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| Latest casualty data from the Department for Transport against long term average |
Earlier this week, the government released its latest road casualty data for the third quarter 2012.
The figures show exactly the same trend we've seen for the last couple of years. Although motor vehicle traffic levels have increased (up 0.2% on 12 months previously), the number of people killed or seriously injured in motor vehicles is decreasing.
Meanwhile, the number of people killed but not in a motor vehicle is increasing month after month.
We are designing danger out of our roads for people but only when they're in motor vehicles. Look at the number of children killed or injured on our roads: The total number of all child road casualties fell 9% between third quarter 2011 and third quarter 2012. But the number of child pedestrians killed or seriously injured jumped 8%.
Pedestrian casualties (adults and children) are up 6% The number of people killed or seriously injured on bikes is up 8%. If you look at the long term trend in the graph above, the picture is blindingly obvious. The trend shows that the number of people killed or seriously injured on bikes is up 25% on the long-term average.
In London, we've seen this tend coming. Ever since 2006, the number of casualties per cycle trip in London has been on the increase. We know this because the London Assembly crunched the numbers to show that the rate of people being killed and seriously injured on London's streets was increasing faster than the number of cycle trips being made (which is also increasing). As the London Assembly pointed out, when bike journeys grew 50% 1995-2010, the risk of cycle casualties actually dropped 50%. The London Assembly report is quietly damning about this: "The Mayor believes the 'safety in numbers' effect will improve cycling safety in London but this is not currently evident". Too true.
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| Tulse Hill in south London. This is probably classified as a 'safe' road for cycling. |
Look at how this road works.
Each lane is just wide enough for the bus. I'd hazard just over 3 metres wide. With massive pavements most of the length of the road and hatchings down the middle. The hatching provides a relatively safe space for pedestrians to cross the road. And the narrow vehicle lanes mean motor traffic can only travel as fast as the vehicle in front. I can see how this road design slows down motor vehicles and, potentially, makes the road safer for people in cars.
Now, the funny thing is that when transport people define 'dangerous' roads, they tend to look at the casualty statistics. In the last five years this short stretch of road has seen 'only' eight cyclist casualties. I've seen countless pieces of correspondence from TfL and from London boroughs that talk about roads like this: "Low number of cyclist casualties on this road therefore equals 'must' be safe for cycling". Or words to that effect.
Safe road for cycling then? Well, no it's not actually.
The lanes are just about wide enough that motor vehicles think they can squeeze past you. It's filled with huge potholes. It's just intimidating. My own guess is that people generally avoid cycling down Tulse Hill if they can because of the way the road brings people on bikes and in cars into dangerously close proximity again and again along its length.
More importantly, a road like this actively stops people from cycling in the first place. For the simple reason that the road just feels horrible to cycle on.
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| Believe it or not, this sort of thing is 'normal' in most countries. Not the sort of roads we get in the UK. We're stuck in the dark ages. Courtesy ibikelondon blog |
The tragedy is that the government will continue to sell us all the message that UK roads are getting safer. Because, looked at in totality, they are. There were 7% fewer fatalities than there were a year ago. But the number of people being seriously injured increased 2% on the previous year. And the people driving that growth in serious road injuries are a) children pedestrians and b) people on bicycles. My own feeling is that the roads aren't getting safer. Perhaps modern car design makes people in cars safer. But the corollary of that is that those 'safer' people are busy making the roads more dangerous for everyone else.
I'll leave with a comment by a newspaper I rarely read. But which got the message absolutely right on this a year ago. And that newspaper is the Daily Mail:
"I think our roads are statistically safer largely because soft targets, particularly child cyclists, have almost entirely retreated from them. But the roads are not really safer. It’s just that people have learned to avoid them unless they themselves go out in armour".
If you want people to cycle and walk, you have to create conditions where they can cycle and walk. And that means making safer networks for people on foot and on bikes. Not only for people in motor vehicles. The government is clearly failing to achieve that.
I suspect another issue with a road like this is that without any traffic in front, cars will be doing 35-40 mph, not 30. The speed then increases the injury when someone is hit. Also, with the growh in 4x4 cars many of which have unnecessary bull bars and bigger higher front ends, how much is front of vehicle design contributing too?
ReplyDeleteAll this is completely in line with the Hertfordshire SMOTS work which shows that the biggest deterrent to kids walking or cycling to school is the fear of cars. Not stranger danger, cars.
The only crumb of comfort in this is the sad prospect of cycling and pedestrian groups being able to campaign to stop the murder of children on our streets as they did in the Netherlands. Given no politician could oppose things to stop children being killed we might ultimately get a change of thinking in the UK, but its so sad we find our selves here.
Adam
We must stop the Child Murder. The only way to do this is to redesign all of our streets to be safe enough for children to walk and cycle on. So let's set aside 10% of our roads budget, work out which are the most dangerous 10% of streets and fix those first by designing out danger for children.
ReplyDeleteThe exclusive use of casualty data is flawed as it ignores issues like people feeling unsafe and not walking and cycling and yes, no casualties!
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that casualty reduction was always based on clusters and patterns and to a certain extent this approach worked. We are now in the situation that the obvious engineering measures have run out of steam, but funding is still based on casualty reduction, often when the statistics are not significant.
We need to be looking at subjective safety now, as well as casualty data, because as your Tulse Hill example shows, it is "safe" as it is no it being used.
TfL funds a lot of borough work (pretty much all in my borough) and we have to play the funding game. Until TfL let's us worry a little bit less on pure numbers and as bit more on making it better and less traffic centric, we are stuck. Oh look, political leadership again!
We've made the cars safer- for car occupants, we've made the roads easier to drive what we haven't done is made the drivers better. The standard of training has barely changed, you get to keep your licence until you are 70 or so, poor drivers are tolerated by the courts. If you want the casualty figures to improve for non-car occupants you'll have to either 1 further separate cars, pedestrians and cyclists or 2 Improve driver training.
ReplyDeleteGavin
I doubt whether changes in road design have done much for the safety of car occupants, but improvements in car design certainly have, at the expense of pedestrians and cyclists. The answer to both is risk compensation.
ReplyDeleteI recall decades ago it was beginning to be said that drivers of Saabs and Volvo cars were involved in more accidents, especially related to drink driving, precisely because the heavily advertised passenger safety measures pioneered by the Swedes were making drivers take greater risks. Oh he irony then when a minicab I was travelling in back then rammed into the back of another car at a junction, right next to a big 48-sheet poster for the new Volvo – complete with safety cage and crumple zones!
In road design, we have seen tight bends or corners on country roads built out to make wider radius turns. For example, 20 years ago on the A283 between Northchapel and Petworth, in Sussex, a tight bend was bypassed by new road, with the old road becoming a layby. All that changes was that the traffic now travels on that road at a measurably faster rate. Drivers risk-conmpensate for the faster road – if car design hadn’t also changed, I dare say that the casualty stats would not have improved.
Of course, risk compensation might be neutralised for the car’s occupants, but not for anyone outside – cyclists, pedestrians and of course occupants of other cars with which our driver might collide. Hardly any surprise that cyclist and pedestrian casualties continue to rise.
And they would have risen faster, were it not for the cyclists and pedestrian’s own version of risk compensation. When the road gets faster and perceptibly more hazardous, the cyclists and pedestrians simply stay away. Perhaps they can find an alternative, safer, route. Otherwise, they either give up and use a car, or stop travelling altogether. Certainly they walk less.
Of course another factor likely to be contributing to the overall reduction of fatalities is better emergency response and treatment. Years ago I remember that the road safety campaigner Mayer Hillman suggested we need a better formula to measure the "danger" of streets, for all these reasons, than just using casualty statistics. He suggested that we should multiply motor vehicle volume by average speed to get the measure of true danger, the quantity that actually needs to be reduced, and I think this might actually be a good starting point, though it clearly can't account for factors like, on Tulse Hill, the inadequate space available for cycling. We perhaps have to factor in typical overtaking distances as well.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of damage done, I reckon casualty figures are probably a lesser element than the exclusion of so many of the population from cycling at all. Roads like the one pictured above are indeed fairly low on casualties among bicycle users, but then so is the M4, and for a similar reason: people are avoiding it. The fact is that many people seem to be averse to taking the bike out altogether. So often I hear colleagues say "ooh, I've got a bike but I never use it - it's too scary". It doesn't seem safe to them, and their experience of the cushioned, quiet, armoured interior of cars has made them disproportionately alarmed by the noise and whoosh of adjacent traffic when on a bike. This, combined with a genuine hike in the intensity of motor traffic, has all but killed off everyday utility cycling in some towns.
ReplyDeleteThe long-term effect is a generation who have not built up a lifetime of cycling knowledge and skills, and who are actually fairly wobbly when they decide to start cycling in later life. Without confidence, the chances of them persisting with the activity are very slim unless they have access to segregated paths. I wonder if the very-confident "forget segregation, all we need are good roads" brigade sometimes fails to imagine what it's like for everyone else. I don't mind cycling on busy A roads if necessary, but I don't expect those colleagues to leap on a bike for the first time in 20 years and do the same...
We look back at horror and wonder at the laid back attidude to car racing during the '70s in which the life expectancy of a racing driver to survive his career was really low.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that in another 40 years people will wonder how crazy we were to allow bikes, cars and lorries to jostle for space on the same stretches of road. Against the context of crazy amounts of modern H & S legislation we are going to look even more inconsistent.
In the meantime, I can't really blame people who ride slowly and carefully on the pavement, tinkering their bells occasionally to alert pedestrians up ahead.
All good stuff.. but!
ReplyDeleteAs a designer of streets (including many cycle schemes) and a cyclist I agree that things COULD be made far safer for vulnerable road users.
However, you are a bit idealistic. It IS a zero sum game in London - the road widths in this country do not match those in Europe and dutch style infrastructure cannot be accomodated without causing massive problems to buses, cars, taxis, freight & removing all parking!
Either:
1. have increased road safety and good cycling conditions, but accept vehicles sitting in long queues for much of the day and have terrible bus journeys (and there are far more bus passengers in London than cyclists).
2. Limit car numbers in the city (popular?)
3. Or, sub standard cycle facilities.
What politicians are going ot vote for 1 or 2?