Cambridge Cycling Campaign to debate withdrawing support for events promoting helmets and hi-viz

I'm sorry but hi-viz do work, i spend a vast amount of time driving during the night and when its dark in the evenings.
There is a vast amount of residual light in built up areas bouncing off vehicles, windows, bus shelters etc etc so that lights cannot always be seen or are lost unless your lit up like a christmas tree, whereas a high viz with the usual stripes on it do get lit up by headlights.

Helmets are personal choice so its pointless anymore trying to get "the lemmings who dont believe" to try and change.

In the end its your personal choice and lets leave it at that rather than argue. After all thats not what the topic was started about was it.

Gladly, it should always be choice not law.

We live in a country where choice has always been important and i hope that remains the same however my view remains the same about wearing one but i would never ever suggest its brought in as law for the reasons above and to be honest i would probably never, as a cop, try to enforce such a law as we have to much other govt interference to deal with.

However with the Govt lacking any spine to take on motorists other than stealth taxes i feel they will ultimately pick on lesser bodies such as cycling.

Hope that answers your question

Read this article:

http://most.psych.udel.edu/MAPlab/Publications_files/MostAstur_2007.pdf

and then tell me that the colour you choose to wear has any effect whatsoever on your safety on the road. Drivers see what they are looking out for and that means other cars, and vehicles that will scratch their paintwork (god forbid). My reading of it is also that if as a cyclist you are of a colour that cars often are not, then you could be endangering yourself because the motorist at a junction looking for a gap will "filter out" that colour because it is outside his attentional set.

Read the article.

So in other words approx 50 students who used a predetermined computer programme and were tasked to look out for a specific colour crashed into somehing a different clour means that hi-viz dont work.

Get real, drivers look for gaps between cars / lorries / buses etc and dont look for bikes either motorised or pedal. It's been known for years, you just have to check the adverts from the 80's about looking for bikes at junctions. Colours have nothing to do with it and generally hi-viz is for oncoming or rear approaching vehicles.

Hooray for a bit of sanity on this question. Some kind of perspective is desparately needed on the risk compensation effect that some lawyers and insurance companies are forcing on any kind of organised activity. Some perspective has to be obtained on this matter, and one of the foremost authorities is John Adams, Emeritus Professor of Geography at University College, London. Anna Minton, in "Ground control : fear and happiness in the twenty-first century" (2012) cites him as follows (pages 182/3):

"Research on the 'risk compensation effect' by John Adams...found that if protected from hazards, people simply readjust their risk threshold, with the consequence that improving brakes on cars does not necessarily increase safety, because people drive faster and brake later. Similarly, traffic controls can actually increase accidents because they remove personal responsibility from drivers. Research on children's play reaches the same conclusions, finding that increased safety measures in playgrounds do not reduce accidents and may in fact increase them
Importantly, Adams agrees that the impact of heightened security on people and places is similar to that of increased control over the environment: it raises the risk threshold and that makes us yearn for ever more security, in turn losing out own individual and collective responsibility for our bevaviour. 'The message conveyed is that everything that isn't strictly controlled is to be feared. This creeping paranoia that is used in the name of safety and in the absence of any compelling evidence is reshaping our society. But the effect is that all this security is diluting personal responsibility and our own feelings of control over the environment, making us more scared and paranoid and desisring of more security to protect us. It's a never-ending spiral', Adams said.

In cycling terms, this means Think, ride within yourself, don't do stupid things like ride up the inside of high sided vehicles in heavy traffic, sign your intent, be decisive and learn how to "hammer it" at roundabouts, for instance it. Risk cannot be sanitised out of the enviroment by technical fixes like helmets. I have been cyling since 1957 and I cannot deny that I have done stupid things and been rebuked for it. I have also seen other riders do "stuff" which was downright hairy and dangerous.
All that can be said is that, when cycling, people have to think and learn to control their exuberance and also hope that drivers of the potential lethal weapons that are motor vehicles are doing the same.

An antidote to modern day "risk compensation" culture can be found in a short story written by Alexander Baron (1917-1999), called "Strangers to Death : A Prologue" It is the first in a collection entitled "The Human Kind", first published in 1953 and reprinted in 2011. Set in the early 1930's it tells in the first person how a 16 year old boy,from London's East End, is bought his first bicycle by his parents. One Saturday morning in May, he celebrates the occasion by joining a "crowd of young people [who] would meet at the street corner. The cyclists, with rucksacks on their backs, tin mugs and kettles, all a-rattle, tied with string to their crossbars, and cheap little tents slung under their saddles, would stream away along the Cambridge road to their camping-site by the River Lea."

While at the camp site, a boy drowns in the river. "He had been caught by the silkweed...It was impossible to break the strands when they wrapped themselves around the body"

This suggests to the narrator and his companions "an exciting new game-to play with the silkweed...
And there, among the waving weeds, we played, heading down through the midst of the weed, seeing it part respectfully (moved by the ripples we made with our outstretched hands) to make a path for us, running it through our fingers, winding it round our arms, tugging at it, disturbing it with our legs".

Amazingly for a modern day reader, no one tries to stop them.

The following evening, as the boy and his companions leave the camp site and cycle back to London, it starts to rain. As the journey progresses, Baron "lost all notion of where I was or where I was going. All I knew was to keep my headlamp shining on that little red guide, and to flee from the hissing menace of the machine behind me"

When they entered the town, "The pace slowed but the steady regularity of the column continued". Baron recounts how he and his companions coped with the hazards presented by the "fat, treacherous cobblestones", the "wet road that sloped in a steep camber to the gutters" and the tramlines, deep metal slots, slippery with rain that waited to trap our narrow tyres and fling the riders under some rumbling truck"

"To my seniors", Baron says, "the tramlines were a final happy challenge. Buses, stopping and starting, blocked the narrow carriageway in front of us. As the line of riders came up from behind each bus, they did not slow down to let it move away in front of them, but swerved out, at undiminished speed onto the tramlines. One by one the machines shot round each stationary bus and swung back into line in front of it, and each time each rider had to make in an eye's blink a series of precise calculations and movements"

Inevitably, the inexperienced Baron encounters his nemesis. "A bus loomed in front of us. The line of bicycles in front of me swerved out out onto the tramlines. I swerved with it, sped alongside the bus, swung to the left in front of the bus". His front wheel gets stuck in a tramline and he crashes. Yet he, his bicycle and his wet glasses escape unscathed. "Jacko asked me if I wanted to go along to the hospital and I, imitating the maner of my seniors, answered, "Nah, I'm all right'"

The last sentence of the story reads "Life was inexhaustible and death was still beyond our ken". (And this, after being present at a drowning).

There is enough here to drive twenty first century risk compensators apoplectic. Because, however, the story was written before "our" compensation culture with its misplaced health and safety rules, took hold it presents sober reality. Accidents will happen. They cannot be sanitised out of existence. The drowning of the boy and Baron's crash were driven by youthful exuberance which realised itself as foolhardy behaviour. Of course, this has to be guarded against. But it cannot be controlled all of the time and certainly, technical fixes, like helmets will make no difference, because they do not get to the root of the problem.

Seat belt is the law. Helmet isn't. Simple.

Actually, there are a lot of car drivers who regularly wear helmets. Why are you so irresponsible to not wear one when you drive? A good number of cyclists and motorcyclists wear body armour (for good reason). How come you don't?

Same purpose: to keep you safe in case of a crash. How could you argue with not wearing a helmet in your car, or body armour on your bike? Especially when it doesn't bother other drivers or cyclists to do so? How can you be so irresponsible not to?

If you crash your car and have a head injury, or fall off your bike and break a rib or an arm, well you'll just be getting what you deserve for not wearing helmet and body armour at all times.