You are reading a single comment by @Oliver Schick and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@Oliver Schick
We don't have a thread on this question, which keeps coming up every once in a while (not only in the way discussed below, but also with suggestions to make Bikeability compulsory). Personally, I don't think it's a good idea to make any form of cycle training compulsory, and I'm pretty sure a majority of or most cycle trainers would agree, although it should certainly become much more widely available and more popular.
It's just been brought to mind by this story:
http://road.cc/content/news/172815-survey-most-cyclists-back-compulsory-cycle-training
Not surprisingly, the survey was 'commissioned' by an insurance company. Far be it from me to suggest that insurance companies have some kind of interest in imposing more conditions on people that could, perish the thought, be used to withhold insurance payouts.
Needless to say, this isn't about cycle training/Bikeability as we know it, either. It's just some kind of 'training', however that might be set up, and reflects current strongly-held prejudice. There's a fair guess that many respondents would have had something like the driving test in mind, as that's by far the best-known example of mode-based proficiency assessment, and in thinking about this, it is necessary to consider the implied parallelism with the driving test.
The driving test is compulsory, but there are many problems with it, such as the exam-based nature of it (people cramming, being set up to fail, and forgetting content), the resulting sense of entitlement ('you cyclists don't have to do a test'), over-estimation of one's own skills (as warned against by Churchill), the subsequent lack of enforcement and consequent disregard by drivers of road traffic legislation, etc.
Bob Davis has written on the driving test:
http://rdrf.org.uk/2015/05/27/what-is-the-driving-test-for-notes-on-its-social-function-at-the-80th-anniversary/
While, fortunately, road traffic casualties have been declining for the most part, I think he's right to say that not much (if anything) has changed in respect of the driving test.
Cycle training/Bikeability, of course, works on quite a different model than the driving test; for starters, it is learning outcome-based and not finishable by some kind of exam, doesn't set trainees up to fail, is flexible and non-institutionalised, and so forth.
Were such efforts to impose a compulsory exam on budding cyclists successful, the most likely candidate for the 'training' wouldn't be cycle training as we know it, but most likely some kind of regression to 'Cycling Proficiency' ('I failed my Cycling Proficiency'), possibly in age-based stages, and undoubtedly infused with the toxic scaremongering of helmets and hi-viz. Do not want.