CHAPTER 2

A Safer World

The Death of Simone Langenhoff

On the morning of October 14, 1971, Simone Langenhoff set off from her family’s rural house near Helvoirt, a village in the southern Netherlands, to cycle to her school. The trip, just over a mile down a narrow, tree-lined road, was one she made every day, usually with one of her five older sisters—but on this occasion she was alone.

As Simone pedaled along that autumn morning, a woman drove her car at high speed around a blind bend and plowed into the girl, killing her. Simone Langenhoff was six and a half years old.

Almost forty-five years later, Simone’s elder sister Anita says she recalls little of the precise circumstances of the crash. But she is very clear about the effect it had on her family.

“There is a story that the woman had been drinking the night before, but I’m not certain,” Anita says. “Afterwards, my father was very angry, though he never talked to us about it. My mother went to a hospital, from grief. She had a breakdown. And our father just thought about his work. The family fell apart.” Soon, Anita explains, her parents divorced. The five surviving sisters remained with a mother who never properly recovered from the loss: “We children were on our own. Not only because of the accident. But the accident changed everything.”¹

Such pointless deaths, and the spiraling agony which follows in their wake, are still depressingly routine. Around the world, about 1.25 million people a year are killed on roads, almost 3,500 every day. A quarter of these are pedestrians or cyclists.²

But in one respect, Simone Langenhoff’s death was special. Her father, Vic Langenhoff, was a prominent journalist with de Tijd, or the Time—a Dutch daily newspaper. Heartbroken at the loss of his youngest child and enraged at the 150-guilder fine imposed on the speeding driver—slightly under $50 at the exchange rates of the time—Langenhoff set about highlighting the human consequences of a booming postwar car culture in the Netherlands, traditionally a nation of cyclists. Over the previous twenty years, as the total miles driven per year in the country had increased fivefold, road deaths also rocketed, from about 1,000 in 1950 to 3,300 in 1971. Among the 1971 fatalities were 450 children, one of them Simone Langenhoff.

Every day, her father discovered, twenty-five more Dutch children were injured by vehicles—almost half of them while riding bikes. His country was, Langenhoff calculated, the most dangerous place in the world for child traffic casualties.

He began to meet other concerned parents around the Netherlands. Then one of his older daughters, age ten, was hospitalized along with four friends after a speeding driver forced them off their bikes. It was time for action.

On September 20, 1972, Langenhoff used a full page in de Tijd to announce a new road safety pressure group. The name was revealed in a dramatic banner headline: “Stop de Kindermoord,” or “Stop the Child Murders.” The organization was, he wrote, “trying to break through the apathy with which the Dutch people accept the daily carnage of children in traffic.”

Langenhoff unleashed his months of grief and fury on “the criminals” in regional governments, who were busy redesigning the roads for the new fleets of motor vehicles without thought for those who, like Simone, had no choice but to walk or cycle.

“This country chooses one kilometer of motorway over one hundred kilometers of safe cycle paths,” he wrote. “There’s no pressure group? Let’s start one. Parents of little victims, worried parents of potential little victims: unite.”³

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That’s precisely what they did. Langenhoff’s article galvanized the fears and anger of millions of Dutch people who resented the sudden and unannounced tyranny of these anonymous, deadly metal boxes. Stop de Kindermoord turned swiftly into a major protest organization. Its members used innovative, direct-action tactics like staging mass “die-ins” and occupying busy roads, turning them into impromptu play streets.

As Langenhoff stepped back from the front line, others took over. The group’s first appointed president was Maartje van Putten, a young student and mother who lived near one of Amsterdam’s new, busy arterial roads and watched in alarm from her apartment window every morning as young schoolchildren tried to cross it.

She and the group set about agitating for better cyclist and pedestrian provision. “We used to block streets at rush hour,” says van Putten, later a member of the European parliament. “We stood hand in hand in a circle. That, of course, would get us on the radio and in the papers. Soon enough we’d get the pedestrian crossing light we wanted, or the cycle lane. It became normal that people were doing those things across the country.”⁴

The politicians gradually started to listen. There was an unexpected boost with the 1973 oil crisis, which saw gas prices suddenly quadruple, prompting governments to question the anticipated future in which the car was the dominant form of transportation. More support came two years later with the formation of the very vehemently named First Only Real Dutch Cyclists’ Union.

Gradually, miles and miles of bike infrastructure was built and the cyclists started to come back. Now almost 30 percent of all trips in the Netherlands are made by bike, many more in urban areas. In Amsterdam, almost half of all city center journeys are on two wheels. In Utrecht this figure is 60 percent.⁵ The eventual Dutch method of separated bike lanes and tamed vehicle traffic has proved the model around the world.

It’s possible none of this would have happened without Stop de Kindermoord. Most other European nations stuck with the supremacy of cars for several more decades, leaving bikes as the niche domain of hobbyists and die-hard devotees. In contrast, the Netherlands gradually, painstakingly reengineered its streets to allow everyday people to ride ordinary bikes for routine tasks, without notable danger or intimidation.

Cars were not banished. The Dutch own slightly more per head of population than the British, though still some way behind American or Australian levels. But these are less likely to be used for short, single-person urban journeys. About nineteen thousand miles of separated lanes insulate cyclists from fast-moving motor vehicles.⁶

The Dutch now see slightly under six hundred traffic deaths a year, fewer than a third of whom are cyclists.⁷ Barely any children are killed, generally fewer than half a dozen.

As for the rural road on which Simone Langenhoff died, in many ways it still looks the same as her father described in his newspaper article: narrow, laid with paving slabs, and lined by tall oak trees. But now it has smooth, separated lanes behind the trees on both sides, allowing people to cycle or walk in safety. The modern-day Simones can ride in perfect peace of mind.

It’s fair to argue the changes begun by Vic Langenhoff saved many thousands of lives. He died in 1997, and spoke little in his later years about Stop de Kindermoord. But Anita Langenhoff, now fifty-six, finds it hard to even consider the positive repercussions from her sister’s death, an event she says she still thinks about every day.

“It had such an effect on the whole family,” she says. “Can I think about anything positive coming from it? No, no. Personally, no. For other people maybe. But not for us.”⁸

Fear, Near Misses, and Why Road Culture Matters

Writing about the tyranny of road danger is a potentially tricky area for a book devoted to mass cycling. It’s important to reiterate that even in many nations without anything approaching Dutch or Danish levels of cycle infrastructure, riding a bike is considerably safer than many people commonly believe. Even in Britain, where a mere 1 or 2 percent of all trips are made on a bicycle, the average person would ride two million miles before they faced even a serious injury.⁹ So why scare people?

The simple response is that they’re already scared. Study after study has shown that the number one reason most people don’t cycle is because of a fear of motor traffic.

One of the most famous investigations of this phenomenon was a 2010 report from a research team who spent months in four British cities, interviewing dozens of families in depth about their travel choices. Almost all said the same thing: they could not imagine riding a bike in such overwhelmingly car-oriented urban layouts.

Even more experienced riders often saw the roads as “a dangerous obstacle course,” wrote Dr. Dave Horton, who led the three-year study: “The minority of people who cycle in English cities tend to do so despite, not because of, existing conditions,” he noted. “Some people try cycling, but are quickly put off.”¹⁰

A later UK research project delved more deeply into this environment of intimidation. The 2015 investigation, led by Dr. Rachel Aldred—a transport academic who specializes in cycling—found that while actual injuries might remain fairly rare, fear and alarm are near-daily companions for far too many riders. Her self-explanatory Near Miss Project saw around 1,500 UK cyclists fill out website diaries about their on-the-road cycling experiences on a single day chosen by them in advance.

The findings were shocking. While the frightening incidents recorded varied in seriousness, from a driver overtaking too closely to someone deliberately driving at them, more than 80 percent of people said they experienced at least one on their given diary day. The study calculated that “very scary” events were a weekly ordeal on average, with almost three-quarters connected to motor vehicles.¹¹

“I was in the cycle lane,” began one entry from a female rider in Bradford, in the north of England. “Lorry comes up behind and starts hooting, not once but repeatedly, and revving his engine. I swerved, he got past, I caught him up at the next red light so it was entirely pointless. Terrified.”¹²

You could ask almost any cyclist in places like the UK, the Unites States, or Australia and they’d have dozens of similar tales. A few days before writing these words I was cycling to my office when a construction truck overtook me far too close on a main road, the driver honking the horn as he went past to mark his displeasure at my not cycling in the gutter. All of fifty yards later he was obliged to stop for a red light.

I caught up and spoke to him as calmly as the adrenaline allowed: that was intimidating and scary. If the shock from the horn blast had made me wobble, I could have fallen off onto the pavement, or worse, under the wheels of the truck. I’m a human being. Why? He stuck out his tongue and rolled up the driver window.

There now exists the beginnings of a pushback against this frightening road culture, notably through the Vision Zero movement. Begun by Sweden’s government in the late 1990s with the lofty intent of working toward a road environment in which no one dies, it has now been embraced to varying extents in other countries, often with cyclists at the forefront. In the United States it gained particular prominence when New York City mayor Bill de Blasio adopted it in 2014 with a ten-year target for eliminating traffic deaths. However, critics note that this deadline currently looks set to arrive about thirty years later than that.

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What is behind this culture? The simple answer is normalization. Even in the relatively cosseted modern world of richer countries, where fatal epidemics are rare and bad, and workplace injuries a cause for lengthy investigation, killing or maiming someone on the roads is still seen as tragic but inescapable. It is, to use a ubiquitous and linguistically poisonous term, an “accident.”

This in turn fuels a complacent, entitled, careless driving culture, where millions of people who would see themselves as moral, kind, and careful people nonetheless get into a motor vehicle and routinely, unthinkingly, put others’ lives in peril.

Like the truck driver who skimmed me, the great majority of these incidents don’t actually hurt anyone, but often this is down to pure chance: a driver’s assumption that a cyclist won’t swerve because of a bump in the road, or will brake in time for a car turning across their front wheel. Worst of all, such maneuvers are pointless, particularly in cities, where cyclists almost always catch up at the next junction. When it happens to me I try to ask the driver why they did it. The response can be outright hostility. More often than not it’s just bafflement.

This complacency comes from a mind-set in which some deaths are seen as more notable, more avoidable, than others. The normalization of road deaths is so embedded it can be shocking to survey the contrast. Between 2001 and 2013, 3,380 American citizens died due to terrorism at home or abroad, the great majority in the September 11 attacks.¹³ Over that same period a shade over 501,000 people died on US roads, or the cumulative terrorism total roughly every month.¹⁴ One much-quoted study suggested that the decision of many US travelers to switch from air travel to driving in the wake of September 11 brought about around 1,500 additional road deaths.¹⁵

Those killed in road crashes don’t have a permanent memorial or a museum, or a Department of Homeland Security with a $38 billion annual budget aimed at making sure it never happens again. At most, some are commemorated by loved ones with a cross or other marker at the place where they died.

This is the extra poignancy behind the story of Simone Langenhoff. Remarkably few other traffic deaths prompt such public outrage or national self-examination. In the overwhelming majority of cases, while families are torn apart by grief, society at large continues as if nothing much has really happened.

The Thousand-to-One Chance

In the early 1950s, when the death toll on Britain’s roads was almost three times higher than it is today despite vehicle numbers being just 15 percent of the modern total, Alan Lennox-Boyd, the minister for transport in Winston Churchill’s then-government, said something very wise about auto crashes.

“Accidents in the main arise from the taking of very small risks a very large number of times,” he said. “A thousand-to-one chance against an accident may not be rated very high, but for every thousand people that take it there will be an accident.”¹⁶ Little did Lennox-Boyd know how personally prescient were his words. Three decades later, at age seventy-eight, he was trying to cross Fulham Road, a busy thoroughfare in West London, when he was hit by a car and killed.

The slightly unpalatable fact is that more or less everyone you know who drives a motor vehicle will routinely take such thousand-to-one risks, half-conscious acts that, even if they don’t kill a retired politician or a six-year-old child, help keep our cities and streets off-limits for many people. If you drive, you probably do it, too.

This might sound as if I’m a militant antidriver. I’m not. Over the years I’ve owned various cars, as well as a couple of captivating if unreliable camper vans. That said, I’m generally happier not owning a car, in part because of the inevitable, unrelenting expense, but also because every time I sit behind the wheel I’m agonizingly aware that this is the one time in my everyday existence where there’s a real, if statistically slight, chance that I could take a life.

This just doesn’t happen when you get on a bike. It could, but barring a turn of events considerably rarer than winning a lottery jackpot, it doesn’t. Significantly more British people die on average each year due to stings from bees or wasps than from a bike hitting them. Quite often the figure is zero.¹⁷

People don’t change their personality when they get off a bike and into a car. It’s simply that the risks you take in a vehicle can have appallingly magnified consequences. It’s not morals, it’s just physics.

Consider that most prosaic of things: distraction. I’m not immune to this on a bike. In my early teens, in an incident that went straight into family legend, I cycled down my hilly home street while fiddling with a loose cable that ran between the bike’s front wheel and a clunky mechanical speedometer. Inevitably I rode straight into the back of a parked postal van. I was briefly stunned and spent a night at the hospital for observation. My bike was bent beyond repair. But the van was barely damaged and the postman himself, who was sitting in the front sorting letters, suffered nothing more serious than the shock of hearing a loud bang and finding, on investigation, a slightly confused schoolboy tangled up in a twisted bike frame.

I’m by no means alone. One of the curiosities of riding a bike around a Dutch city is the apparent inability of local teenagers to cycle without simultaneously checking their phones, even sending text messages one-handed. But this generally happens at little more than 10 mph, and on a dedicated bike lane. Serious repercussions happen, but they are rare.

In contrast, according to US government figures, 3,154 people died on American roads in 2013 due to crashes connected to distracted drivers. Of those killed, around 450 were pedestrians or cyclists.¹⁸ The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration makes the chilling calculation that at any one moment of daylight across America about 660,000 drivers are looking at a phone or another electronic device.¹⁹ Teenagers are, inevitably, the most likely age group to kill themselves or others in a car by not paying attention.

Another of Lennox-Boyd’s routine thousand-to-one risks is high speed, as Vic Langenhoff knew, to his endless sorrow. Leah Shahum, a former cycling advocate who now heads the Vision Zero Network in the United States, says limiting vehicle speeds is “the biggest factor” in reducing deaths. “That’s not something we’ve talked a lot about in America,” she says. “If we at Vision Zero Network were only to achieve one thing—I hope we do more—it would be to help communities effectively manage speed.”²⁰

That speeding is dangerous is both much debated and, when you look at the evidence, utterly irrefutable. One particularly tenacious academic, Rune Elvik, from Norway’s Institute of Transport Economics, has spent much of his career perfecting a statistical analysis known as the Power Model. This takes actual data from more than a dozen countries to estimate by how much road casualties increase given a certain rise in traffic speeds.

When a few years ago Britain’s government mooted raising the speed limit on the country’s motorways from 70 mph to 80 mph, Elvik was able to inform them that, even assuming a conservative 3 mph rise in actual speeds, they could expect about twenty-five more deaths and one hundred serious injuries a year.²¹ The plan was soon dropped.

And yet speeding remains ubiquitous. About two-thirds of American drivers admit to regularly exceeding speed limits,²² with similar statistics in the UK. This isn’t just an issue for freeways or rural main roads. A series of streets around me in southeast London have been designated 20 mph zones by the local council, mainly a theoretical aspiration given the lack of enforcement. One of them has a digital signboard telling drivers how fast they are actually going. I’ve spent ten minutes at a time there and not seen a single vehicle adhere to the limit.

In part, this is because most speeding is semi-officially tolerated. License plate–recognizing speed cameras remain illegal in many US states. In Britain the top-selling newspaper, the Sun, ran a recent campaign seeking to force police using radar speed guns to wear high-visibility jackets to give drivers proper warning of their presence.²³ They have not, as yet, suggested that police offer the same courtesy before they search people for knives, which kill considerably fewer British people each year.

Why do so many people tolerate, even encourage, putting others in danger? Again, it comes down to culture. Those seeking more equality on the roads are battling almost a century of motorist-led propaganda arguing that the deaths of cyclists and pedestrians is not just unavoidable but, in many cases, somehow the fault of the victims.

Murder Most Foul and Blaming the Victim

In 1935, the year British drivers first had to take a test to be allowed on the roads, the secretary of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), set up twenty years earlier amid rapidly increasing traffic deaths, addressed a meeting of the organization.

“Animals have now developed a road sense, but children must still be trained,” argued Colonel A. A. Pickard. “Thirty years ago dogs preferred to take their nap in the middle of the road. Hens invariably flew across the road in front of your car. The chicken of today, however, hatches out with an instinct of road sense. It flies into the hedge, not into the road. Dogs are equally wary. You will see them look before crossing. They recognize the warning of the horn and stop, or even get back to the pavement. But it may be many generations before babies are born with a road sense instinct.”²⁴

In that year, 6,502 people were killed on Britain’s roads. Of these, just 196 were drivers. Another 1,400 were cyclists, and just over 3,000 were pedestrians. About 75 percent of pedestrian fatalities involved either children or people over sixty.²⁵ This was a one-way massacre, and yet even RoSPA, an organization officially dedicated to road safety, seemed to believe it was up to the victims to adapt for the convenience of their killers.

Pickard’s speech is quoted in one of the most righteously furious publications about death on the roads. Murder Most Foul, written in 1947 by the largely forgotten J. S. Dean of the Pedestrians’ Association pressure group, spends an eloquent if occasionally melodramatic 114 pages denouncing “the motor slaughter” and, in particular, the pervasive message that it was somehow not the fault or responsibility of drivers.

“The more the drivers kill and maim the more right they become, and the more right they become the more dangerously they drive,” Dean wrote. “Or, to put the position from the opposite side, the more the non-drivers, and especially the pedestrians, are killed and maimed, the more this is proof of their carelessness and refusal to be ‘educated,’ and the more this is accepted the less care is taken by the drivers to avoid them, and this is applied to the youngest children and the oldest and most infirm persons.”

Dean was scathing about the efforts of supposed road safety groups like RoSPA, particularly the message that rather than placing the obligation on drivers it was up to children to learn road sense from infancy. “Put the idea of death and destruction deep into their minds,” he wrote. “Never let them forget it. Fill their lives with it. Teach them fear. Make them frightened and keep them frightened.”²⁶

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All this would be a historical curiosity were it not for the fact that many of these attitudes remain, albeit expressed less bluntly. The modern road safety message in many countries, especially to children and young people, is still based around encouraging them to wear bright colors, emphasizing that they must endeavor to be seen, rather than the responsibility falling on drivers to travel at sufficiently slow speeds and look out for people.

Worse still, the evidence seems to be that rather than such advice making cycling and walking any safer, it just seems to make it less common.

One highly influential early examination of this phenomenon came in 1990, when Mayer Hillman, a maverick architect-turned-campaigner for livable cities, examined what he saw as a fundamental contradiction in the official narrative about traffic safety in the UK. On one hand, proudly quoted official statistics showed the rate of child traffic deaths per vehicle on the road had decreased by 98 percent since the 1920s.²⁷ At the same time, Hillman noted, the government was running a fear-based traffic safety campaign aimed at young people, showing someone about to step off a curb with the slogan “One false move and you’re dead.” Which was correct?

To untangle this paradox, Hillman and his colleagues at the Policy Studies Institute think tank replicated a series of surveys carried out by the same organization in 1971 into how much children were allowed to walk and cycle unsupervised. With increasing economic prosperity, cycle ownership had actually risen among younger schoolchildren over the period, they found, from two-thirds to 90 percent. But while in 1971 almost 70 percent of children with bikes were allowed to ride them on the roads, by 1990 this had plummeted to 25 percent.²⁸ Far fewer children walked unaccompanied, especially to school.

This was not an era of greater safety for children, Hillman concluded; it was one of greater confinement to the home. “The ‘good old days’ of reminiscence and the ‘good new days’ depicted by the accident statistics are reconciled by the loss of children’s freedom,” Hillman concluded. “The streets have not become safer, they have become, as the government’s poster proclaims, extremely dangerous. It is the response to this danger, by both children and their parents, that has contained the road accident death rate.”²⁹

A US-led study into the subject from 2009 found a similar picture in America. While in 1969 almost 90 percent of US children who lived within a mile of school would walk or cycle, by 1999 this had dropped to 30 percent. The researchers found a much-celebrated 70 percent decrease in child pedestrian fatalities was matched by a 67 percent decrease in walking to school.³⁰

Society had been rebalanced to favor the motorist, wrote the authors of this study, titled “Who Owns the Roads?” “Soon after the automobile’s creation, its proponents worked to reconstruct the meaning of safety, removing the connection between speed and danger,” they said. Even language had adapted, they noted, with words like “jaywalker” coined to describe those who “failed to show deference to the motorist by walking where and how they always had.”

This tilting of the odds away from vulnerable road users is so institutionalized that many people don’t even realize it’s there. A small number of people, however, find themselves obliged to face up to this culture of indifference, usually for the most awful of reasons.

How to Get Away with Murder

In June of 2000, police arrived unexpectedly at Cynthia Barlow’s office in London. Her daughter, Alex McVitty, had been crushed by a cement truck that overtook and turned across the twenty-six-year-old as she cycled to her job at a law firm. The appalling grief of so suddenly and violently losing her only child was not even the end of Barlow’s ordeal. She soon found that she was facing a police and justice system that appeared to care little for such deaths.

The truck driver, who said he had not seen Alex in his various mirrors, was charged with dangerous driving. Before the trial Barlow asked repeatedly to be warned of any distressing evidence, and was assured there would be none. She then arrived at the court on the first day to find a TV screen set up to play graphic security camera footage of her daughter’s last moments.

The prosecution’s evidence seemed strong, but when questioned in court over a key element of the incident, a policeman admitted he couldn’t read his own writing in his notebook. The driver was acquitted.

“I got to the end of all the legal processes in a state of absolute despair,” Barlow says. “My experiences had changed me completely. Nothing was going to be the same, ever again. The trust you instinctively have in the system was all gone.”

Barlow decided to fight back. She bought shares in CEMEX, the construction materials firm whose truck killed Alex, so she could attend its annual meeting and ask directors how they would make their vehicles less likely to kill cyclists in the future. CEMEX is now at the forefront of such safety efforts, including driver training and extra mirrors, sensors, and alarms in truck cabs.

As with the aftermath of the tragedy that hit the Langenhoff family in 1971, it’s very likely that Cynthia Barlow’s actions have saved other lives. But like Anita Langenhoff, when asked if this might be a reason for some pride, Barlow seems barely able to understand the question. “I’m not interested in me,” she says finally. “What matters is my daughter.”³¹

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To make another comparison with the story of Simone Langenhoff, part of the horror of Barlow’s experience is how unexceptional it is. Because traffic deaths are seen as everyday and inescapable, law enforcement and judicial systems often treat them as accidents even when they are very clearly not. This inbuilt set of assumptions seems all the stronger when the victim is a cyclist.

Shortly before this chapter was written, two cyclists died in quick succession in crashes in Brooklyn. Lauren Davis, thirty-four, was struck by a Fiat car in the morning rush hour on a narrow one-way street. Later that day New York police officers briefed reporters that Davis had been “salmoning”—riding against the traffic flow—and hence the Fiat driver was not investigated. Five days later, James Gregg was crushed by an eighteen-wheeler truck. The first police account claimed the thirty-three-year-old had been holding on to the vehicle to propel himself along and fell under a wheel. Local media duly carried reports about both incidents as being tragic but largely self-inflicted.

There was one problem: none of this seemed to be true. A witness emerged who had been riding behind Davis before the crash, moving with the traffic, not against it. She said she saw the Fiat turn across Davis into a side road.³² With Gregg, the police soon dropped the claim about him holding on to the truck, and then speculated that “wind force” had sucked the young man under the wheel.³³ Neither police statement about Gregg’s death mentioned that the truck driver, legally, should not even have been driving on the residential street.

This phenomenon of automatically ascribing fault to vulnerable road users was investigated in a hugely depressing academic study from New Zealand, which focused on the death of an unnamed ten-year-old girl who was struck by a van and killed while trying to cross a road on her way back from school one Wednesday afternoon.

The first police report concluded the girl had run across the road “without any warning.” There was, it added, no suggestion of excess speed by the driver, who was said to be traveling at about 40 kph.

However, a civil engineer sent to examine traffic on the road at the same time a week later found speeds were, on average, 8 kph above the 50 kph limit. The volume of traffic allowed pedestrians just a four-second gap to cross. Running was the only option.

Despite this, the subsequent, brief inquest fully endorsed the police view. The coroner speculated the child might have “been doing a little bit of jaywalking.” Such a phrase, noted the Auckland university researchers, “clearly signals negligence on the part of the child.”

They added: “Structural contributors, in particular the causal factors pertaining to the transport system, emerge from this process of moral arbitration unscathed. Poverty, the volume of traffic, the lack of provision of safe places to cross, and, particularly in this case, the state’s inability to enforce its own speed limits, are ignored.”³⁴

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There is a well-known adage among the worldlier breed of British police officers: If you want to get away with murder, do it in a car. Looking at cases like the death of Alex McVitty and the New Zealand schoolgirl, it is hard to disagree. Had the CEMEX truck driver been so inattentive on a construction site, he would most likely have faced manslaughter charges under workplace safety laws. If the girl, who would now be in her thirties, had been killed by more or less anything else—a knife, unsafe food, a faulty gas heater—the investigation would have been much more thorough.

This bias continues into the court system, particularly when juries become involved. Under the English legal system, if you’re accused of certain traffic offenses—for example, causing death by careless driving—you are allowed to decide whether the case is heard by a magistrate sitting alone or at a higher court, with a jury. A magistrate can jail you for six months at most. If you’re convicted by a jury, the sentence can be five years.

And yet, most canny lawyers advise their clients to opt for a jury trial. Why? Because juries are notoriously wary of convicting drivers. Martin Porter, a leading personal injury barrister who is also a keen cyclist, says driving offenses “seem far more likely than other serious crimes to invoke empathy and compassion from a jury.”

“‘There but for the grace of God go I’ is not a thought likely to cross many jurors’ minds with murder, rape, terrorism, or knife crime,” he says. “But surveys show that a majority of drivers admit to breaking speed limits, and almost all can probably remember a lapse in concentration or worse when in a car.”³⁵

Even if a driver admits guilt or is convicted, the penalties are often laughably low. A 2014 analysis of data from forty-five UK police forces found that of all the drivers convicted in connection with incidents in which a cyclist was killed, just 44 percent received any sort of jail time. More than a quarter were not even banned from driving.³⁶

It is, in fact, surprisingly difficult for drivers to lose their licenses in many places. Under the UK system drivers receive “points” for infractions, ranging from three for minor offenses to ten or more for, say, driving while drunk. If a driver amasses twelve points, they should normally have their license suspended for a period.

However, magistrates have the discretion to not do this if, for example, they believe a person badly needs to drive for personal or work reasons. An investigation in 2013 found people still allowed on the roads despite amassing more than thirty or forty points. One man had been caught speeding eight times in little more than two months, but he was still driving legally, the researchers found.³⁷

It’s not hard to see the repercussions of this. One study of California court statistics by epidemiologists at UCLA found that drivers with prior citations were almost four times more likely to hit a child pedestrian than a randomly selected control group. This rose to more than thirteen times more likely for those with five or more citations. It might seem obvious that such people are more likely to cause harm. What’s arguably most shocking is that the majority of them were on the roads by right: 83 percent still had a valid license.³⁸

With the legal odds stacked so strongly against them, it’s little surprise so many people choose not to ride a bike.

Banishing the “Accident”

In recent years some people have begun to challenge this lexical approach. In 1993, Leonard Evans wrote an editorial in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) explaining why “crash” was a better word than “accident.” Eight years later he won the argument, and the BMJ banned the use of “accident” for road crashes. “An accident is often understood to be unpredictable—a chance occurrence or an ‘act of God’—and therefore unavoidable,” the BMJ’s North American editor Ronald M. Davis wrote. “However, most injuries and their precipitating events are predictable and preventable.”³⁹

The approach of Vision Zero is similar: to see road deaths as something that can be analyzed, predicted, and thus eventually eliminated. “When you map out where the severe and fatal crashes are, you often see trends,” says Leah Shahum. “It’s an unfortunate trend, but it’s often very helpful. City after city you have these concentrations of dangerous areas. For instance, in San Francisco, seventy percent of the severe crashes happen on twelve percent of the streets.”

While dozens of other cities have become interested in Vision Zero, Shahum says, none have as yet become as involved as San Francisco and New York. “It’s early days,” she says. “It will take time. It needs leaders to say that we’re going to need to do things in a dramatically different fashion. It doesn’t just mean doing a little bit better, working a little bit harder.”

What’s often not sufficiently appreciated is that creating streets that are more welcoming for cyclists has a wider safety dividend for other road users, particularly pedestrians. More bikes and fewer cars will create, to use the title of this chapter, a safer world.

Again, this is nothing to do with a supposed greater skill or moral rectitude of cyclists. It’s just physics, or more precisely kinetic energy—the force generated by motion. Kinetic energy increases exponentially as the object involved gets heavier and more rapid. As an example, consider me riding my solid, everyday bike at 12 mph. If some hypothetical inattention meant I hit a pedestrian, they would face kinetic energy of about 1,250 joules. That’s not insignificant, but it could be much worse. Had I been driving the last car I owned, a relatively tiny Nissan MICRA, the energy imparted of that traveling at 30 mph would have equated to just short of 100,000 joules. Make it a midsized SUV at 35 mph, and suddenly we’re at almost 270,000 joules. It’s a very different impact.

Of course, predicting what happens in a particular real-world collision is impossible. Pedestrians, and other cyclists, do die when struck by a bike, usually as a result of a secondary impact—for example, their head striking a curb as they fall. It happens, and is no less unimaginably tragic than any other road death. But it is also rare enough to be a much-reported news story when it does take place.

The other transformational safety effect concerns motor traffic itself. As we’ll see in chapter 5, a general prerequisite for mass cycling is not just separated lanes for bikes on faster routes but low vehicle speeds on quieter streets, typically no more than 20 mph and often less. It can be difficult to embed, but when this lower-speed system works there’s suddenly a lot less kinetic energy around to kill or injure people.

The precise effect of reduced driving speeds on pedestrian deaths is much debated, but there’s no doubt it is significant. One examination of casualty data from the UK and Germany found the risk of fatal injury to a pedestrian was between 3.5 and 4.5 times higher for a car traveling at 40 mph rather than 30 mph.⁴⁰ A US road safety group found the death rate for pedestrians is 2.3 percent for cars traveling between 10 mph and 20 mph. At 40 mph or more, 54 percent of people are killed.⁴¹

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As you might expect from all this, countries like the Netherlands and Denmark generally have good road safety records by global standards, although there are other factors at work—for example, tough drunk-driving laws. One apparent curiosity is Britain, which despite a near-nonexistent cycling culture has an identical road fatality figure to the Netherlands, with 2.8 fatalities a year per one hundred thousand people.⁴² How is this so? In part, it appears, this is because the benefits of safer traffic have not been shared equally.

British statistics for the number of people killed or badly injured on the roads show these almost halved over fifteen years, from forty-two thousand in 1999 to twenty-four thousand in 2014. But closer examination shows by far the biggest reduction came among drivers or passengers, and to a lesser extent among pedestrians. For cyclists, the absolute number of deaths and injuries was almost the same in 2014 as in 1999, without overall cycling levels having notably increased.⁴³

A decade and a half of massively improved road safety mainly benefited people inside vehicles, not those who needed the help most.

I Woke to Find Myself in a Dark Wood

This unequal battle on the roads has become gradually acknowledged in recent years. An official world day of remembrance for traffic victims every November was begun in 1993, and is now officially recognized by the United Nations.

The idea came from RoadPeace, a British charity set in 1992 by Brigitte Chaudhry, whose twenty-six-year-old son had been killed by a driver running a red light. Its pioneering campaigns focus particularly on the most vulnerable people, the victims of what RoadPeace calls “traffic homicide.” Amy Aeron-Thomas, the group’s executive director, argues that even campaigns like Vision Zero neglect this element of injustice.

“We do think there should be more priority given to reducing the threat of death, injury or even intimidation to others than to yourself,” she says. “If you look at the collisions between cyclists and cars or pedestrians and cars then you see that the pain and suffering is all on one side.”⁴⁴

More than a decade and a half after her daughter’s death, Cynthia Barlow is the chair of trustees for RoadPeace, and a respected national figure on traffic safety. But things could have been very different.

In the wake of the farcical court case that saw the acquittal of the driver who killed her child, Barlow says, she was seriously considering suicide. A concerned friend took her to see an exhibition of Botticelli’s drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy.

“At the entrance to the exhibition was a big picture of the first words of the poem: ‘Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood,’” Barlow remembers. “I kept going back to the exhibition and let my brain do what it was doing. Eventually I realized I was suicidal because I blamed myself for what had happened to my daughter’s case. I realized it wasn’t my fault, it was the system. Out of that came an absolute, unshakeable determination that things were going to change.”⁴⁵

Changing this system will be slow. Every day, around the world, there are new Simone Langenhoffs, new Alex McVittys. But the change will come. It must.