might be 100% longer, but the nominal difference is only 7 minutes.

The marginal cost of the commute by car is petrol + depreciation due to increased mileage + some wear and tear, nicely estimated here. I think due to higher costs of motoring in the UK than US we will convert he numbers to pence without adjusting for exchange rate. So marginal cost per mile is £0.23. 3 miles, twice a day for 222 days a year = £306

Belgium's tax incentive of  0.20 € per kilometre equals £0.27 per mile = £360

So the toal incentive is equal to £666 per year, less £100 for a pair of tyres and a service.

I wonder how many would change mode for £566 per year?

Giving up your car

I have a confession to make. I'm a petrolhead, and not just a little one, I can bore the hell out of you with facts like Lancia Deltas used the same indicator stalks as Ferrari F40s. C'était un rendez-vous is faked and I can prove it. And you should never, ever turn off the traction control in a Smart car on a wet roundabout.

It all started when I was about 8, one lazy Sunday morning I was up early and watched some foreign bloke win a race in a bright yellow car, his name was Senna and the car was a Lotus.

A few years later my heart was broken when he died one terrible weekend in Italy.

But I still loved Formula One, I even had another dead hero, Bernd Rosemeyer, he died in 1938 in Germany

Throughout this time I was still too young to drive myself and so like most young chaps I had a bike. I had several in fact. I loved them, I rode them everywhere. I rode them right up to the day before I took possession of my first car. My dad was a bit of a cyclist and every July we watched the TdF highlights of an evening. Alongside my poster of Senna I had one of a Peugeot Triathlon and watching Greg Lemond power through Paris like a locomotive was one of the most exciting moments ever.

Eventually though when I was old enough I passed my driving test, bought a car and from that day cycling took a back seat for a few years, it never left entirely but was definitely overshadowed.

Then, when I was old enough I bought my dream car, well, of all my dream cars, the only one I am ever likely to be able to afford, a Lotus Elise. What a beauty, what a car! The noise of the sports exhaust, the exquisite balance and handling.

Such a shame that there is almost nowhere to enjoy it and so it spent most of its time in the garage, usually just coming out for a cruise around town. Only once or twice did I ever really experience its wonders on a B-road. It didn't take long for the realisation to set in. Too much car in too small a country. Too expensive, too frustrating, too likely to end up in court or a grave. She sold very quickly, to a man from Belgium who had once taken part in LeMans.

And I bought this.

At this point I had already been cycling again for a few years and i picked up this CX as a commuter bike, a job it does very well (note to self, buy some mudguards).

The moral of the tale? I'm a cyclist, I love cycling and bicycles but I also love cars, fast cars, on the ragged edge, I think I'll buy a go-kart. I have no kids and live 6 miles from work, perhaps giving up my car was easy because of my circumstances. Before I did it I was sure I would have to replace it pretty quickly, but I just never got around to it. Now the idea of dropping several grand on an item I have very little need for that would also severely increase my exposure to liability, seems stupid at best. Giving up motoring has been liberating, no bills, no responsibility, pumping up for the day with a brisk ride in to work and winding down with a thoughtful ride home. Life just seems better.