Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you, and scorn in the one ahead.
Mac McCleary
Part One – Motoring
Some readers may
recall the slogan of a recent road safety campaign in New South Wales – Safe speeding: There is no such thing.
It is one of those
irritating platitudes favoured in public safety campaigns that are either
demonstrably false or boringly true; which it might be turning only on what is meant
in this case by the term, speeding.
If by ‘speeding’ it
is meant, driving at an unsafe speed,
then the slogan is an extremely uninformative analytic truth, like all bachelors are unmarried men, or all grandmothers are mothers. If on the
other hand by ‘speeding’ it is meant, driving
at an unlawful speed, then the statement is clearly untrue.
It is just as
obvious that the road authorities and police in NSW do mean it in the latter sense, and are thus propagating a blatant
falsehood in a vain effort to constrain the behaviour of otherwise autonomous
adults when in control of motor vehicles on public roads.
Why do I say the
slogan is obviously false? Because almost everyone who drives exceeds the speed
limits, indeed almost all of the time they are capable of doing so when on the
road. The scale of law-breaking on most public roads is near universal and
really only varies in frequency and as a matter of degree*.
Yet, in Australia
at least, road accidents and fatalities as a proportion of vehicles on the road
and distances travelled have plummeted in recent years. Annual road deaths in Australia have fallen
from a peak of about 3,800 in 1970 to approximately 1,600 in 2012. Over that
period, road travel is reported to have increased by almost 150 per cent.
Now, there are many
explanations for this dramatic drop – better cars, better secondary safety
equipment, better roads, and better driver training – but none of the answers
is reduced speed on the roads. Except outside schools when children are about, when
passing fixed speed cameras, or in very heavily built-up areas (where the
average speed is less than 30km/h), it is quite to the contrary.
Most of us drive
more and faster when we can, with fewer and fewer accidents.
Ergo, the road
safety claim is anodyne tripe: it manages to be both boring and false. So, what would some true
statements about road safety and driving speed look like? Something like these:
· Other things being equal, exceeding
the speed limit increases the risk of traffic accidents
· Speed is a factor in increasing the
risk of collisions, and is exponentially related to their seriousness
· You should reduce your speed when
important variables – road or weather conditions, roadworthiness of the car, or
driver affect – either limit the ability to avoid accidents or increase their
likelihood; and
· Exceeding the speed limit increases
your risk of incurring expensive fines or other penalties.
As almost all
drivers in Australia will know, only the last two of these four feature in road
safety advertising. The first two true statements are far too insipid to be
employed as slogans. Much easier to rely on risible nonsense like, there is no such thing as safe speeding.
This observation
shines a small light on one example of the sort of behaviour we higher order
primates engage in when confronted with complex risk matrix calculations: the
law is just one part of the risk profile, and its enforcement just one other
part.
It is important not
to interpret this argument as a lassaiz
faire or anarchic approach: the greater part of any risk calculation is the
degree of probability of a serious injury or cost being incurred, and the
relative scale of that cost or injury to ourselves, to those close to us, and (depending
on our degree of altruism) to the wider community. As a rule, in our calculations
legal implications come third after first, pain and injury, and next, financial
considerations, all set off against actual or perceived benefits.
In fact, the exception is to find someone who calculates
that driving at the speed limit or lower is the best option. These public
nuisances are I suspect often unwitting literalists in statutory interpretation
– timid, unimaginative little people who cannot conceive of exercising
sufficient independent thought to override the dictates of authority and sense
the point and purpose behind the law; even when there is a queue of cars behind
them on a single lane, double-lined road.
As a matter of policy, these obdurate and self-absorbed
tossers need to learn a lesson about not interfering unnecessarily in other
people’s busy lives; whatever the road rules might be.
* For concurrence with my view from motoring writer
Toby Hagon, see: http://smh.drive.com.au/motor-news/why-every-driver-has-broken-the-speed-limit-20120204-1qygs.html
* * *
Get a bicycle. You will not
regret it if you live.
Mark Twain
Part Two – Cycling
When I say
‘calculations of risk’ I do not mean that this is a formal and explicit process
made with each decision. We are constantly, implicitly and often barely
consciously revising our risk assessments when driving cars. Just as we do in
many other kinds of kinaesthetic endeavours – like cycling.
The remarkable thing
about cycling in Sydney – reputedly one of the least bike-friendly cities in
the world – is how little conflict, aggression and danger one actually experiences. Just
imagine the number of cars, trucks, motorcycles, buses and pedestrians (not to
mention wheelchairs, prams, skateboards and more) that traverse a rider’s path
in an average two-hour ride: thousands.
Even in urban and
suburban Sydney – with its hilly, twisting, poorly surfaced roads and
intermittent bikepaths-to-nowhere – one can ride forty or fifty kilometres in
that time. And yet in a typical ride one
might encounter the threat of only one or two life-ending accidents, and be
confronted by perhaps another one or two seriously hostile fuckwits in charge
of a motor vehicle.
Not at all bad a
ratio, I reckon. Less than a thousand to one chance of a violent end each time
you go for a ride. So, despite the anti-cycling campaigns in the tabloid media,
maybe it is we cyclists – and not pedestrians and motorists – who are the real
whingers in the road-use debate…But no.
Why? Because, in
strictness, there is no such thing as a cyclist, any more than there is a
shopper, a pedestrian, a motorist or a passenger. Just as one may figuratively
be born to shop, you may love your car madly, enthuse over walking or prefer
the place of passenger on a bus or train or plane. But none of this turns your
identity into one of the above, in any philosophically meaningful sense of the
word, identity.
This is because cyclist,
passenger, pedestrian, motorist and shopper, and a host of terms with similar linguistic roles, are
situational or functional predicates.
The statement, Ruth is a
shopper, tells
us what about Ruth? Only that she shops. But so does just about everyone on the
planet, save for the pathologically shy, or those so poor they have nothing to
shop with, or those sufficiently rich and indolent to have someone do it for
them.
Saying Ruth is a
shopper
tells us little more about Ruth than saying she is a walker. Almost all of us
walk to varying degrees. This just goes with being a bi-pedal hominid. Here in
NSW there is a lobby group called the Pedestrian Council. There is also the
NRMA – the National Roads and Motorists Association – and Bicycle NSW, which
represents the interests of cyclists.
But hold on – didn’t
I just say that there is no such thing as pedestrians, motorists and cyclists?
So who do they represent? Simply, people in their capacity of doing certain
things, that’s who. All of whom have rights to the use of public space and who
all (or many) whinge when others, as individuals or as groups, do things in the
public space they don’t appreciate. Like beat them through heavy traffic.
This is amply
evidenced in a recent Sydney Morning Herald article concerning hostility shown
to cyclists on Sydney roads#.
Just in case you were thinking this was an issue of concern restricted
principally to Australia, let me introduce you to the views of the esteemed
British actor, Nigel Havers, writing in the UK’s Mail
Online on 13 June 2006:
Cycling used to be a genteel, reassuring
activity. One thinks of Cambridge undergraduates languidly journeying through
the narrow streets of the town with their scarves flapping in the wind, or
modest delivery boys from the local grocery store pedalling away on their
errands.
But today's pedal-pushers seem to be of a
very different stamp – gentility and modesty have been replaced by aggression
and arrogance. Brimming with hostility, utterly indifferent to those around
them, they appear to think they are above the law.
Normal rules about red lights, pavements and
one-way streets are treated as a matter of supreme indifference by this new
army of Lycra-clad maniacs, whose every action demonstrates their contempt for
pedestrians and motorists.
I am not against cycling per se. In fact, I
used to cycle myself and still possess a bicycle. But I always made sure that I
obeyed the rules of the road.
Oh
dear, next he’ll be telling us he used to be a lefty until he got mugged by an
immigrant; and now, while he has nothing against other races, he just wishes
they would all go back to their own country.
But
I digress – back to Nigel:
Just as they pay no tax, but use the roads
freely, so cyclists are subject to absolutely no parking restrictions. They
feel they have the right to chain up their wheels anywhere, to the railings of
private property or even a parking meter, and could not care less if they
obstruct pedestrians or annoy the property owner.
Bicycles are allowed to clog up the streets,
pavements, pathways, even the entrances to homes. Why do we have show such tolerance
to those who infringe the law?
When a cyclist bangs on the roof of my car or
scrapes my mirror without even bothering to apologise, I sometimes wish for the
good old days of Edwardian England, when young men would be sent to jail for
swearing in the streets, causing a danger to the public or cycling without a
light.
Out of his own mouth
is he damned.
You see, as noted
above, just about everyone breaks the law. Motorists certainly do. And so do
pedestrians. So, no doubt, do shoppers and passengers and, well, whomever.
We all infract rules.
Short of murder, rape, assault, robbery, destruction, swindling et al, your reaction to rule breakers
just tells us which group or activity you are not a part of or which you do not
support.
Who are the sorts of people
who do not approve of cycling? Fat, lazy, peevish people on the whole, that’s
who. People like novelist Howard Jacobson.
The Quickrelease TV website in September
2008 reported that Jacobsen, ‘a saggy-bottomed fellow if
his hatred of healthy exercise is anything to go by’, opined at the Sunday Independent that cycling was one
of those Olympic sports which had no use in the real world, yet then went on to
complain about the legions of London cyclists who plague him:
Cycling is worse than futile, it is malevolent.
Not a day goes by, unless I cower in my house and lock all the doors, when I am
not put in danger by cyclists – whether it’s cyclists riding the pavement,
jumping the lights, weaving between pedestrians and traffic, overtaking on the
inside, chaining their bikes where they are bound to cause obstruction, abusing
and on occasions threatening me for pointing out any of these infractions to
them…blah, blah, blah, blah.
You
get the picture. But hold on, Howard hasn’t
finished yet:
For holier-than-thou smugness, only a mother
breastfeeding in a public space beats a cyclist. Both have been licensed by our
society to believe they are forces for beneficence – true children of nature in
a naughty mechanistic world – whereas the one only makes the planet more
dangerous and the other only contributes to its overpopulation.
Olympic
sports must have a use in the real world? Like discus? Only breastfeeding mothers
are worse than cyclists? Why do people like Jacobson do it? Why can’t they help
themselves in revealing their own deeply pathetic motivations?
* * *
When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the
human race.
H.G.
Wells
If, like
me, you are a Purposivist in
statutory interpretation, you understand that the current road rules are made
principally for people as motorists and pedestrians. Despite the recent
installation of traffic lights in bike lanes (usually at the bottom of steep
hills), cycling, despite its venerable lineage, is not typically uppermost in
the minds of legislators.
The growth
in cycling as a pleasurable and health-giving activity in recent years has
exposed the inadequacy of most current laws to reflect and accommodate their
use in public places. Thus, those of us who cycle look at the underlying
purpose of the law and decide, quite rightly, that the rule saying ‘do not
proceed against a red traffic light’ is designed to stop cars hitting each
other or pedestrians.
Cyclists,
being on the whole clever and alert people, calculate that it is sensible and
shrewd to beat the traffic and get up to speed by crossing the intersection
before the flotilla of cars, trucks and buses sets off in the same direction.
Disapproval of this is just cycling envy.
Pedestrians
know this too, and look out for motor vehicles as they themselves dart across the
road against the lights. Yet we do not have the Howards and the Nigels
railing against this practice, because even lazy, cranky celebrities are
themselves pedestrians. Even tabloid journalists occasionally walk.
As almost
all people (including cyclists) are pedestrians and most are motorists, it is a
relatively risk-free activity to accuse only cyclists of rule-breaking, as the
claimant is rarely a cyclist themselves. Only the offence of hypocrisy is
committed.
But imagine,
pace anti-cyclists, if we insisted
that prams, strollers, skateboards and wheelchairs were registered for use on
public thoroughfares. After all, one can be injured on a footpath by a
non-motorised vehicle. Still better, it has been suggested # (in a
gently ironic way) that maybe pedestrians should be registered too –
perhaps with a higher annual fee for joggers…
It’s all just
too petulant and ridiculous. Public roads are there for all of us. And most
adults have the capacity to make judgments about risk in using the public
space.
So, get
over it and get on yer bike.
# See the article by
James Robertson and Jacob Saulwick in the Sydney Morning Herald of 31 August
2013, at http://news.drive.com.au/drive/roads-and-traffic/close-encounters-of-the-hostile-kind-20130830-2svyl.html
