Real safety for kids cycling comes in numbers - only when we get proper segregated cycle pathways will we swallow that hard dart of fear and set them free, says Samantha Laurie.
Every morning as I watch my son cycle off to school a tiny shard of fear pricks my gullet. Text me when you get there. (He’ll forget.) Ride on the pavement round the roundabout. (Unlikely since he’s already been told off twice about this – once by the police.) Make sure you wear your helmet. (Fortunately, I’m still winning on this one.)
I know as well as the next parent that my messages are counterproductive. I know that a 14-year-old shouldn’t be on the pavement. I know that my stream of instructions make him anxious. I also know that statistically cycling isn’t that dangerous: Britain has one of the lowest cyclist accident rates in Europe and overall the number of cyclists killed on the roads has halved in the past 30 years (despite a 15 per cent growth in cycle traffic over the past decade).
The problem is one of subjective safety. My son is one of just two per cent (yes, two per cent) nationally of kids who regularly cycle to school. Because cycling doesn’t feel safe parents don’t let their children do it. And when so few do it, it becomes disproportionately dangerous. The less experience car drivers have of child cyclists the less tolerance and patience they show. Equally, as a generation of new drivers who have never cycled take to the wheel patience, courtesy and respect for cyclists diminishes.
What is clear is that something is wrong when the average distance to secondary school is just three miles (two miles to primary) yet just two cent of children cycle to school. Cycling England, the national body abolished this month in government cost-cutting, reports that whilst over half of schoolchildren would like to cycle to school it’s their parents who object citing road safety, poor school provision for bike parking, lack of knowledge of safe routes to school and impractical baggage.
Sustrans, the sustainable transport charity, has taken up their concerns with brio. Here in Surrey, a county which has one of the highest levels of children taken to school by car in the UK, a dedicated Sustran’s Bike It officer in Reigate and Banstead has increased cycling in 22 participating schools to an impressive average of 32 per cent. At the heart of the programme is Bikeability, the modern, on-road version of cycle proficiency but Bike It also raises awareness of safe routes – through parks and towpaths – that children can use and campaigns hard for schools to provide better storage for bikes. Bike It officer, Gayle Rowson, runs bike maintenance classes, family cycle rides, bike breakfasts, transition rides for children to try out the route to secondary school. When parents raise the issue of siblings or a need to drive on to work as obstacles she talks to them about cycle sharing with other parents. She talks to children about rationalizing the amount of baggage they carry to and from school; to headteachers about organizing ‘cycle trains’; to parents about taking part in the training themselves.
It’s clearly working. The Bike It programme routinely quadruples the number of children who cycle to its member schools. But there are just 60 Bike It officers in the country – and just one in Surrey.
If children are to return to the streets much more is needed from parents in terms of expectation. Most parents would agree that they would like their children to cycle to school: health, freedom, fun, a sense of achievement, traffic reduction. There’s no reason why we wouldn’t. But the idea that we should aim for a model of mass cycling, with segregated pathways and cyclist priority, as experienced in say the Netherlands is seen as inconceivable.
Yet the Netherlands has not always been cyclist-led. In the 50s and 60s cycling was almost entirely excluded from government policy; existing cycle paths were removed to make way for more cars. The number of deaths on the roads rose, especially among children cycling to school. What changed this was a campaign in 1973 from a pressure group called Stop the Child Murder. The campaign to make cycling safer for children influenced government policy to such an extent that it prioritized the building of segregated cycle paths, which resulted in a rise in cycling and a reduction in cyclist deaths.
Here in Britain, cycling campaigns have been much less ambitious. Gains have been piecemeal and tokenist: a few hundred metres of disjointed narrow cycle lanes along a busy road, advance stop lines for cyclists at junctions. It’s true that campaigning for cyclists is not easy in Britain – there is little government or even public enthusiasm for spending public money on a minority group, and not one best liked at that. But what if campaigners took the Dutch lead and campaigned for child safety? What if they tapped into a groundswell of support from a majority group – parents – to win back the right for their children to be safe on the roads?
Campaigners are quick to say there’s not the money for major infrastructure changes. But it took just 15 years of committed and consistent policy for the Dutch to transform their cities. And there is certainly the appetite – parents have simply become accustomed to not voicing it.
If there is any chance of stopping the rot in child cycling it needs to address those subjective parental fears. It’s no good telling parents that cycling has got safer – they need to see segregated cycle paths, compulsory child helmets and 20 mile an hour zones. On most of those they would be at odds with most current cycle campaigns: for example, CTC, the national cyclists’ body opposes segregated pathways and shared use pavements because of the dangers of having to negotiate side roads and campaigns against compulsory helmets for fear of putting riders off.
But these are priorities for parents. Many of us try very hard to swallow the exaggerated fears of predatory paedophiles, speeding cars and general ill-intent that threaten to freeze-dry our children’s childhood but real safety for kids on the roads comes in numbers. Only when most of us are prepared to swallow that bubble of fear will parents break with a twenty year habit of picking up the car keys. And only when parents start lobbying in earnest for better cycling infrastructure will that happen.
