It’s often stated, not just by many drivers, but also by pedestrians and even some cyclists that “cyclists need more training”. Of course, training is a good thing, and it would be useful to have a lot more road sense awareness of all kinds in schools, but that’s a question of education, rather than transport.
What about the claim that, specifically, above all others, cyclists should have some form of mandatory training, usually with a cycling licence and bike registration tag to go with it?
This is the sort of blog post that could run and run, and I might well go into more detail on this in the New Year, but in the meantime, here is a graph showing the correlation between the actual amount of training needed to qualify to control transport modes of various different sizes, and the daily threat they pose to the British population, averaged out over the last 10 years. I’ve had to extend this out further for commercial aircraft and shipping, as neither have had a major incident since the 1980s.
An important point to note that this is not distance specific, in other words, the graph only considers the overall threat based on annual fatalities, not the risk per mile moved.
Whilst it is true that cars move significantly more miles than either pedestrians or cyclists, it is also true that motor (road) vehicles in general, and cars specifically, cause far more fatalities than everything else combined, and they do so by some distance. So this is more about the overall public health problem, rather than any specific threats in individual locations.
However, if the health benefits of walking and cycling were factored in, both would head into negative fatalities, whereas a significant amount of fatalities would need to be added to motoring deaths due to the problems caused by air pollution, social severance and sedentary lifestyles. This is the training message we really need to get across, but how can we?
So who really needs more training?
Well if we want to save lives, we have to look at improving motoring skills and cracking down on anti-social and dangerous driving first. It impact from motor vehicles which caused 1,710 of the 1,713 road deaths in 2013, not impact from bicycles. Note that the graph looks at “at fault”, rather than impact – in other words, the fatalities to pedestrians and cyclists where they were deemed to be “at fault” are the ones on the graph.
So maybe we could still benefit if we trained up every cyclist in the UK, so they’d be happier and more confident? The only problem is that this training wouldn’t last, because it is only as good as the next side swipe by a close/fast passing motorist. That’s why it’s far better still to get on with training our highways engineers to build cities which are safe for all to get around in.
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