The psychology of cycling safety

The Dutch bicycle manufacturer Vanmoof has reduced delivery damage to its bikes by up to 80 per cent by printing the image of a flat-screen TV on its boxes.

More than simply good lateral thinking, it hints at the psychology of cycling safety that’s at play on our roads.

Drivers pass closer when overtaking cyclists wearing helmets than when overtaking bare-headed cyclists, increasing the risk of a collision, found Dr Ian Walker, a traffic psychologist from the University of Bath. He used a bicycle fitted with a computer and an ultrasonic distance sensor to record data from over 2,500 overtaking motorists in Salisbury and Bristol.

He found that drivers were as much as twice as likely to get particularly close to the bicycle when he was wearing the helmet. Across the board, drivers passed an average of 8.5 cm closer with the helmet than without.

Dr Walker suggests the reason drivers give less room to cyclists wearing helmets is down to how cyclists are perceived as a group.

“We know from research that many drivers see cyclists as a separate subculture, to which they don’t belong. As a result, they hold stereotyped ideas about cyclists, often judging all riders by the yardstick of the Lycra-clad street-warrior. This may lead drivers to believe cyclists with helmets are more serious, experienced and predictable than those without. The idea that helmeted cyclists are more experienced and less likely to do something unexpected would explain why drivers leave less space when passing.”

If the fragility of a flat-screen TV encourages couriers to handle a box with more care, it seems the more vulnerable a cyclist appears, the more care is taken by a passing motorist.

Perhaps we should all be carrying a flat-screen TV monitor on our luggage racks.

So ingrained in our everyday day existence is a car culture, that most of us simply go along with the inverted hierarchy that sees pedestrians and cyclists enjoy the fewest rights on the road. Much has been written about the psychology that upholds this status quo. In his 1947 study of the ‘road deaths problem’, Murder Most Foul, former Chairman of the Pedestrians’ Association JS Dean’s asserts that roads are only dangerous by virtue of being filled with heavy, fast-moving motor vehicles, and consequently the greatest burden of responsibility for avoiding crashes, deaths and injury on the roads should lie with the motorist.

So it seems perverse that, to this day, road safety education concentrates not on the drivers of vehicles, but on those they have the potential to kill. Dean illustrated how placing responsibility for road danger on pedestrians and cyclists might lead, by stealth, to the placing of culpability on those groups – Murder Most Foul is a tirade against the placing of responsibility for road accidents on children.

As Dave Horton argues in his excellent article, Fear of Cycling, the dominant assumptions on which British road safety was originally based remain in place.

An onus on road safety rather than road danger reduction, a weak legal framework and under-funded road traffic law enforcement are just some of the things that foster a sense of invulnerability amongst car drivers. If the resulting inequality is to be redressed it must be challenged at every level and in every way.

The ethical choice

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