Not exactly sure what this has to do with anything, but it sure is eye catching. From here.
Is our approach to cycle safety doing more harm than good? Like most Right Thinking Folk, I’ve been outraged (OK, maybe ‘concerned’ is a bit closer to it) by a couple of cycle safety stories published in one of our local papers. It might be a coincidence that they appeared in the same paper, published in the same city. Or maybe not.The first was a story that’s been picked up in a number of places, reporting that the companies that are designing and building some of Christchurch’s new urban cycling transport infrastructure have workplace health and safety policies that ban their workers from cycling to and from work meetings because other transport options are deemed to be safer.
Wait, what?
On the face of it, it sounds like the companies that the good burghers of Christchurch have commissioned to build their safe and effective cycling infrastructure have absolutely no faith in their own work. If that’s the case, it deserves all the on-line derision and ridicule that it’s received.
A part of me wants to cut these companies some slack; they’re involved in work on sites that would have quite a different risk environment for riding than, say, a city street. I mean, a motorway construction site is not my first choice for a safe and relaxed ride, so I can see the sense in having a workplace health and safety policy that might seek to constrain some risky behaviour. And in a big organisation, working across a range of sites across the country, it might be easier to have a blanket policy that applies across the board. It might make for a bit less ambiguity. It’ll make life easier, perhaps.
But the massive downside is that it has the unintended outcome of banning all cycling while you’re on the clock. That’s just crazy. The good people over at Bike Auckland have done a nice blog post outlining three reasons that they think the companies involved should re-think their policies. They argue (and I agree) that the companies are being inconsistent with the available data (they’re engineering companies, and frankly should know better); they’re not showing any empathy with the communities they’re building infrastructure for; and they’re setting a bad example
One of the commentators on their site wryly notes that it’s possible that the companies involved are focussing on the “safety” part of their “health and safety” obligations, perhaps at the expense of the “health” part. It’s a good point, and well made with the backing of some numbers taken from a research report commissioned by the New Zealand Transport Agency.
Those provide a fairly hefty suggestion that car transport is by far the most expensive in health terms, Which gets back to the point in the click-baity title – given the very clear evidence of the health benefits of cycling over other transport options, is an approach that disadvantages or discourages cycling – including on safety grounds that are supposed to make us healthier and live longer – actually delivering worse health outcomes? Is cycle safety resulting in preventable deaths?
The answer seems to be yes. There’s enough data around to be able to do some back-of-the-envelope type calculations to estimate the preventable deaths that have resulted from cycle safety policy. The classic policy intervention would have to be the introduction of compulsory helmet wearing. First, some caveats. There’s a lot of correlation in this kind of analysis and you have to be a bit careful in over-stretching the causality. And there are general trends going on that make it hard to point to the effect of one particular thing over another. But one good thing about it is we have a defined point in time at which an intervention was applied (in this case the introduction of compulsory helmet laws) that make some general before and after comparisons valid.
And what the numbers show is that the gradual decline in cycling was markedly accelerated after the helmet law was introduced in New Zealand. Probably no surprise, and there is more than one reason why that might be so.
At the same time as that’s been happening the death rate from preventable disease – many of which can be prevented by a healthy and active lifestyle that might include a bit of biking- continue their inevitable march upwards. Grab some population-level mortality data and do a bit of number crunching and it’s possible to take a stab at estimating the effect of compulsory helmet wearing on mortality.
Some research published in the New Zealand Medical Journal did exactly that (although see here for a critique). They support the assertion that the introduction of compulsory helmet use in New Zealand has reduced cycling rates so much that the population-level reduction in physical activity would account for 53 otherwise preventable deaths per year. So, if you were so inclined, you could say that bike helmets kill 53 people in New Zealand every year. Possibly a bit of a stretch, but it’s worth a thought. Given the fact that cycling is no more or less risky than basically just hanging around at home, it begs the question of whether our approach to cycle safety is doing more harm than good. I’d argue that it probably is.
The great cycling revolution continues to face some stiff headwinds.
Thousandth fastest 