It's that time of the year when we talk about the dangers posed by cyclists with the Daily Mail publishing a story with the headline 'Cyclists may need number plates: Shake-up of road laws could see bike-riders forced to have registration numbers and insurance… and observe speed limits'.
The Safe System approach the Government's adopted approach to road safety in the latest available (published) road safety statement suggests, quite sensibly, that vehicles should be travelling at speeds that place their kinetic energy in ranges survivable by the unprotected human body (without serious injury) in a collision. Some quick numbers to inform the debate are provided in the statistics collected on reported road collisions. One road user type that can be harmed by any vehicle in a collision is pedestrians. In Great Britain, for pedestrians struck by single vehicles in the complete 2020 data (RAS40004 is the table required) the deaths and serious injuries suffered by those pedestrians are as follows (serious injuries are 'adjusted' values to account for differences in reporting methods).
Pedestrians struck by:
- Pedal cycle: 4 killed, 99 seriously injured
- Motorcycles (all sizes): 6 killed, 178 seriously injured
- Cars (all sizes): 200 killed, 3106 seriously injured
- Bus/Coach: 12 killed, 124 seriously injured
- Vans: 24 killed, 328 seriusly injured
- HGVs: 39 killed, 74 seriously injured
- Any other vehicle: 6 killed, 79 seriously injured
Any road traffic collision is a potentially life-changing event, and deaths and serious injuries suffered by those involved are always tragic. The differences in harm distribution here however are stark. At the population level, annually, we have nearly 300 pedestrian deaths and nearly 4,000 pedestrian serious injuries caused by the various vehicles types above, with around 1-2% of these being in collisions with cyclists.
Any attempt to ensure that cyclists are subject to the speed limits of the roads on which they travel (something I happen to agree with) should therefore include consideration of how to properly control the speeds of all other vehicle types, within the Safe System approach to which the Government is committed. To protect those most vulnerable, the debate here should not be about cyclists and speed limits. It should just be about speed limits.
