It's enough to make you tear your hair out, which is made a lot easier if you're not wearing a cycle helmet. The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has banned a Cycling Scotland advert for showing a woman cycling without a helmet, more than 0.5 metres away from a kerb.
The TV ad, designed to encourage motorist to give cyclists more space on the road by using the slogan "See Cyclist. Think Horse" elicited five complaints, and was partly upheld. Complaints were made about the woman's lack of safety attire, lack of helmet and distance from the kerb, despite Cycling Scotland pointing out that helmets were not a legal requirement, and that the woman was riding in the "primary position" – the safest position for urban roads, giving the car in the video plenty of room to overtake. The ASA upheld the complaints, calling the ad "socially irresponsible and likely to condone or encourage behaviour prejudicial to health and safety", and the ad must not be broadcast again in its current form.
The helmet debate is a weary one, and as Cycling Scotland pointed out in their response to the complaints, the ad showed people both wearing and not wearing helmets, because ultimately, helmet wearing should be a choice. The ad wasn't aimed at cyclists, but at motorists, so the fact that people took umbrage at the messages it sent to cyclists, rather than the target audience is maddening. The Cyclists' Touring Club have long campaigned against compulsory helmet laws for numerous reasons, not least because of the tendency to put off would be cyclists, and the fact that proscribing helmet wearing exaggerates the risks inherent in cycling.
The scene that triggered the ban is a case in point - a young woman wearing a dress, without a helmet on a wide road – rather than someone in hi viz on a specialist bike, with panniers packing a change of clothes. It's the embodiment of cycling as something utterly casual and unremarkable, that requires little skill or thought that can easily be incorporated into your routine, to help you get around that little bit quicker. The type of cyclist the UK's cycling minister says he wants to see more of, and sort of scene that might encourage a lot of people to take up cycling, especially if they recognise that it's not particularly risky. Instead, we're told it's "socially irresponsible" to show this kind of image on screen, as if Cycling Scotland had filmed someone bare knuckle boxing before the watershed.
As ever, the message seems to be that the onus is on cyclists to protect themselves from danger on the roads, and that any injuries that befall them are their own fault. Despite constant calls for politicians to look at infrastructure in cities, instead cyclists are stopped by police and upbraided for trying to find safer spots to stop. When people are killed by heavy goods vehicles, rather than question whether such vehicles should be in city centres, Boris Johnson suggests a ban on headphones, despite no evidence they're responsible for fatalities.
The one time I was knocked off my bike, I wasn't wearing a helmet. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't: it's a personal choice, after all. As I was loaded into the ambulance with a broken leg and no other injuries, one of the police officers remarked, "I bet you wish you'd worn a helmet!" as though a helmet would have stopped the motorist responsible throwing a door into my path without checking the road first.
So now ads must show all cyclists with helmets, cycling in the gutter, the most dangerous spot of all.
If we really wanted to encourage cyclists, we could show ads like this, which normalise cycling, and encourage motorists to give us space on the roads.
