The Lothian Cycle Campaign

FOR YOUR DIARY

See Diary in Spokes 81 and Spokesworker 04.03.02, plus...

Mar 27 Cycle Tourism Forum Sustrans day conference, Glasgow. Free. 0131.554.1795

Apr 8 Sustainable Transport Debate Organised by transport professional bodies, open to all. European Room, City Chambers, Edinburgh. 17.30-20.30. info: alice.mcglone@ukgateway.net

Apr 23 In Town Without My Car Scottish planning day (free) for the September 22 event (see below). The national ITWMC coordinator, Richard Evans, is running this workshop/planning day. If you can get involved, please go along - and ask your local council to participate also. Contact - below - see Sep 22.

Apr 27 Cycle Campaign Network conference Dorchester. Spokes normally will pay travel for one active member (eg from Planning or Resources Group, or other organiser) to attend.

Apr 28 Dundee family cycle fun day Selection of try-out bikes, including emphasis on people with special needs. Helpers also needed. More info:01382 434739 gordon.quinton@dundeecity.gov.uk.

May 18 Spokes Summer Mailout provisional date. Usual helpers will be notified nearer the time, or get in touch if you can help with enveloping and delivery of a pile of envelopes.

June 15-23 BikeWeek theme Bike2Work. Full details and registration at www.bikeweek.org.uk. See also www.bike2work.info. Locally includes...

June 13(???) Gyle Bike Breakfast Symondsmark@hotmail.com or Mark Symonds, 552.2529.

June 16 BIKEFEST There will now be a Meadows Edinburgh Bikefest, despite earlier uncertainty. For info, or to help, contact Callum MacDonald 538.0148 callum@bikefest.org.uk. More helpers/ ideas are needed, to create a truly cosmic event. And for the same day's Glasgow BikeFest see the draft events programme now at www.scottishcycling.co.uk/events/gcf/gcf2002/programme.html.

June 19 Spokes City Chambers Annual Bike Breakfast Jackie 664.0526. Please get in touch if you can help on the day or in advance. We especially need other organisations who would like to have an interesting bike/transport-related stall at the breakfast. A good attendance of cyclists is guaranteed for a 2-hour session!

June 30 Kids Fun Family bike ride Saughton<->Cramond, sponsored for Children 1^st. Adam Quin 444.3000 ext 5035.

mid July (start) Ecotopia Bike Tour 2002 Annual eco/social-justice ride, this year from Dover to EYFA Ecotopia gathering in Ireland. Info: biketour@online.ie or Ben Diss, 16(B) Cherwell St, Oxford OX4. See also www.eyfa.org - not sure if covers the ride.

Sep 15 Pedal for Scotland Annual sponsored ride Glasgow-Edinburgh. Sponsored for Barnardos and Children 1^st. Info: 0131 657 4393 www.pedalforscotland.org.

Sep 22 In Town Without my Car New name for European Car-Free Day. At last the UK government is also giving support! What about the Scottish Executive? - and will Edinburgh and the Lothians councils take part this year? More info: www.itwmc.gov. Richard Evans 020 8946 0912. See also 23 April.

SMALL ADS (free in spokesworker) Wanted: Child trailerbike with gears. Sallybrownsjb@yahoo.com.

Help/sponsors: for sponsored cleanup on cyclepaths in Newhaven/ Warriston area. Spokes member Barbara Cartwright is organising this cleanup to raise funds for her October 120km trek in Cedarberg, South Africa, in aid of One to One childrens' fund. The funds are to be used for a day nursery for children infected or affected by Aids/HIV in a squatter camp near Cape Town. All offers enthusiastically received by Barbara at 552.2036.

SPOKES NEWS SNIPPETS

• The new Spokes email address is spokes@spokes.org.uk. The old btinternet address may eventually disappear.
• Spokes is extremely grateful to the many members who ask for extra supplies of each Spokes leaflet, and use these to leaflet bikes at work, shopping centres and so on. However, we have received a complaint from one person who found a leaflet between their spokes. It would be possible for such a leaflet, if not noticed, to cause quite a mess, and possibly even danger. i.e. please keep Spokes well away from Spokes. Thanks very much.

BIKE FACILITIES ACTIONS

• The east-west route closure at Hopetoun House [Spokes 81 p3] has not been resolved. If the closure of this crucial route concerns you, please contact Peter Hawkins for the latest news and who to write to. 443.6712.
• New bike parking has been installed at Waverley Station - well designed and well located! One set of Sheffield racks by the entrance ramp at platform 11, the other under the steps up to Princes Street at platform 19. Please write to Railtrack (at Waverley) to compliment them on this welcome move. Since they are in a bike-friendly move, take the opportunity to suggest any other improvements! (One would be a wheeling ramp at the steps at the east end of platform 19, up towards Leith Street).
• Two Spokes members have again repaired the drainage and improved the path at Cultins Road underpass between the Canal and Edinburgh Park. If you notice further problems, please contact Peter Hawkins (above). The council is unwilling to do anything at present, as the route is officially closed, but have said they may form an official cycleroute here as part of the West Edinburgh Bus system WEBS. Please write to your councillor to ask for this to be included in WEBS.

NEW PUBLICATIONS

• School Cycling Information Pack Free to any Scottish school from east@scottishcycling.co.uk 662.4461 (Cathy Scott). Includes leaflets on funding, activities, school bike clubs, Scottish Schools Cycling Assn, activity cards, etc, etc.
• Sustrans Scotland Supporters' newsletter Scottish Sustrans members should have received the Spring 2002 newsletter - with news of Sustrans routes and activities. Or phone 0117.929.0888. May also be on Sustrans site at www.sustrans.org.uk.
• Links from business to the National Cycle Network Free advice from Working the Net info sheet at www.sustrans.org.uk.
• Walk in to Work Out Free government pack (Depts of Health and of Transport - joined-up thinking!) for organisations on how to encourage walking and cycling to work. 0141.314.0024.
• Cycle Helmets - new web site based on Australian experience, with lots of useful links at the end. www.cycle-helmets.com.
• UK Cycle Campaign Network now at www.cyclenetwork.org.uk.

NATIONAL CYCLING FUND

The government has made available a £m challenge fund open to bids from any organisation, for initiatives to encourage more people to cycle. The fund only applies in England. Several years ago such funds were available in both England and Scotland - the Scottish one enabled Spokes to gear up its map design and distribution project substantially, and ScotRail to improve on-train bike storage and so to abolish the hated £3 bike-carriage fee. A report on the Scottish Cycle Challenge recommended ongoing funding to enable organisations to develop new one-off and longer-term initiatives, but it seems that only the English department is to do this. Please write now to your MSP asking for a Scottish fund.

LETTER TO SPOKES

The following letter was received from Malcolm Wardlaw [mj_wardlaw@hotmail.com], in response to articles in Spokes 81. We would agree with some but not all of Malcolm's several points. Spokes supports appropriate well-designed on-road cycle facilities. We do fully agree with Malcolm (as we highlighted in Spokes 80 lead article) that more cyclists on the roads bring higher levels of safety. However, there is also evidence that the very presence of on-road cycle facilities is one of the best ways to significantly increase the number of cyclists - and therefore raise levels of safety. Malcolm, whilst sceptical about on-road facilities, gives no evidence of any realistic alternative strategy likely to have the same impact in increasing cycle use levels (or, therefore, safety). [Ed].

"We cyclists are still machine-gunning ourselves in both feet. Which does it make most sense to do: wail because of a small minority of drivers who show less than satisfactory regard for cyclists; or, nurture common interest with the 20-30% who actively show courtesy towards cyclists? Is that a difficult choice?

Apparently it is. "In 20 years' time the idea of vehicles travelling inches apart at closing speeds of 120 mph plus, and mixing with pedestrians and cyclists at potentially lethal speeds, will seem as archaic as open sewers down the middle of the street do now". Is that opinion, by David Jarman of West Lothian Council, one that I as a cycling advocate am supposed to endorse? Well I don't. There is a kind of safety campaigner who talks up the "dangers" of our roads in order to gain power to impose new measures. In fact, both driving and cycling carry low risk tariffs nowadays, the expectation of a fatal crash being all of once in 18,000 years in both cases. In modern cars, with modern driving behaviour, 120 mph closing speeds are safe enough on first-class A roads. What is the alternative? Make all single-carriageway roads one-way? Install a central barrier down all such roads? A blanket speed limit of 20 mph? None of these measures is practical or likely, so why endorse Mr Jarman's rhetoric? We only isolate ourselves from mainstream opinion. Let us focus on the essential issue. Cars that buzz cyclists at high speed on country roads are a clear and present menace, and the problem is getting worse as car handling provides mediocre drivers far too much confidence. Even second class roads are becoming plagued by this behaviour. The French drive far harder than we do, but they treat their cyclists better. The solution is to focus less on "speed" in the abstract, more on the interaction when car meets bike.

As for the mixing of bikes and motor traffic, this takes us into more sinister territory. The current gospel of "safe cycling" is laid out in the Scottish Executive's manual Cycling by Design. Anyone who cares for free access to the road network had better take an interest in this work, for it would have us all extracted from the traffic onto pedantic, dangerous, but "beautifully engineered" cycleways. Segregation does not work. Proof? I present three exhibits:

1. Pedestrians are more at risk than cyclists and more vulnerable: The fatality rate (deaths per billion km) is 25% higher for pedestrians than for cyclists, or 50% higher if you include pedestrians of active age killed in falls (which are not recorded as road traffic deaths). Pedestrians suffer qualitatively severer head injuries than cyclists. A French survey of 5,500 hospitalised road crash casualties noted that 4.2% of pedestrian cases suffered over 24 hours' unconsciousness, while only 2.3% of cyclists did (no helmets in 1987). If pedestrians are already more at risk, how can cyclists gain by joining them?

2. Dutch experience: In Britain, 93% of cyclist deaths involve collision with another vehicle. In the Netherlands, 93% of cyclist deaths involve collision with another vehicle. In Britain, 55% of cyclist deaths involve collision with a motor car. In the Netherlands, 55% of cyclist deaths involve collision with a motor car. In Britain, 20% of cyclist deaths involve collision with an HGV. In the Netherlands, 20% of cyclist deaths involve collision with an HGV. The level of cycling in the Netherlands has increased only 30% since 1980, and it actually fell after 1995. There is so much cycling there because there always has been, rather than because of any conspic-uous success in promoting cycling in recent decades. Our average fatality rate is 2.5 times higher, but there's 15 times the per-capita cycling in the Netherlands. Cycling is safe where it is popular. In havens of high cycle use, such as Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire, fatality rates today are not much higher than in the Netherlands.

3. Systematic comparison: There have been plenty of systematic studies comparing safety of segregated and unsegregated cyclists. They all show better safety when cyclists ride with the traffic as authentic road users. "Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles" (John Forester). The ignorant suppose that being hit from behind is a serious risk in road riding. It isn't. It is one of the rarest types of serious crash. Most serious crashes happen at junctions, where segregation only leads to horrendous complications that baffle drivers and cyclists alike. Even totally separate networks, like the Milton Keynes Redways, have a poorer safety record than local on-road cycling.

The truth is, we nearly always benefit far more than we risk by riding with the traffic - for which reason we need to be precise when we criticise driver behaviour. Cyclists should pour onto the roads in ever greater numbers to effect a greater road presence and so achieve the kind of respect (and low fatality rates) enjoyed by the French. But that is precisely the one measure that officialdom will not endorse, at least in part due to our howling and balling about the "dangers". They believe us, and so do the wider public, who therefore are put off even attempting to learn cyclecraft. We block our trek to a better cycling future by over-stating our case. Correctly, we should insist: "There has to be a lot more of us". Prominent on-road markings encourage cycling by endorsing the bicycle as a means of transport. This leads to better safety. Re-engineering should go no further than that.

I have written to a number of people regarding the flawed concepts of Cycling by Design. None have replied. Unless you want to get banned from the roads onto dangerous, awkward cycleways over the next 20 years, I suggest you get active to put matters right. On the topic of danger-hysteria, I was impressed with the veracity of the Transport Research Laboratory [reference in Spokes 81] in reporting that when councils ran big helmet promotional campaigns, local cycling levels dropped. Thus, ironically, helmet campaigns increased the risk for those who stayed on as cyclists. Might it be that the promotion of helmets by the wearing of them has the same effect? There is an international pattern emerging of increasing risk of head injury with increasing helmet use. In the USA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced last summer that the risk of head injury per US cyclist had increased by 50% during the 1990s, as helmet use had increased from about 15% to about 50%. In Western Australia, one may calculate from hospital admission data and traffic counts that the risk of head injury per cyclist must have increased by a third since 1991, the year before the helmet law. Earlier this year, the government of New South Wales launched a belated investigation into why the expected benefits of helmet use had not materialised. Here in Britain, cyclist fatality rates and serious injury rates got relatively and absolutely worse after 1994, closely corresponding to the years of fast growth in helmet use. In New Zealand, head injuries fell 35% over the period 1989 to 1997, while the amount of cycling also fell 35% (helmet use increased from about 25% to 95% during this time). Compliance with helmet promotion and compulsion was very high in New Zealand, so their experience probably represents the best that can be achieved with helmets; ie, absolutely nothing.

This counter-intuitive world result is not so surprising. The introduction of rugby helmets resulted in such a startling jump in injuries that sports doctors wanted to ban the things. What a pity the medical profession is proving so slow in reacting to a similar result for cycling. A safety feature with, at best, only very marginal benefits, has been promoted as a life-saver. A false sense of security is evidently a lot deadlier than none at all.

Despite all this alarming accumulation of contrary evidence, officialdom and safety campaigning groups like RoSPA and BHIT still promote helmets as being effective to prevent major head and brain injuries. It is particularly alarming that this kind of message is being directed at children. And despite the recommendations by the BMA and the RCGP that cycle helmets should not be made compulsory anywhere in Great Britain, we may yet see creeping compulsion through health and safety legislation. The Royal Mail is going to make helmets compulsory for its postmen when cycling - the fact that they may be more at risk when walking is not considered. The possibility that injuries may increase is not suspected. This development is bound to raise calls for universal compulsion in the media. It will harden the "cycling is dangerous", "cyclists need helmets" mentality, pushing us further from the only possibility of a future worth having; cycling as a common-or-garden mode of transport like walking, done in ordinary clothing and fully appreciated as being as safe as walking.

Cycling will get safer only when it looks safe enough to encourage 10 million more people to take it up. Safe cycling looks safe. Is it clear what I'm getting at?