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Hi-Viz cyclist © Simon MacMichael.jpgMandatory hi-vis and helmets will be considered as part of government cycle safety review
The government’s cycle safety review will not be based on ‘knee jerk reaction’ but on ‘solid evidence’ according to transport minister Jesse Norman. Promising a wide-reaching look at how safety can be improved “for cyclists and other road users in relation to cycling,” he said that a number of measures would be considered, including mandatory hi-vis and helmets.
Launched in response to “a series of high profile incidents involving cyclists” according to the official press release, the government’s cycle safety review will be in two parts.
The first phase will look at whether a new offence equivalent to causing death by careless or dangerous driving should be introduced for cyclists, while the second will take a broad look at cycling road safety issues.
BikeBiz reports that while speaking at the Department for Transport sponsored Cycling + Walking Innovations 2017 conference, Norman revealed the second phase would be launched with a consultation in the new year and would be, “a wider and more embracing look at how safety can be improved for cyclists and other road users in relation to cycling.
“That could be infrastructure, education, signage and other things which could contribute to a successful and effective transition to a world in which walking and cycling are enormous. It’s not going to be based on any knee jerk reaction; it will be based on solid evidence.”
Asked whether measures up for consideration might include mandatory hi-vis or helmets, Norman replied that he didn’t have a personal position on those issues, but that they would be up for debate.
“That is something in relation to the cycle safety review where we will see what the evidence and the submissions say,” he said.
“If you want to have a society where a 12-year-old can get on a bicycle it’s a serious issue as to whether you’re going to mandate hi-vis or helmets and there will be many arguments about whether the safety benefits outweigh or do not outweigh the deterrent effect that might have on people cycling. So we’re going to leave that to the review.”
Nationwide explains why it made cycle helmets compulsory under its travel insurance
Asked whether a national standard for cycle infrastructure might be adopted, he suggested that this “could be addressed in the review when it goes out for public discussion.”
Quite what the government hopes to achieve with this review remains up for debate, with Norman emphasising the importance of making cyclists feel safe, while simultaneously claiming that British roads are among the safest in the world.
“We very much believe cyclists have to feel safe,” he said. “There has to be harmonious interaction between all road users. We have to get over the perception that cycling is somehow unsafe around busy roads when the reality is that we have some of the very safest roads in the world.”
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
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79 comments
Personally, I hate the term 'cyclists'. There are so many different types of cycling, banding them all into one to me is a huge mistake. Why should I, a British Cycling member with insurance, well-serviced bike, helmet, splash of Hi-Vis and lights be dubbed under the same moniker as some hooded tw4t swerving through traffic p1ssing drivers off.
Anyone else feel like they are being banded in with the idiots who happen to be riding a bike ??
Personally, I hate the term 'cyclists'. There are so many different types of cycling, banding them all into one to me is a huge mistake. Why should I, a British Cycling member with insurance, well-serviced bike, helmet, splash of Hi-Vis and lights be dubbed under the same moniker as some hooded tw4t swerving through traffic p1ssing drivers off.
Anyone else feel like they are being banded in with the idiots who happen to be riding a bike ??
Test-send
As much as we dislike the Daily Fail I came across this column by Peter Hitchens while flicking through my mums Sunday read. He pretty much goes against the grain of the average reader
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-5117751/Cycle-helmets-lives-ri...
Would it not be interesting to see how many "dislikes"these irrational comments would attract, if disliking were enabled? Its the same old rubbish that was trotted out to oppose the wearing of seat belts and motorcycle helmets. Do the same pople oppose the legal requirement to have reflectors fitted, or use lights at night? If all cyclists wore helmets and enhanced their visibility voluntarily, there would be no need for a law.
I wear a cycle helmet and hiviz clothing all the time I am in the saddle. It's called "protecting yourself". The hazard could be a motorist, or it could be a pedestrian, or an unleashed dog, or a dog on a retractable lead, or gravel on the road etc. I have been cycling for 60 years and I have never been struck by a motorist. I have, however, fallen off my bike 4 times in the last year alone due to slippery surfaces, any one of which may have caused me serious head injury - so I wear a helmet. I have been overtaken by vehicles thousands of times. Any one of those may have struck me if I had not enhanced my visibility.
I have spent over 30years in the Royal Air Force responsible for explosives safety and bomb disposal. That line of business focuses your mind a damn sight more than cycling! You soon realise 2 things. The first thing to realise is that incidents happen. Most incidents (accidents if you like) are NOT caused by law breakers or irresponsible people - but they DO happen. The second thing is to do whatever is necessary to protect yourself against the consequences.
If you dont wear a helmet or make yourself as visible as possible on the public road then you are only one thing - STUPID? And if you dont make your children do like-wise, then you are plain ignorant.
Tough christmas?
Pete 1999,
I wear a helmet on my 'proper' bike rides, encourage my kids to do so, and have quite possibly avoided serious injury because of wearing one (crash at 50mph), however your logic is wrong.
It's interesting that you put a dangerous career background to justify your comments, it really has no bearing though. If you were in Afghanistan and about to walk across a market Square (cos that's what they do in the film's) to disarm a bomb you'd probably have some kind of helmet, protection against explosion. But would you be sent to do so if the enemy were in situ, attacking from many angles with machine guns and assault rifles, the odd hand grenade. That's what we are dealing with on the roads. The bomb may well be a big head impact, but every day there's thousands of bullets in the form of close passes, left hooks, people jumping red lights, pulling out of junctions. In fact pushing mandatory attire is just going to make your army smaller and justify the actions of your enemy.
Or if that analogy is too much, why aren't are painted hi viz?
Is this like with drivers - everyone thinks that they are above average drivers?
Mind you, I'd probably be classed as a mamil swerving through traffic pissing drivers off. I'd much rather have drivers see me and get annoyed than not see me and be content.
You're right about 'cyclists' being rubbish though - collective responsibility is complete tosh.
I clicked on that and started reading, but it gave me eye cancer.
I think it was the start of the article:
That's exactly the fallacy that cyclists should be addressing - it's not statistically that dangerous. I cycle a lot and have never been killed.
I have fallen off my bike three times and been doored off once, riding for six years. On none of those occasions did my head come anywhere near contact with the ground. I have no faith that a helmet would protect me from being hit by a car. Helmets are warmer than caps, which is the only reason why I wear one at this time of year. Merry Christmas, fungus (is a bogeyman the same as a troll?)
Don't get me wrong I was not trying to say I was above average, just I don't want to be tarred with the same brush as the idiots in bikes out there
Too late! All the drivers I've wound up won't be able to tell the difference between us as I wear a helmet and a reasonable amount of Hi-Vis too.
The way I see it is that I'd rather see an idiot riding a bike than an idiot driving a car. Simple damage limitation.
You aint getting me in High Vis.
The Cycling Silk offers the lawyer's view of this one, and is the clearest explanation I've found of the status quo, and the arguments for and against the legal changes suggested in this proposal ("The first phase will look at whether a new offence equivalent to causing death by careless or dangerous driving should be introduced for cyclists") :
http://thecyclingsilk.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/a-note-on-law-manslaughter-...
I hope he can be invited to comment as part of the review process - in fact perhaps he could submit his article, or even offer his expert opinion to the review? (I'm assuming, as Chris Boardman rightly suggests, there will be an evidence based approach).
and if the rules on gross negligence manslaughter were actually applied then the charge against Charlie alliston should never have occured. his actions were to avoid collision, he braked (admitted by the prosecution), he swerved to avoid collision, he gave an audible warning (as recommended in the HC) and yet the police/CPS saw fit to ignore the rules regarding when it was appropriate (to charge for manslaughter) and fitted him up when it was anything but. In fact his riding did not even meet the wanton and/or Furious charge either.
The worst that Alliston was guilty of according to law and precedence was a Construction and Use breach for not having the correct number of brakes which even if he'd had the extra front brake given the timescale of the last movement back into his path he would not have being able to stop from even the (admitted by the prosecution) wanton and furious 10mph speed just before impact.
The system allowed 'evidence' that did not recreate what happened which swayed the jury to convict, breaching the rules/law yet again... and there is somehow the need to come up with a law which is ignored by police/CPS government by those doing the killing and maiming!
This is just the wrong way round.
These people seem intent on making people slightly more 'car proof', which is impossible, with the equivalent of a burkha ban for cyclists.
Think harder, invest more and make roads bike friendly or provide cycleways or both, they could put us all in clown suits over full body armour covered in flashing lights and there'd probably be just as many smidys.
The Health & Safety Executive's own guidance on Personal Protective Equipment is (and I paraphrase) that you engineer the shit out of risky conditions first, and recognise that PPE is a last resort with serious limitations. Work for a major engineering or construction firm and this will be drilled into you. His non-answers on this simple topic thus far have shown zero understanding of this.
By targeting cyclists, Jesse Norman isn't showing any inclination to understanding the risks involved with current road design and use. He talks about evidence but has completely eschewed evidence in selecting cyclists for his first study, especially as the wider roads study is continually being booted down the motorway. He has chosen to respond to tabloid headlines regarding Alliston rather than research the risks objectively, and he is abrogating his responsibilities as a minister.
If this study does anything other than (diplomatically) call him out for being a prick who plays to the cheap seats it will have been a whitewash. He is already showing himself up as incompetent and biased and I encourage anyone who cares about this to take every opportunity to tell him.
What kind of idiot in any position of authority over a system that directly results in 5 premature deaths daily, chooses the cause of less than 1% of those deaths (and 0% of the 40,000 annual pollution deaths) to investigate first, and even talks about PPE? Jesse fucking Norman. Except it isn't idiocy - these stats will be known to him, and yet he has chosen to pursue resolving the noise around the edges to keep the Daily Heil on side, rather than do anything significant about risks, the spineless toad.
Being cynical (probably appropriate for politicians, especially Tories) one might argue that both Norman and Hammond are simply doing as they've been told by the paymasters. Get cyclists off the roads and straighten the roads out, all to make life easier for driverless car makers, as an alternative to the probably impossible, certainly expensive, task of getting the driverless tech to work properly around cyclists. I suspect the only evidence this lot care about is the evidence provided by their bank managers.
You could well be right.
And, you know what - it isn't Jesse Norman doing what Jesse Norman was always going to do (ie. take the path of least resistance - and thought) that hugely offends me. The current chancellor wanted to end 'the war on the motorist', FFS. Grayling, Norman's boss, doored a cyclist then tried to make out it could have been the cyclist's fault. We know where we are with these twats - like dangerous dogs and kids pulling wheelies, we're an inconvenience that they don't understand but need to 'manage' somehow.
But what really boils my piss is that in using words like 'evidence' and by pretending that this report he's kicked off is worthwhile he's trying to give it a veneer of objective respectability. In reality it's headline-grabbing political bullshit that won't make the roads safer and could kick-start a move to get cyclists off the roads. In this single action he's gone from a wobbly, ultimately harmless, gobshite, to being a dangerous bastard.
It's odious doublespeak.
There's pretty good evidence that cyclists are safer when more people cycle. It therefore follows that cyclists are less safe when the number of cyclists decreases. Norman should know this.
There's pretty good evidence that pushing cyclist PPE reduces cyclist numbers. Norman should know this.
Therefore, pushing PPE reduces numbers which reduces everyone still cycling's safety. Norman should know this. It's his fucking job to. And yet, here he is, toying with the idea of pushing PPE; toying with the idea of reducing cyclist numbers; toying with the idea of making us less safe.
I know I can't speak for others, but a government minister toying with ideas that could make it more likely that I don't make it home one night, because I decided to take the less convenient, healthier, harder, sweatier, greener option of commuting on a bike, highly fucks me off.
As others have said, I suspect that this evidence based review is likely to be far less about making cyclists safer and far more about making the road environment easier for the other road users (and, specifically, for our new driverless overlords).
Worth remembering that CTC (CyclingUK) forcefully opposed the move to require rear lights for cycles just after the '39-'45 war, as this was perhaps the first erosion of a principle that the person driving (or cycling) into the back of another road user at night should have been paying attention to what their headlights were illuminating (cycles were required to have a rear reflector). Deer don't have hi-viz or lights and a few drivers every year will die or be seriously injured when they hit a deer.
I don't wear a helmet having certainly survived one collision because I was not wearing one (I did write off the car though, with the main injuries a chipped vertebra, and a small scar on my backside). There have also been other crashes, where again the absence of a head enlarging limp of foam meant I was able to tuck and roll with my head and upper spine in the naturally protected position provided by a foetal 'ball', and a relaxed body state.
Worryingly I note around 50% of helmet wearers compromising the protection they assume a helmet might provide, by having the straps loose (potential for garrotting) or even unfastened, and at this time of year the helmets are perched atop of thick balaclavas, or woolly hats like a double size burger, vastly increasing the leverage of the crucial C1-C5 vertebra or the force with which the soft facial areas (nose, cheeks, mouth) will be rammed into the road as the peak hits first in a typical face plant crash (especially if the novice rider's typical reaction of putting arms out stiffly in front - and breaking clavicles or bones in the hands or arms fails to stop the head hitting at an angle and moving forwards)
A further detail needs to be the 'accessories' worn. I learned a few year's back of a couple on a tandem, both wearing helmets with ABS visors who face planted in a fall and were lucky not to suffer any loss of sight as the shattered visors had fragments embedding in their faces. The vertical drop test also bears no rational connection with a fall from a moving bike, and somewhere I believe there is a video showing the violent 'kick' to rotate the head backwards (and break the neck of the rider) as a head form connected to a body weighing around 90% more (unlike some standard drop tests?) hits a 'road surface' at an angle with the body then rotating around the head (a very basic mechanical linkage analysis).
Bear in mind too that research in the late 1940's found that the cranium wth its shock absorbing structure of 7 fused plates, and sacrificial, self healing covering of skin and hair (to limit the 'snatch effect' of an oblique impact) displays the refinement of 2.3bn years of evolution to protect the brain in impacts at running speeds (15mph for a 4 minute mile - 20mph for a sprint). The test found that the skull was only at 30% of its impact capacity in a 20mph flat surface impact (such as tripping over when running or running into a tree). Tellingly a helmet us at 260% of its impact capacity (ie well smashed up) in a 20mph impact. Perhaps the best added protection being the traditional bunch of bananas close fitting padded leather racing helmets, or cycling caps in wool or cotton rather than the current offerings.
Chris B is right to press for evidence based objective investigation of crashes, and from this a range of learning points produced. Most fatalities happen when the victim goes under the 8-10Ton axle(s) of a typical bus or truck and 80% of those crashes are with the victim going under the FRONT of the truck or bus. Yet no coroner is noting, as a means to prevent future deaths (a prime outcome for every inquest) that had there been some means to push the victim clear from going under the wheels, perhaps 90% of the crashes where the death has as its primary cause a crush injury under the wheels, that fatality would have been avoided. Trams have lifeguards, fitted for this very purpose - so what stops the fitting of such devices to trucks and buses?
Interesting. Just as the campaign to remove helmet law as a failed policy ramps up where it began in the Australian state of Victoria. I thought brexit was actually about the UK removing itself from the nannying effects of the EU but the UK seems to be good enough at it on its own. Over regulatory policies such as this suggest our societies are in a state of decline. I thought the English really wanted to pick themselves up again, but alas.
If there's one ban that will save more lives than anything else on the road it would be to ban cars.
Too true, but Is suspect that it isn't the kind of evidence Mr Norman will be seeking.
Wearing hiv-viz and having lots of lights does not stop you being run over by arseholes.
I almost got wiped out on a roundabout by some *&%£. Another driver stopped and checked on my wellbeing and told me 'they cut me up at the last roundabout'.
Not to mention the psychos who execute a left hook.
Being in a car doesn't stop twunts having a pop at you in their own metal box (unless you're in an Audis obvs), the difference is that the result on a bike is likely to be more bloody. Twats are twats, and they don't like it up 'em.
my first thought of mandatory hi-vis is suck my nut, helmet wise kinda yeah and no, even though a helmet might have saved my head being stuffed with glue and steristrips, but just let people have the choice, and why put the blaim on cyclists for getting hit by cars, why not just put some responsability on drivers to be aware of other road users, instead of being self entitled a**ses who think the world revolves around them.
I'm yet to see evidence that Jesse Norman should be set loose with his own twitter account, never mind have any ministerial clout.
What a dire shower of shit this lot is.
Whilst I agree with the sentiment of what is being said in these comments, I do hope it will not deter cyclists from wearing helmets and hi vis. The harsh reality is drivers do make mistakes, accidents happen and cyclists are vulnerable. Lights, hi vis and helmets all help to reduce the likelihood and seriousness of such accidents. As a survivor of such an accident ( I was wearing hi viz, a helmet,my lights were on), I was less concerned about the injustice of being hit by a driver who failed to see me and more about the damage to my body. I was knocked out and concussed amongst other injuries. I can only thank my helemt for preventing a more serious head injury.
Of course I support safer roads, harsher sentencing of drivers to act as a deterrent, a revised driving test etc, but I also urge any cyclist to wear helmet, hi vis and have good lights. Should this be mandatory? evidence would suggest not. Should it be encourgaed through public funding and policy. Absolutely.
My understanding is that lights are mandatory for when they are needed and reflectors equally. The biggest factor for making cycling on the road safer is better driving.
END.
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