Drum Major Institute Blog: End the Culture of Accepting Traffic Deaths
NYPD needs to crack down on dangerous driving like what killed Mathieu Lefevre, but it’s not just dangerous drivers who are at fault. Felix Salmon points to studies finding that 2/3rds of bike accidents happen because of unsafe cycling and safer biking would surely keep people alive.
Doh. A very nice call to action on traffic danger had to be watered down at the last moment by the irresistible urge to be the most reasonable man in the room by reminding everyone that “both sides” are inevitably “at fault”.
Here we have two studies uplifted by their association with the great Felix Salmon. Each time they are cited their results can be exaggerated and their credibility bolstered by their prior esteemed repeaters. Salmon quoted a book that quoted one clause from each study:
According to Mapes, a 1996 study by the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center found that “as many as a third of all bike accidents involved simply riding against the flow of traffic,” and a 2003–2004 Orlando, Florida, study found that “nearly two-thirds [of bike accidents] involved riding on the sidewalk or another unsafe choice by the cyclist.”
Do you spot the gross errors in Drum Major’s paraphrasing? It is like a game of telephone, except with adults who feign themselves more reasonable the more they garble basic facts. It is not “2/3rds of bike accidents”: in one study it is “as many as a third” and in another it is “nearly two-thirds”. (The average of that is less than half, which sounds rather different.)
And just as fundamentally, the studies do not find that accidents “happen because” of cyclist error: they “involve” some reported cyclist error. Traffic crashes often involve poor choices by several parties. This doesn’t mean that you can’t say anything based on studies of some classes of cycling error, but it does mean that you can’t assign fault based on them. To do that you would have to conduct a more detailed analysis than anyone above has had the interest to conduct. They want to declare fault but they don’t want to be bothered with the chore of determining it.
The cost of this sloppy citing is that myths undermining the Drum Major’s advocacy are reinforced. They think they are strengthening their message by sounding extra-reasonable, but really they are giving readers a reason to dismiss it: the belief that killed cyclists are usually at fault for their own deaths. It’s not some minor side question, it’s our society’s primary rationalization for the fatal status quo. It is the engine of the “culture of accepting traffic deaths”, and it has been given a shy squirt of gasoline by the same people saying it must be shut down.
Victim-blaming is the only way we can morally tolerate the regular killings of pedestrians and cyclists. When we have the courage to stop blaming the dead, the system of imperiling the living will unravel.
