How Accidental is an Accident?

This piece appears in print in Salvage 14: Shrouded in Darkness. Issue 14 is available to buy individually here. Our poetry, fiction and art remains exclusive to the print edition, and our subscribers have exclusive access to some online content, including all audio content. New subscriptions can be taken out here, and start with the next issue. Or you can support our work with a digital subscription, and get instant access to all published issues, including the latest issue.

June 2021. A middle-aged man is on his way to work. He is on his bike, waiting to turn right from Great Dover Street onto Borough High Street. A car continues from Great Dover Street behind him, straight ahead across the junction. The back of the cyclist and the front of the car collide. The cyclist suffers a fractured collarbone as he falls to the ground. The driver doesn’t stop. The police are called. The ambulance takes the cyclist to hospital. The police take a statement from the cyclist. No further police action is taken. The driver continues with their life uninterrupted. The cyclist takes three months’ recuperation and three months of physiotherapy to recover. 

This happens all the time. This could be any of the 111 cyclists killed or the 16,347 injured on the roads in 2021, equating to two killed every week and another two injured every hour, according to the UK Government’s ‘Reported road casualties Great Britain annual report 2021’ and the ‘Reported road casualties in Great Britain pedal cycle factsheet 2021’. This is a normal type of collision: about three quarters of collisions involving cyclists occur near junctions (according to Transport for London’s ‘Vision Zero Action Plan’). This is a normal type of interaction: cyclists are 12.3 times (and pedestrians are 3.8 times) more likely to be injured per mile travelled than car occupants (according to the ‘Reported road casualties Great Britain annual report 2021’). This is a normal result for the driver: out of 25,892 serious injuries on the roads in 2021, there were only 793 prosecutions and just 385 convictions for causing serious injury by dangerous driving (according to the RoadPeace Dashboard). So why does it matter, if it’s something that happens every day? 

It matters because these ‘normal’ injuries and deaths are not accidental. They’re part of a pattern of traffic violence, a type of structural violence repeated at every junction, every country lane, and every driveway. This structural violence is caused by mass car ownership – with the car manufacturers as the protagonists and the state as the willing assistant making car usage as easy as possible. After the state’s sight was locked onto cars, it was easy for inertia to carry the country into a position of car (and oil) dependency. A state’s transport system built for cars easily muscles out all other transport modes, because – once the state has adopted a neoliberal capitalist mindset wherein public services must ‘pay their way’ – it makes public transport financially unviable. Add some neat propaganda associating cars with adulthood and freedom, and the country’s position of car dependency has secured itself. When the same types of collisions are happening to the same types of road users, even at the same junction, year after year, it would be naïve to call them accidents. Common-sense opinion chalks them up to a collection of unfortunate, but isolated, events which have randomly occurred in the empty space between buildings. While it’s true that the specific individuals who are hurt and killed may not be predetermined, the structural bias that turns cars into weapons for use against other road users makes this pattern of violence inevitable. 

I used to think that a collision indicated there was something wrong in the road layout. I thought whenever someone got injured on the road, it would provoke an investigation. I imagined people from the council or the police would rush in with clipboards and resolve whatever it was in the road that had caused the collision. I used to think that if (God forbid) I were to be hit by a car, then at least my injury or death would highlight the problem at that location and make the roads safer for other people.

This is what design standards are supposed to do in advance: create a consistent and predictable road network using pre-planned road layouts tested for safety. The roads in Great Britain have what’s known as a high level of formalisation, i.e. standardisation and regulation, like state schools do (in contrast to, say, housing’s private rented sector). Local councils enforce their own design standards based on national government documents and they undertake or contract maintenance; all British roads and junctions are designed by professionals and go through independent safety audits to check that they meet the relevant standards for layout and visibility. These checks are, in theory, meant to prevent collisions, or patterns of collisions, from occurring. 

But for pedestrians and cyclists, a certain level of injury and death has been factored into the standards, and this level is considered normal by the state (including the Department for Transport, local councils, the police) and by society at large. Thousands of pedestrians and cyclists are injured and hundreds killed in collisions on the roads every year, not through a failure in the application of standards but through the accurate application of standards that put cars, not the most vulnerable road users, first.

The problem is more with what the state isn’t doing than with anything it is doing. There has never been a requirement to provide pavements alongside every carriageway, or to build them to a minimum width, keep them clear, or provide pedestrian crossings every certain number of metres. Similarly, there has never been a requirement to provide protected cycle lanes (or even any cycle lanes at all), nor routes for cyclists to pass through junctions safely. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as the UK’s car ownership grew, the number of licenced vehicles increased by about 3.6 per cent every year (according to the Department for Transport’s (DfT’s) ‘Transport Statistics Great Britain 2013’ report), while the state encouraged road-building and car parking without any counterbalancing to protect space for pedestrians and cyclists – the latter is important because space equals safety for vulnerable road users. The Design Manual for Roads and Bridges (DMRB), which is written by government-owned company National Highways and has for decades been the main standards document for English roads, doesn’t account for pedestrians and cyclists in any substantial way because it’s intended for the strategic road network’s long car trips and freight movements. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, thanks in part to Reclaim the Streets movements and other anti-roads campaigns, there was a gradual recognition within the state that roads can be designed differently depending on their different functions, on a scale between ‘movement’ (trunk road) and ‘place’ (residential street), and can acknowledge pedestrians’ and cyclists’ needs. First published in 1977, ‘Design Bulletin 32’ (DB32) was one of the earliest standards for designing residential streets, but its stipulations were very car-oriented. It took until 2007 before a more place-focused document became national government policy in Manual for Streets: a new (and much more readable) standard acknowledging the prevailing mood at the time, with pedestrians at the top of the ‘user hierarchy’. 

For decades, in the absence of clear guidance on how to design urban streets to prioritise walking and cycling, local councils took up their favourite parts from the DMRB and adopted them into their own standards. Although some councils ‘review[ed] their standards and guidance to embrace the principles’ of Manual for Streets, as the document recommended, cultural change away from car-dominated streets proved a very slow process. Even today, the most progressive councils – which know by now that junctions designed to traditional standards will produce high numbers of pedestrian and cyclist deaths – nevertheless continue to turn a blind eye. What makes matters slower is that standards documents like Manual for Streets aren’t retroactive: they only apply to roads built after publication. To get comprehensive pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure, there would need to be a national audit identifying gaps, providing funding for local councils to fill those gaps, and some enforceable standards specifying minimum quality and quantity of pavements, crossings, and cycle lanes – but that was never on the cards. 

Years of car-based standards documents sustained a political culture in local councils where pedestrians and cyclists have to come up with, request and financially justify any infrastructure that’s specific to them, like pedestrian crossings or cycle lanes. For instance, throughout the 1980s and 1990s many councils required a calculation called PV2 to justify a new pedestrian crossing. This took into account traffic volumes and speeds, the road’s width, the number and severity of recent collisions, and the number of existing pedestrians crossing, using a numerical formula to determine whether a pedestrian crossing was needed. This is like measuring demand for a bridge by the number of people swimming across a river. Rather than prioritising pedestrians’ safety, councils considered every extra pedestrian crossing an expensive gift. Although the PV2 calculation, specifically, isn’t widely used any more, the political culture within local councils remains one of having to justify pedestrian and cycle infrastructure with ‘sufficient demand’. It requires considerable political will to design ‘expensive’ or ‘unnecessary’ protected space where it’s not required by Manual for Streets or 2020’s new cycling design guidance ‘Local Transport Note 1/20’; the majority of roads still throw all the modes into the same space and assume they will get along. 

When traffic mixes pedestrians, cyclists and cars, road safety campaigners say that the road design is ‘not forgiving of human error’ as it relies on drivers behaving perfectly and would work better if cyclists and pedestrians just didn’t exist. Any error can easily result in a serious or fatal collision for a cyclist, due to the fact that they’re in the same space at the same time as a vehicle of incomparably greater speed, mass, and engine power. Road safety campaigners, of which the biggest lobby is called ‘Vision Zero’, believe it’s important to ‘reduce the risk of a collision occurring through human error’. This is certainly true, however the adoption of Vision Zero policies by numerous state authorities around the world has been more of a surface-level intervention. Councils in England address collision reduction through a specific project, called ‘road safety’, rather than a comprehensive problem in how roads are designed and used. There are a number of statistical issues with this project, including that collisions are only recorded if the police are called, near misses are not recorded at all, and much of recent decades’ collision reduction is due to people avoiding travelling by foot or bike in the first place. National standards documents (and local councils’ application of them) assume that reducing the risk of collision occurring through human error means piecemeal changes to certain roads, such as cheap painted cycle lanes, advanced stop lines for cyclists, and narrow streets. In the same way that traffic lights are really a traffic management product with a concession to pedestrians tacked on the side, all these optional add-ons are only suitable for very low numbers of cycling and walking trips and reinforce the idea that non-car modes are a nuisance in relation to the serious business of driving cars. 

For example, most ‘mandatory’ painted cycle lanes (meaning it’s mandatory that cars don’t enter them) aren’t enforced with bollards or cameras. This is so that cars and big lorries can still drive into them if they need to, and delivery vans can pull into them to load – and to save councils money on bollard installation. And so drivers regularly do stray into them, rendering them pointless as a safety feature for cyclists. As for advanced stop lines at traffic lights, although relatively common they are now considered to provide the least protection of any possible cyclist safety feature at signalised junctions, according to ‘Local Transport Note 1/20’. The document criticises them for actually creating a more dangerous conflict, as their approach lanes put cyclists in the way of vehicles turning left over their path. And narrow streets are intended to prevent drivers overtaking cyclists – the Highway Code says drivers are meant to leave the same space to overtake a cyclist as they would a car – but in reality drivers frequently overtake closer and in the same lane. 

The fundamental logic behind these add-on features is the leveraging of cyclists’ vulnerability to appeal to drivers’ wish not to harm themselves or others. The idea is that if drivers could just see cyclists, they would take care not to run them down – eliminating the ‘error’ drivers make. But the problem with this is that a mixed-traffic road layout is a fundamentally antagonistic space, not one where we’re all looking out for each other. Of the DfT’s list of contributory factors to collisions (among which ‘junction design’ is not an option), consistently the most commonly assigned by police is ‘driver or rider failed to look properly’, followed by ‘driver or rider failed to judge other person’s path or speed’ (as noted in the ‘Reported road casualties in Great Britain: pedal cycle factsheet, 2021’). If every driver is making the same mistake, at every junction, year on year, it’s not an error, it’s a design fault. The way the roads are laid out is hostile to pedestrians and cyclists, and that justifies drivers behaving in a hostile way towards pedestrians and cyclists. When a driver close-passes a cyclist because they feel like they’ve been slowed down, they’re not wrong. The cyclist is travelling much slower than the speed limit, on a road that’s not made for them, trying to behave like a motor vehicle – and failing because they are fundamentally different. The road layout is telling us all something about whose journeys the state prioritises, and that filters through to affect how drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists behave. 

After reducing driver error, the second step in Vision Zero’s approach is ‘reduce the risk that a collision will be serious if it does occur’, which most authorities interpret as reducing speed limits. Lower vehicle speeds do reduce the severity of a collision: according to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, a person hit by a car driving at 20 mph has a 90 per cent chance they’ll live, a 50 per cent chance at 30 mph, and just a 10 per cent chance at 40 mph. Reducing speed limits isn’t the same as reducing actual speeds; to actually slow drivers down, the principle of ‘design speed’ says you need physical restrictions like speed bumps, narrower streets and intermittent width restrictions. Without them, a new 20 mph limit in a previously 30 mph zone only reduces speeds by 2-3 mph on average, and most drivers ignore the limit and remain above 20 mph. While this does still slightly reduce collisions, it’s not enough. 

Councils’ resistance to introducing physical speed-reduction measures stems not only from financial stringency, but also an inertia that resists doing anything to restrict drivers’ access to the roads, even at the cost of casualties. This results in a very generous approach to drivers’ speed in Great Britain, including a lack of enforcement of 20 mph limits by the police. Camera enforcement has to be specifically requested by members of the public, who also have to supply volunteers to stand around on street corners with handheld speed cameras. Even then, drivers have to be at least 4 mph over the speed limit and be caught three times before the police consider taking any further action. This convoluted system, a mainstream method of enforcing speed limits in residential areas, is called ‘Community Speed Watch’. 

The purpose of these exercises is to ‘raise awareness’ of the speed limit, the logic being that if drivers only knew how fast they were going, they would obey the law and slow down. This logic seems hopelessly naïve, in the same vein as ‘if drivers could only see cyclists, they wouldn’t run them over’. It ignores everything we know about how street design affects behaviour, and how culturally ingrained driving fast is in our society. Neoliberal individualism backed by institutional credence says motorists’ journeys are more important than the journeys and lives of others. But the main issue with 20 mph speed limits is that they have minimal effect on the other half of keeping residential streets safe: reducing traffic volumes. 

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, there was generally nothing in local council and national government policy to reduce traffic volumes. In fact, through parking minimum standards and park-and-rides, car ownership and usage was actively encouraged. The leading design standards document for residential streets at the time, DB32, reflected an obsession with cul-de-sacs, leading to that characteristic 1990s new-build estate layout of curved dead-end streets. Although access-only roads are positive, those layouts didn’t create direct, or overlooked, through-routes for pedestrians and cyclists. And, as always, these standards only applied to new developments – there was no obligatory mechanism for retroactively redesigning existing streets to reduce traffic volumes. 

Within the last few years, traffic speed and volume reduction on residential streets has been the main focus of transport campaigning – a shift away from the anti-motorway movement in the 1990s and the campaigns for main road protected space for cycling in the 2010s. Residential streets were seen by the cycling movement (the pedestrian rights movement is sadly almost non-existent) as an easier target. Having faced so much backlash against main road cycle lane schemes for ‘slowing down car journeys’, calming traffic on residential streets and removing rat-runs was considered a simpler battle ground. With a more automatic local base of support (residents) and plenty of successful examples from the 1990s, filtering streets to limit through-traffic seemed like an ideal place to shift campaign focus. 

In reality, this could not have been further from how things have played out. Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) introduced by local councils just before 2020 faced an unexpectedly high level of public backlash, which increased exponentially during the initial tranche of Covid-19 active travel funding. Off the back of this, a surprisingly large movement against ‘fifteen and twenty minute cities’ gained traction and support from GB News presenters, and in London a ULEZ backlash drove sudden policy changes in both Labour and Conservative Parties. 

The scale of the LTN backlash was surprising, but the arguments were mainly the same as those heard in the previous few decades, recycled and with a new gloss. The anti-LTN movement seeded itself in fertile ground – there isn’t just an institutional (state) reluctance to prioritise pedestrian and cyclist safety, but a wider cultural resistance to keeping them safe at the expense of car journey times. Further, there is an intense, visceral resentment of people not in cars, which fuels real-life acts of violence that go unpunished (as do many acts of day-to-day violence under capitalism). It’s complicated in class terms – ‘those smug cyclists think they’re better than us’ – but richer people are more likely to own (more) cars than poorer people. Drivers who are actually at work while they’re on the roads (such as taxi drivers or delivery drivers) conduct themselves under the further time pressure of precarious or piecework, which creates additional hostility towards anyone they perceive as slowing them down. It’s a kind of false consciousness, because most people say they actually want to walk and cycle more, but the state doesn’t make it pleasant or easy for them, and they are afraid of being hurt. Having a hostile road design contributes to this cultural feeling, but if the government forced a redesign of all the roads overnight, or even over a few years, there would still be a lot of residual anger against cyclists – it doesn’t only stem from how the roads are laid out. 

This antagonistic climate is unintentionally fuelled by the third step of Vision Zero’s approach: ‘emphasising the responsibility all actors have to reduce road danger’, which is normally taken to mean (cheap) road safety marketing campaigns. These often involve a substantial amount of victim blaming, through slogans like Brighton and Hove City Council’s ‘Share the road, Share the responsibility’, which doesn’t account for the vastly different levels of responsibility a pedestrian has compared to a driver. In the police and schools’ ‘road safety’ advertising campaigns foolish animals and children careen into the road and, in the Highway Code, negligent people walk around town without hi-vis jackets on (as if walking to a friend’s house is a dangerous activity akin to working on a construction site). 

It’s absolutely not true that all road users have a responsibility to reduce road danger. That would be a false equivalence between things in different categories: on the one hand, legs, with which people are born and nature intended for walking, and on the other hand, a car, which humans made from 1,300 kg of metal, protective steel panels and a zero-to-sixty-in-five-seconds engine. Unfortunately, the law backs the car in this fight, as using the weight and force of your car to ‘nudge’ a human out of the road is not seen as a violent threat, but instead simply your right as a motorist, and drivers behind you will be grateful that you’re not holding them up. Breaking a 20 mph speed limit isn’t seen as similar to wandering around town casually swinging a claw hammer, it’s just one of those things everyone does: ‘traffic offences’ are synonymous with ‘minor crime’ in general parlance. There isn’t a cultural recognition of the serious danger driving a car carries, and – at some point in the last century – society changed the rules about how and when we’re allowed to hurt people, exempting cars from the category of weapons. As the campaign RoadPeace argues, ‘road crime is not treated as real crime’, and if it were, ‘driving would be treated as a licensed activity that can be withdrawn, instead of a right bestowed for life’. 

Cycling and walking campaigners in the US compare the right to drive with the right to own a gun, as both consumer items are aggressively promoted to the public as ‘freedom’, instead of being seen as outrageous and dangerous liberties taken by too many people with too few restrictions. The UK state has done nothing to disabuse people of the car manufacturers’ idea that the right to drive is synonymous with the need to access destinations. Where measures proposed to improve conditions for walking and cycling – necessarily – restrict driving, political will crumbles and the country spirals even deeper into car dependency. Pedestrians and cyclists are killed on the road not because the state explicitly deems the demographic type ‘cyclists’ or ‘pedestrians’ or ‘children’ expendable, but because this is the inevitable result when motorists’ right to drive trumps people’s right to live. 

How accidental is an accident? At any junction there are likely to be multiple incidences of life-changing injury per year. The incident described at the beginning of this article was followed by two further collisions where cyclists suffered life-changing injuries at the same junction in 2022. The design standards which led to this pattern are intentional policies written by people, who factor in a certain level of serious injury and death as normal. The neoliberal culture in government, councils and police, held back by inertia, shies away from making bold movements and prioritises financial savings over pedestrian and cyclist safety. The law treats collisions as a lesser crime, and the public supports car dependency even when it’s not in its self-interest. The roads system – from start to finish – is geared up to allow this ‘error’ by the driver to occur and go unremarked upon. It was bound to happen.

Pearl Ahrens has written about transport for LabourList, the Ecologist, and other magazines, and has sat on panels for engagée magazine and The World Transformed festival. She is a former elected Trustee of the London Cycling Campaign, where she led on the Board’s policy work, and she is a Senior Transport Planner at an engineering consultancy in London.