2009-10-20 - Rider Down/Fatality, Victoria Embankment

The family...spoke of their grief today and called for better safety for cyclists in London.

She always wore a helmet and was "lit up like a Christmas tree" with lights, reflectors and a high-visibility jacket.

Her donated organs saved three patients, including a 15-year-old boy.

[Her father] said: "The Mayor wants thousands more people on their bikes but more cyclists will be killed. It's not like Holland where the roads are built for bicycles. In London drivers are getting more and more aggressive and it's dangerous for even experienced cyclists.

sad story, good that the family are speaking up.

Awful, I wonder why her helmet failed her in this instance.

Awful, I wonder why her helmet failed her in this instance.

A helmet is little use in this sort of crash. They're designed for low-speed, low-impact crashes, and this doesn't sound like one. If the impact was relatively hard, it would simply have broken--what little force it could have protected from is unlikely to have had much bearing on the rider's well-being. Even if the crash is low-speed, low-impact, it is still possible to fall so awkwardly as to be badly injured even while wearing a helmet.

At any rate, the focus on the rider's equipment is exactly the wrong focus. The focus should be on what happened--what the motorcyclist was doing, what the rider was doing. Those are the important facts and will explain how the collision happened and how it could have been prevented. Helmets and hi-viz are a distraction.

They have to be emphasised in the reports though, to stem the inevitable speculation by ignorant serial commentators jumping on the no helmet/low visibility bandwagon.

That's fine, it's just factual reporting--there wasn't even the obligatory 'she died even though she was wearing a helmet' comment in the article.

It is of course clear that safety for cyclists must be improved. However, cycling in London is not dangerous--the number of incidents is very low compared to the number of trips made. What is dangerous are the individual situations in which fatalities occur. As for cycling in general, as with everything in life there is a certain level of risk involved, and it is important not to exaggerate the overall level of risk.

I know this sounds like a terrible thing to say when people have got killed, but there are hundreds of thousands of journeys made by bike every day, which adds up to (a roughly estimated by me on the basis of the estimated daily figure) 200 million bike journeys in London a year.

Twelve people have died this year, several hundred will be seriously injured (requiring hospitalisation), and there'll be around 2,500 slight casualties (that don't require hospitalisation). There is a high degree of under-reporting of slight injuries and a certain degree of under-reporting of serious injuries. In any case, these tragedies are all the more tragic as they are so rare--why them?

Changing the 'culture of complacency' is hard work and we need all hands on deck.