The model Elle Macpherson was this week pilloried by the tabloids for bicycling in a London street without a helmet and with her (helmeted) son on her handlebars. "Elle on wheels," cried the Mail. "What the Elle are you doing?" screamed the Mirror with an editorial titled "Elle to pay". Even the Times demanded a response to her behaviour from the gods of health and safety. The answer from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents was a predictable howl: "Illegal and dangerous!"
The truth is the opposite. Macpherson was probably the safest cyclist in London that day. Like the mayor, Boris Johnson, she is signed up (I guess by instinct) to the Wilde-Adams theory of compensatory risk assessment. By not wearing a helmet, she lowers her risk threshold and thus rides more carefully. She commendably cycles rather than drives a car and protects her child, who cannot manage his own risk. The society should give her a medal, not insult her. The press were idiots.
By chance, this week sees the publication of another tome in the mountain of evidence that Britain's safety culture is making us increasingly unsafe. Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic collates a mass of evidence about how we drive cars and use roads. It demonstrates the extent of mendacious brain-washing inflicted on the public by health-and-safety lawyers, bureaucrats and sellers of expensive equipment.
Vanderbilt, like Gerald Wilde, Hans Monderman and John Adams before him, rests his case on the thesis that stripping people of responsibility for safety makes them take more risks, not fewer. Traffic safety is concerned not with dehumanised automatons but with people, and is a balance between authority and personal freedom.
Adams's "theory of risk compensation" states that people push their behaviour to a given level of danger. If they are made to feel safer - through driving a big car, wearing a harness or riding a motorbike in a helmet - they shift their risk threshold to a higher level of danger. The old experiment still works: increase your speed to 80mph, undo your seat belt and see what you do next. You brake. Likewise mobile phone users instinctively slow to a crawl, dangerous but less so than driving at 80mph.
The accumulation of statistics is overwhelming. Helmets, like seat belts, somehow do not seem to reduce accidents. Last year Norway's centre for transport research, in rejecting compulsory helmets, noted the "increased risk per cycling kilometre for cyclists wearing helmets, in Australia and New Zealand at around 14%". It also noted a consequent reduction in cycling use of 22%.
A British study showed that motorists instinctively give cyclists without a helmet a wider berth. Drivers are no more stupid than riders. Eye contact makes driving more intelligent, which is why convertibles reportedly have fewer accidents. For every cyclist who claims "my helmet saved my life", there are two for whom wearing a helmet led them to risk it.
The world's most celebrated cycling country, the Netherlands, has just 1% helmet use and has the safest cycling record anywhere. It has one third the cycling death rate of Western Australia, which has the most draconian law. The Dutch Cycling Council declares that helmets "increase cycling speeds and encourage riskier cycling behaviour ...They also reduce the care motorists give to cyclists". The dispatch rider careering through a red light may think his helmet makes him safer than the unguarded old lady on a sit-up-and-beg style bicycle, but he is wrong.
Ever since the government suppressed the 1981 Isles report for suggesting that compulsory seats belts might cost lives by encouraging speeding, the psychology of road use has been treated as anathema. The idea that signs, lights, cameras and "controlled" pedestrian crossings might distract driving vision and decrease safety is intolerable to those who love regimenting others. A mother nosing her way on a bike through the traffic must be more dangerous than if she were careering at twice the speed in an armoured buggy - whatever the facts may say.
Traffic engineers regard cars as crazed robots to be freed from human frailty. Theirs is a Fritz Lang metropolis in which tiny pods move silently through three dimensions and people are ants. They have cocooned us in super-safe cars that we drive too fast. They think they are reducing congestion with parking restrictions, lanes, roundabouts and gyratories, but cancel any such benefit by making journeys twice as long as they need be with one-way streets and traffic lights. The latter waste road space, increase travel time and burn millions of tonnes of unnecessary carbon.
Traffic management must be the most uneconomic, anti-human and carbon-guzzling regulation on earth. Pedestrians are corralled and confined by fences. Streets are polluted by forests of signs, preventing drivers from their prime task of watching and showing consideration to other road users. We put up with this nonsense in the naive belief that it must be doing us good. It is not.
Vanderbilt is a follower of the "shared space movement" pioneered by the Dutch engineer, Monderman, whose work is now near standard across mainland Europe. There are 4,000 "naked street" schemes in Germany alone, where lights and restrictions are minimal and pedestrians, cyclists and cars tolerate each other at all but the most difficult crossings.
Rather than accelerating and braking down a regulated street, cars tend to move at under 20mph, informally policed by pavement design and the uncertainty of sharing space with pedestrians and cyclists. That eyes are the best traffic policemen was a Monderman maxim. In shared space, accidents fall and journey times actually improve, often by extraordinary amounts.
At Monderman's much-publicised Drachten intersection in the Netherlands, where fountains replace posts, fences, lights and kerbstones, the chief menace is said to be visiting traffic engineers repeating the master's trick of walking blindfold and backwards through the streaming traffic, which somehow gives way but never stops. Naked streets have even proved safer for the disabled.
The one English example is the "half-naked" Kensington high street. Cleared of barriers and safety clutter, its accident rate has fallen by 44% in two years. Only in Britain would such a boon be "experimental", fought tooth and nail by safety engineers in league with contractors and, I must assume, undertakers. There is hardly a street in Britain not being upheaved for some pedestrian segregation scheme, each aimed at reducing personal risk and thus increasing the chance of an accident.
All vehicles are people in disguise, negotiating the use of common space with each other. They must never be induced to delegate that obligation to signs and machines. They certainly must not think themselves safer than others, or they will behave with less consideration for others as a result.
Most people with whom I discuss these ideas look at me with blank amazement. It just cannot be true. The control of "the driving experience" must surely make it safer and not more dangerous. If the facts suggest otherwise, they must be wrong. Control always has the best tunes.
Galileo had the same trouble with the Inquisition. I say give Elle Macpherson a Galileo medal.
