Submitted by admin on Fri, 2006-12-29 11:50.
Bicycle safety is the use of practices designed to reduce risk associated with cycling.
Bicycle crashes
The first recorded bicycle accident is probably the 1842 collision between Kirkpatrick McMillan, an early rider of the velocipede, and a young girl in the crowd which had gathered to witness his arrival in Glasgow after a 40-mile ride from his home.
Causes of crashes vary according to local conditions. Research in the UK has found that between 60% and 85% of serious cyclist injuries are the result of negligence by a motor driver, while a study conducted in 2000 by SWOV (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).
Safety
Fundamentally, safety is the reduction of risk. Safety interventions divide broadly into primary and secondary safety. Primary safety is the active reduction of risk; secondary safety is measures taken to mitigate the consequences of risk. For example, brakes are a primary safety measure, seat belts are a secondary safety measure. The principles of risk management dictate that risk should be controlled first by reduction of risk at source, second by reducing of exposure to risk and third, only if the other two fail, by use of personal protective equipment.
In regards to road-traffic safety for cyclists (and indeed for pedestrians), the first option is seen by most Western governments as politically inexpedient. Notwithstanding the fact that a clear majority of serious cyclist injuries are caused by motorist negligence (estimates varying between 2/3 and 9/10), most opinion-formers are drivers of heavy motor vehicles. The media is often strongly pro-motorist, perhaps due to the substantial advertising spend of the motor industry. This bias existed well before the car became a mass means of transportation. As long ago as the early 1930s there were efforts to clear cyclists off the roads to make way for private cars, then the 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, but was resisted in other countries. In England, Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, H Alker Tripp commented that pedestrians and cyclists could never share the roads safely with motor traffic, so should be segregated. The implied loss of commons has been described as creating "bicycle Bantustans".
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.
Most important among these is the understanding of road position. In the 1960s and 1970s it was common for novice cyclists to be instructed to ride as close to the nearside kerb as possible. It is now understood that this encourages dangerous overtaking, by acting as a tacit invitation to overtake and by giving a false impression of the amount of space a cyclist needs. Modern practice places the cyclist much further into the traffic stream.
