"Just zis Guy, you know?" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> On Thu, 17 Apr 2003 16:10:12 +0100, Paul Smith <
[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
http://www.roads.dft.gov.uk/roadsafety/roadresearch/bicyclehelmets/index.ht
m
>
> The DfT of course has an agenda - they are now quite open about their desire to keep helmet
> legislation on the agenda. The reason for this is simple, and consistent with many other aspects
> of road "safety" policy: they have become accustomed to thinking the motor lobby way.
>
> The motor lobby is wary to the point of paranoia about anybody considering accident reduction at
> source as a means of improving road safety. Consider the possibilities this raises: raising the
> standard of the driving test, reducing speed limits across the board, automated speed limiting,
> harsher penalties for bad driving, even police activated remote engine immobilisers. So for over
> half a century the road lobby has worked at setting the road "safety" agenda into a particular
> mould: that of reducing the severity of consequences of poor driving, rather than addressing the
> poor driving itself.
>
> So, when considering cyclist safety the Government (and the road "safety" establishment) is
> conditioned by decades of practice to consider that helmets are a valid safety measure, even
> though they do absolutely nothing to stop accidents in the first place, and provide no proven
> protection in crashes likely to be serious or fatal. Any complete analysis shows that:
>
> - helmets are only scratching at the surface of the problem, the best way of reducing cyclist
> fatalities is to reduce cycle crashes
>
> - motor vehicle drivers are to blame for most fatal crashes involving cyclists
>
> - cyclist accident rates fall with increasing overall levels of cycling and rise as cycling
> levels fall; the relationship is not linear, but it is consistent across large numbers of
> countries
>
> So, the best way of improving cyclist safety is to improve driving standards and to encourage more
> people to cycle. The worst way to achieve that is to focus to excess on cycle helmets, for the
> following reasons:
>
> - it gives cyclists a false sense of security, so is dishonest - cycle helmets cannot protect
> against the worst types of crashes, those where the cyclist is struck at speed by a car
>
> - it reinforces the idea that road cycling is dangerous, which discourages people from cycling
> on the roads, in turn making cycling on the roads more dangerous forthose who do so -
> "positive feedback," in engineering terms
>
> - it gives drivers the idea that the cyclist is engaging in a risky activity, when actually
> the cyclist is doing something perfectly safe and benign but the driver is engaging in an
> activity which kills thousands in the UK alone every year and is the largest single killer
> of children in the developed world
>
> - it gives weasel lawyers another stick with which to beat us.
>
> The report, it seems to me, focuses mainly on the mechanistic effects of helmets, and ignores to a
> large extent the much more profound social effects, as well as the causes of the crashes. Cause of
> death: head injury is incomplete without the accompanying causation: driver error in the car which
> hit the cyclist.
>
> I think Sir Humphrey Appleby referred to this as a dog = cat solution: Something must be done,
> this is something, therefore this must be done.
>
> Guy
Just zis Guy? You just said it all. Change it to "Just the Guy"?
Cheers
Rich
> ===
> ** WARNING ** This posting may contain traces of irony.
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