The 2012 RDRF Wooden Spoon Award for bad writing about safety on the road had, as you might expect, a pretty stiff amount of competition.

A front runner was whoever in the Department for Transport wrote a brief for the Ministers responsible for road safety and cycling indicating that the Dutch record on cyclist safety was worse than the UK’s (The Dutch have far more people cycling per head of the population so, even with a far lower casualty rate per cycling journey, more cyclists per head of the population are hurt or killed: we think that means their record is better).

Actually just about anything from the official “road safety” industry could be a contender because of this kind of way of measuring success or failure. Or most of what comes from the official motoring organisations. Quite a lot really.

But the judging panel finally made its decision on the basis that the winner summarised  something fundamentally wrong in both public and professional “road safety” culture in just one sentence in a very short news report. If you are a “road safety” highway engineer, or indeed the winner, you won’t see what is wrong. If you want a full explanation of what the RDRF thinks is wrong, and why we need to highlight this, do look at our full account here

So, without further ado, we present the 2012 RDRF Wooden Spoon Award for bad writing about safety on the road

To:

West Sussex Today

for its February 1^st 2012 edition story

“Wisborough Green tree collision

EMERGENCY services were called to Wisborough Green after a collision involving a car and a tree on Tuesday January 31.”