This may appear to be a break from discussion of the current major campaigns for cyclist safety – but it is not. While cyclists are not directly mentioned, consideration of this issue is crucial to addressing safety for all road users, including cyclists.

This issue is how – supposedly – trees, bollards and other inanimate objects are “dangerous”. It tells us much of what we need to know about the official view of “road safety”. Read more »

The devotion of a whole front page by The Times to cyclist safety is quite extraordinary. RDRF has, along with other organisations and 17,000 individuals as of the first  draft of this post on 5th February signed up to it. But will this campaign fizzle out like the ones waged by The Independent and the London Evening Standard – let alone safety campaigns launched throughout the last century? At the risk of seeming overly negative, we have to question features of this campaign and ask what will be required to effectively pursue the good intentions that exist. 

After all, “safety on the road” can mean all kinds of things: from misguided and counterproductive fantasies through to getting the most vulnerable out of the way of the most dangerous. Public figures have signed up to The Times campaign – as they would to motherhood and apple pie. Below we analyse the campaign in detail: its potential for reducing danger on the road to cyclists and other road users, what will be required to pursue these objectives – and the problems that have already surfaced. Read more »

Transport practitioners should be aware that there are a number of current campaigns for the safety of cyclists. Following on from direct action in London, these include probably the highest profile campaign for cyclist safety ever by The Times. But will any of them actually achieve anything? We will examine them in depth, starting with that of “British Cycling”.  Read more »

We hope to be writing an extensive review of the Department for Transport’s major programme of studies carried out in 2008, 2009 and 2010 on Cyclist Safety. We think that there are a number of serious problems with what was produced and how the programme was structured – most notably the emphasis on the work on helmets, which we see as being fundamentally misconceived and executed.

 While preparing this I was reminded of some DfT-commissioned evidence-review of the (in)effectiveness of road safety education: The Development of Children’s and Young People’s Attitudes to Driving: A Critical Review of the Literature by Kevin Durkinand Andy Tolmie Read more »

Peter Hitchens is part of a tendency in right-wing Conservatism, including the satirist Peter Simple , which has criticised some of the problems of mass car use, not least the “road safety” engineering of the modern car and its environment. I recommend that you read his latest piece on the subject. In such a piece you get more human insight into car and road safety culture than in so many professional articles. But there are -as always – problems. In fact, we should wonder: Is Peter Hitchens not something of a hypocrite on this subject?  Read more »

Headcam footage

RDRF is pelased to have supported Martin Porter in hisaction described below in his press release: Read more »

By any measures that make sense, anyway, the costs of motoring since the era of Blair and Prescott (1997) and from 2000 can be seen to have gone down. This is according to two tables of statistics publcihed by the Department for Transport Read more »

It’s time to write again about the costs of motoring (no, not to its victims, just to car users), as we are in another spasm of a particularly unpleasant feature of car culture. This is the presentation of alleged motorist victimhood through the mangling and abuse of the English language. It’s worth examining this self-pitying culture as we have – as so often with “road safety” ideology and parts of car culture – an inversion of reality displayed to us.

According to Robert Halfon MP, families are being “crucified” by high petrol prices But should we see the Great British Motorist as Jesus nailed to the cross?

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This has now been accepted as evidence:

House of Commons Transport Committee: Reply by Road Danger Reduction Forum to “Call for Evidence” into the Government’s “Strategic Framework for Road Safety”.

  Read more »

Faculty of Engineering, Science and the Built Environment, Department of Urban Engineering:    Extra-curricular transport lectures series

“What’s wrong with the ‘road safety’ industry?”

A lecture by Dr Robert Davis

Chair of the Road Danger Reduction Forum Read more »