As mentioned recently, cities around the world are finally accepting the reality that fewer cars and more bicycles is a workable solution. But encouraging bicycle use and providing ride sharing bikes is not enough. There has to be somewhere to ride them, and most cities were poorly planned, built only for 4+ wheeled vehicles when they should have been built for everyone.
Dr. Ian Gerrard of Bath University did a study in 2018 on driver behaviour. He found that no matter what cyclists wore, from beginning to advanced riders, including a vest that told drivers the cyclist was recording video, drivers would endanger cyclists by driving illegally, less than the 1.5 metres required by law in the UK. Many passed as close as 10 cm (if you don’t know how many inches that is, learn metric).
So when someone tells a cyclist “You should wear / should have worn _______”, they’re shifting blame away from toxic car drivers (from now on called cagers) and onto cyclists. How odd, this sounds reminiscent of how society blames women for what they wear after being assaulted.
Cyclists cannot stop drivers overtaking dangerously, research study suggests
A new study from the University of Bath and Brunel University suggests that no matter what a cyclist wears, 1-2% of drivers pass dangerously close to overtake.
This suggests there is little a rider can do, by altering their outfit or donning a high-visibility jacket, to prevent the most dangerous overtakes from happening. Instead, the researchers suggest, if we want to make cyclists safer, it is our roads, or driver behaviour, that need to change.
The study set out to ask whether drivers passing a cyclist responded to how experienced the cyclist looked. It was expected that drivers would give more space to a rider who seemed inexperienced and less space to a rider who looked highly skilled.
[. . .]
The researchers found that, while the vest that mentioned video-recording showed a small increase in the average amount of space drivers left, there was no difference between the outfits in the most dangerous overtakes, where motorists passed within 50 cm of the rider. Whatever was worn, around 1-2% of motorists overtook within this extremely close zone.
Cycle Outfits During the study, the Dr Ian Garrard wore different outfits at random to see what effect it would have on driving habits.
Dr Ian Walker from our Department of Psychology, who led the project and analysed the data, said: “Many people have theories to say that cyclists can make themselves safer if they wear this or that. Our study suggests that, no matter what you wear, it will do nothing to prevent a small minority of people from getting dangerously close when they overtake you.
“This means the solution to stopping cyclists being hurt by overtaking vehicles has to lie outside the cyclist. We can’t make cycling safer by telling cyclists what they should wear. Rather, we should be creating safer spaces for cycling – perhaps by building high-quality separate cycle paths, by encouraging gentler roads with less stop-start traffic, or by making drivers more aware of how it feels to cycle on our roads and the consequences of impatient overtaking.”
This proves one thing I’ve always known: cagers know you’re there, whether cyclist or motorcyclist. They don’t value your life nor care about your safety. Their attitude is that anyone not in a 4+ wheel vehicle has no right to be on or cross the road.
If cagers don’t want cyclists on the road, then why aren’t they agreeing to taxes that will build and improve cycling infrastructure? Why aren’t they against closure of lanes and replacement with protected cycling paths? Instead, they are demanding – and getting more wasteful road space.
