Constructing Fear of Cycling - by Dave Horton
...The transformation of streets for people into roads for cars, perhaps inevitably, produced death and injury. By 1936 concerns about the alarming rise in cyclist casualties had led to the idea of a cycling proficiency scheme, eventually adopted nationally in 1948 (CTC 2005). To stem the carnage, cyclists must be trained to deal with the new, dangerous conditions. But things could have been otherwise. A 1947 book by J. S. Dean, former Chairman of the Pedestrians’ Association, is instructive here. In his ‘study of the road deaths problem’, Murder Most Foul, Dean's basic tenet is that, ‘as roads are only “dangerous” by virtue of being filled with heavy fast moving motor vehicles, by far the greatest burden of responsibility for avoiding crashes, deaths and injury on the roads should lie with the motorist’ (Peel n.d., 3).
Yet road safety education concentrates not on the drivers of vehicles, but on those who they have the capacity to kill. Dean saw how placing responsibility for road danger on those outside of motorised vehicles might lead, by stealth, to placing of culpability on those groups, and Murder Most Foul is a tirade against the placing of responsibility for road accidents on children.
The dominant assumptions on which UK road safety was originally based have remained in place. Today, rather than producing strategies to tame the sources of danger on the road, road safety education tries instead to instil in 'the vulnerable', primarily school children, a fear of motorised traffic, and then to teach them tactics to escape from road dangers as best they can. The title of the UK Government’s highway code for young road users is Arrive Alive (Department for Transport 2000a). The message such a title sends to children is not how much fun and freedom can be derived from sustainable modes of mobility such as cycling and walking; rather, it tells children that the world outside is a dangerous place, full of potential accidents, and they had better make sure they ‘arrive alive’. ...
<a href="http://www.copenhagenize.com/2009/09/fear-of-cycling-02-constructing-fear-of.html">http://www.copenhagenize.com/2009/09/fear-of-cycling-02-constructing-fear-of.html</a>;
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