Cycling: UK H&S hysteria versus Copenhagen chic

Published by Matt Polaine | Filed under Bicycle, Cycling, Cycling infrastructure

I am a driver, motorcyclist, cyclist and of course pedestrian. I have raced bicycles on road and off road, driven on a race track, and motocrossed on a motorbike. I’ve done 70kmh on a bicycle down French mountains and cycled through London traffic. I am pretty good at judging risk and hazards.

However, in the UK we have a real deep-seated problem with pervasive and socially corrosive Health & Safety culture tipping into the insane. Born out of the good intentions of hazard awareness, now we have US-style liability vultures wrecking the social glue of common sense and personal responsibility.

Nowhere is this more focussed than the on-going debate on cycle helmets. I wear one when I cycle off-road because it protects me from my own inertia injury risk, and because I am pushing the limits when racing or training hard. Pootling around a forest track with the family does not merit protective head gear.

I also wear a cycle helmet on the road most of the time, but especially when training hard, but for a very different reason. It is to protect me from the highly unsavoury behaviour of UK insurers who are building a file of precedents of ‘contributory negligence’ used against those cyclists who are injured when a driver hits them. The claim made is that the cyclist is partly responsible for their injuries (ie crushed to death by a cement mixer) because they were not wearing protective head gear. This in many cases admonishes the driver of any responsibility, and is certainly the bias taken by UK police and the Crown Prosecution Service when it comes to apportioning blame and sentencing.

The rot that this H&S misinterpretation has created, along with US-style compensation culture, is now so rife in the UK, it is taken as almost normal. Yet this level of insanity - and it is insane when one considers all the externalities harmed from this cultural rot - can be clearly exposed when we look at most mainland European cultures, mainly northern European ones. I will take the city of Copenhagen for example.

In the UK people don’t cycle because it rains, it’s too cold, they look stupid in their hi-viz clothing, helmet with resultant helmet hair, body armour, protective gloves, protective eyewear, threatening traffic volumes, dangerous and thoughtless drivers, and lethal so-called cycle facilities.

Compare this to Copenhagen. It is colder, rains more (than East Anglia in the UK), snows more and is a far bigger city than Cambridge (where I live) which is supposed to have the highest density of cyclists in a city in the UK (in spite of efforts of local drivers and infrastructure design).

This website clearly shows how risk averse - and insane - our UK culture around cycling has become. As of the date stamp of this posting, I can not see a single cycle helmet on this website. I can however see many stylish (subjective I know) men and women cycling in the rain and snow, and in sub-zero temperatures.

Just take a look at all these photos and then consider our UK culture. Look at how motor traffic respects cyclists as part of the traffic, unlike here in the UK where we are treated as road vermin blocking progress.

Look at all the terrible risks cyclists are taking in Copenhagen; wearing scarves, riding with one hand, riding with an umbrella, and sin of sins - no-one wearing a cycle helmet.

Cambridge County and City Council will not publish any cycling promotional material with cyclists pictured without a helmet and some form of hi-viz gear on. I am sure this is also the from for many, if not all, other local authorities in the UK. This compounds the problem that cycling in the UK is sold as a highly hazardous activity, with a very real risk of severe injury without protective gear.

It is ironic therefore, that by ‘protecting’ cyclists from UK car-is-king culture, we are sentencing a whole generation to an early death from obesogenic disorders with far, far worse odds than a cycling injury. Of course misguided H&S officers won’t be around then to be beaten about the head with healthcare bills…