Surprise, this won’t be about Québécois folk or metal bands, but about bike safety! I recently got interviewed by CTV on this issue and I would have had a lot to say, were it not for the limited time, so TV viewers got spared my logorrhea. Instead of leaving those thoughts unsaid, here they are.
When people talk about bike safety, the first thing that often comes to their mind is the bike helmet. Which seems reasonable, at first glance. But is it, really?
Anyone working in a profession dealing with hazards and accidents knows about the hierarchy of controls: a nifty system designed to minimize accidents, separating the hazard controls in five categories, by order of effectiveness. It’s part of the ISO 45001 standard.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE for short), in our case bike helmets, is at the bottom of that hierarchy, as it is the least effective. If we look at each control with our cycling glasses (another PPE!), we can link them to actual measures, policies or equipment:
- Elimination: the most effective of all. By removing the source of the hazard, the probability of an accident tends toward zero. In our case, that means making the streets car-free. Unfortunately for us, Ottawa shows little desire for it, even for short periods of time. Preston Street closed for several weeks due to the 417 construction works, a great opportunity to create a temporary pedestrian zone. Yet nothing happened. A temporary car-free space for one block of Somerset West? Councillor Troster “hit a brick wall of doubt” when she tried to get consensus on that. The NCC opening up Queen Elizabeth Drive to active transportation and people during summer? The mayor attacked the program using a cherry-picked video. Except for Sparks Street (and hopefully William Street, whose whole… 270m should be pedestrianised before 2027), the City refuses to create car-free spaces, despite the multiple proofs from Canada and beyond that pedestrianisation is good for people and for local businesses.
- Substitution: here the goal is to replace something very hazardous with something less hazardous. For us, that would be replacing cars by… well, by any other means of transportation, really, since none are as dangerous as cars. Here we’re talking modal share shifts: taking people out of cars and putting them on transit, on bikes, on foot. One big problem: in the newest Transportation Master Plan (TMP) documents Ottawa City Hall is aiming for a modal share of cars of 66% in 2046, vs 72,2% in 2005. Such low ambition is confounding. They’re even aiming for a 2046 public transit modal share that is lower than in 2005! Apparently a pandemic is a valid excuse for the next 20 years. As a comparison, in Montreal Centre cars’ modal share dropped 5 points, from 60% to 55% from 2013 to 2023. There’s a lot to be said regarding the TMP, but that would deserve a whole new post.
- Engineering Controls: now we’re entering the realm of bike infrastructure. “Isolate people from the hazard”: safe, separated cycle tracks and lanes. And granted, we’re seeing more and more of those in Ottawa, but the meagre funding means that those projects are happening at too slow a pace, more often than not as add-ons to road projects, and without any real effort to create a connected and comprehensive network that could take you from point A to point B without having to cycle in traffic.
- Administrative Controls: here we have all the rules that govern the roads – Highway Traffic Act, by-laws, etc. We need them, obviously, but they’re not effective enough and don’t account for human error. Do you know why we have red clearance intervals at traffic lights? Because people speed up upon seeing a yellow light, often crossing an intersection on a red light. As a side note, the City has an interesting mechanism in place, using money collected from fines related to violations of Administrative Controls to fund Engineering Controls, through the Road Safety Reserve Fund. The only issue? As the City’s Auditor General found out very recently, “revenue generated from red light cameras is not being allocated to the Road Safety Reserve Fund” but to the City’s operating budget and to the police.
- PPE: and we’re back to the helmet, the least effective solution to control hazard. By the way, did you know that bike helmets are designed to protect you from a fall, nothing more? The various standards test for a fall from around 2m high, and with a speed around 20 km/h. Something self-inflicted, not an encounter with a speeding pick-up truck. This is verified scientifically: as stated in this study which looked at traffic crashes-related deaths,”helmets could have helped the most in cases of single-vehicle crashes when cyclists fell off their bicycles or hit obstacles”. That said, they obviously can save lives and they do protect you, as do the other items falling into the PPE category: gloves, glasses, etc.
Respecting this hierarchy of controls would not only make biking safer, but would actually make it safer for everybody to enjoy a city: pedestrians would have more pedestrianised spaces and bike lanes to act as a buffer from the traffic lanes, drivers would be less numerous on the roads, lessening the risk of accidents and reducing congestion, etc.
Good advocacy focuses on the most effective forms of control. Bike helmets are useful, of course, and can save lives, but fixating on this without seeing the bigger picture does nothing to improve safety as a whole.
And remember, safety isn’t a shared responsibility. As Uncle Ben, borrowing from the French revolutionary Comité de salut public, once said to Spider-Man: “With great power comes great responsibility”. And since (horse)power lies in the hands of those driving motor vehicles, and of the policy-makers at all levels of government, they need to be held accountable. Ask them: “What are you doing for the safety of people on bikes?”. And let the City know how you feel every time you get the chance. Our newsletter will inform you weekly about engagement opportunities, you can sign up here (bottom of the page).
Be safe out there!