Bicycle safety

Bike slalom at bottom of ramp, intended to discourage speeding out into open road

Bicycle with Child safety seat

Bicycle safety is the use of practices designed to reduce risk associated with cycling. Some of this subject matter is hotly debated: for example, the discussions as to whether bicycle helmets or cyclepaths really deliver improved safety. The merits of obeying the rules of the road including the use of bicycle lighting at night are less controversial.

Bicycle crashes

According to a Department for Transport reports show that cyclists in the United Kingdom have a higher killed and serious injury rate per million vehicle kilometres, which is half of the rate for motorcyclists and eight times the rate for motorists. ^[1]

The first recorded bicycle accident is probably a collision in 1842, reportedly between Kirkpatrick McMillan, an early rider of the velocipede, and a young girl in Glasgow. The report, however, is vague and the identification disputed.^{[citation needed]}

Causes of crashes vary according to local conditions. A study conducted in 2000 by the Institute for Road Safety Research in the Netherlands found that single bicycle accidents accounted for 47% of all bicycle accidents, collisions with obstacles and animals accounted for 12%, and collisions with other road users accounted for 40%, with the remaining 1% having unknown or unclassified cause.^{[citation needed]}

Even minor bicycle accidents not involving hospitalisation can cause important costs to the cyclist and to society. The Belgian SHAPES project has recently estimated the cost at 12 €-cent per kilometer cycled.^[2]

Defining safety

A cyclist who is hit by a car is more likely to be killed than one who just falls off.^[3]

As long ago as the early 1930s there were efforts to clear cyclists off the roads to make way for private cars, then largely a preserve of the elite. These were successful in Germany, then an authoritarian regime, and spread during the war to German-occupied countries such as the Netherlands where civilian motor transport was also crippled by fuel rationing, but was resisted in other countries.^{[citation needed]}

During the mid-part of the twentieth century, the traffic engineering response to the increased use of motor vehicles in the United Kingdom, as in the rest of the industrialised world, was to look for solutions which not only eased the passage of traffic through the streets, but which also protected vulnerable road users from the dangers of the motor car.^[4] In the 1940s, an influential proponent of this ideology was Herbert Alker Tripp, an assistant commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police.^[4] Tripp argued in his book Town Planning and Road Traffic that: "If we could segregate pedestrians completely from the wheeled traffic, we could of course abolish pedestrian casualties".^[5]

This philosophy was also pursued by Colin Buchanan, his 1963 report for the UK Government Traffic in Towns, defined future government policy^[4] until the end of the century. Buchanan himself knew that segregation had not been proven to work in the case of cyclists, he famously wrote in his 1958 book Mixed Blessing "The meagre efforts made to separate cyclists from motor traffic have failed, tracks are inadequate, the problem of treating them at junctions and intersections is completely unsolved, and the attitude of the cyclists themselves to these admittedly unsatisfactory tracks has not been as helpful as it might have been".^[6]

Primary safety

The state of knowledge regarding primary safety has advanced significantly through programmes such as Effective Cycling and the development of Britain's new National Standards for cycle training. In addition to technical improvements in brakes, tyres and bicycle construction generally (for example, it is now rare for a chain to snap and throw the rider when accelerating away from a stop), there are well-understood behavioural models which actively manage the risk posed by others.

Cycling experts such as the UK's John Franklin emphasise the importance of assertive cycling and good road positioning. Franklin advocates the use of road positions that will give cyclists a good view of the road, that will make cyclists visible to other road-users, and will discourage risky behaviour by other road-users; he often advocates the use of a centre-of-lane 'primary riding position' when negotiating hazards.^[7]

Rural safety

Direct rear impacts with cyclists are a more prominent collision type in arterial/rural road type situations. When they occur in such circumstances they are also associated with significantly increased risk of fatality. Data collated by the OECD indicates that rural locations account for 35% or more of cycling fatalities in Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, and Spain.^[8]

Hard shoulders

Main article: Shoulder (road)

The use of appropriately designed segregated space on arterial or interurban routes appears to be associated with reductions in overall risk. In Ireland, the provision of hard shoulders on interurban routes in the 1970s reportedly resulted in a 50% decrease in accidents.^[9] It is reported that the Danes have also found that separate cycle tracks lead to a reduction in rural collisions.^[10]

See also

• Bicycle-friendly
• Bicycle helmets by country
• Bicycle Safety Camp
• Bikers Against Drunk Drivers
• Hazards of outdoor activities
• Safety in numbers
• Vehicular cycling

References

1. ^ "Motorcyclists have an especially poor safety record when compared to other road user groups. Their killed and serious injury (KSI) rate in the UK, per million vehicle kilometres, is approximately twice that of pedal cyclists and over 16 times that of car drivers and passengers.". Road Safety Research Report No. 54. In-depth Study of Motorcycle Accidents
2. ^ Aertsens et al. Commuting by bike in Belgium, the costs of minor accidents. Accident Analysis & Prevention, Volume 42, Issue 6, November 2010, Pages 2149-2157.
3. ^ Davis R "Death on the Streets:Cars and the Mythology of Road Safety." Leading Edge 1993
4. ^ ^{a b c} "The cost of bad design". The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). 2006. http://www.cabe.org.uk/AssetLibrary/8125.pdf. 
5. ^ H.A. Tripp (1942). Town Planning and Road Traffic. E. Arnold. 
6. ^ Colin Buchanan (1958). Mixed Blessing. L Hill. 
7. ^ Franklin, J. (2007). Cyclecraft, 4th ed. Norwich: TSO
8. ^ Figure IV.7 Pedestrian and cyclist accidents by road type. RS7:Safety of Vulnerable Road Users, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, August 1998
9. ^ The bicycle, a study of efficiency usage and safety., D.F. Moore, An Foras Forbatha, Dublin 1975
10. ^ Collection of Cycle Concepts, Danish Roads Directorate, Copenhagen, 2000

External links

• How to reduce the odds of a collision with other vehicle operators
• Navigating safely through a highway construction project
• Safety Quiz - Is Cycling as dangerous as we think it is?
• Is Bicycling Safe? - If you follow the rules of the road and ride carefully, cycling is actually safer than driving.
• Bike-Boxes at Traffic-Intersections in Portland Oregon, USA
• US Consumer Product Safety Commission Bicycle Guidelines
• The Belgian SHAPES project on commuter cycling