[road]

Tribalism is a serious problem in our society, and the media often make it worse.
In the world of cycling, and on road.cc particularly, we hear about “cyclists” and “drivers” on a daily basis.
The use of these words not only assumes the existence of such categories of people, but it also plays a significant role in constructing them.
This, in turn, reinforces the “drivers vs cyclists” narrative, one of the many variants of tribalism corrupting our thinking.
Words are powerful.
With the exception, perhaps, of those for whom cycling is a profession, the word “cyclist” does not apply to anybody else. The sole act of driving a car does not make one a “driver”. When I make dinner I’m not a “cook”, when I write an email I’m not a “writer”, when I paint a wall in my house I’m not a “decorator” and so on. To put it another way, riding a bike does not define who I am. Nor does driving a car. These are actions, not categories of people.
The urge to categorise people according to what they happen to be doing at any given moment is not healthy.
A recent road.cc article reporting on a crime where somebody shot somebody else in the US was presented as if it was somehow about cycling since the killer was described as a “cyclist”, as he happened to be riding a bicycle when the incident took place.
The original article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel described the killer as a “bicyclist”, and the Associated Press, from which news outlets picked up the story, ran the headline “Cyclist gets 25 years in deadly road rage shooting”.
All of this gives more ammunition to the relentless anti-cycling campaign that much of the media are engaged in.
But I think road.cc should have the moral obligation to counter the normalisation of the “cyclists vs [insert other category of people]” narrative.
I wonder, for example, if alongside the “Near Miss of the Day” feature, there could be one like the “Bad Headline of the Day”, pointing out instances where the word “cyclists” is obviously misused and serves to misrepresent a story as being about an imaginary category of (bad!) people rather than what it is really about.

Topic

[OnYerBike]

Thanks for tracking this down

Thanks for tracking this down and proving I’m not completely senile just yet! I guess the contents of comments aren’t captured by Google?

And apologies for insinuating that road.cc had perpetuated that particular headline – as is evidently the case, where there is no genuine connection to cycling the story isn’t picked up by the staff writers.

[IanGlasgow]

“Bad Headline of the Day”

“Bad Headline of the Day” would be any news story that doesn’t follow the Road Collision Reporting Guidelines
https://road.cc/content/news/road-traffic-collision-reporting-guidelines-launched-283429

So pretty much any story in the Car Crashes into Building thread.

[hawkinspeter]

John Stevenson wrote:

I’ve done site-restricted Google searches for ‘triathlete’, ‘Drummond’ and ‘Dundee’ limited to the period since Jan 1 this year and found nothing.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aroad.cc+drummond&newwindow=1&biw=1839&bih=2023&sxsrf=APq-WBuTnib-G1sHQgGD8l4ouDr3Ozp7lQ%3A1649774336725&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2022%2Ccd_max%3A4%2F12%2F2022&tbm=

etc — replacing drummond with the other strings is left as an exercise for the reader.

This search also fails to turn it up:

https://road.cc/search-results?search_api_views_fulltext=drummond

And this is a bust too:

https://road.cc/search-results?search_api_views_fulltext=dundee

None of those tools are infallible (site-specific search is very much an insufficiently advanced technology) but I also can’t find any reference to this story except on the Courier’s website.

Okay, I’ve tracked it down to the “Car crashes into building” forum thread which is unfortunate as it’s currently over 900 comments long. It was from David9694 about a month ago – I don’t know how to share a link to a specific comment.

Anyhow, that’s not something that road.cc can be blamed for.

(I found it by using site-specific searches in DuckDuckGo which showed up as a snapshot of the recent comments, but DuckDuckGo wouldn’t show me a cached version, so I had to use BING (I think I threw up in my mouth a little) which could show me a cached version and thus identify which thread the comment was on.)

[John Stevenson]

I’ve done site-restricted

I’ve done site-restricted Google searches for ‘triathlete’, ‘Drummond’ and ‘Dundee’ limited to the period since Jan 1 this year and found nothing.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aroad.cc+drummond&newwindow=1&biw=1839&bih=2023&sxsrf=APq-WBuTnib-G1sHQgGD8l4ouDr3Ozp7lQ%3A1649774336725&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2022%2Ccd_max%3A4%2F12%2F2022&tbm=

etc — replacing drummond with the other strings is left as an exercise for the reader.

This search also fails to turn it up:

https://road.cc/search-results?search_api_views_fulltext=drummond

And this is a bust too:

https://road.cc/search-results?search_api_views_fulltext=dundee

None of those tools are infallible (site-specific search is very much an insufficiently advanced technology) but I also can’t find any reference to this story except on the Courier’s website.

[hawkinspeter]

OnYerBike wrote:

OnYerBike wrote:

John Stevenson wrote:

I’m pretty sure we didn’t cover that story, because why would we? That Drummond had been training to do a triathlon was entirely irrelevant to the incident which happened in a pub. No roads or bikes involved.

I’m fairly confident I came across that story via road.cc – although it’s quite possible it was posted in the comments/forum section rather than having an actual article written about it.

I remember seeing it here – maybe a mention on the Live Blog?

[OnYerBike]

John Stevenson wrote:

John Stevenson wrote:

I’m pretty sure we didn’t cover that story, because why would we? That Drummond had been training to do a triathlon was entirely irrelevant to the incident which happened in a pub. No roads or bikes involved.

I’m fairly confident I came across that story via road.cc – although it’s quite possible it was posted in the comments/forum section rather than having an actual article written about it.

[Simon_MacMichael]

Thanks for starting this

Thanks for starting this thread. Let me try and address some of your points.

First, the words “cyclist” and “driver” (and by extension “pedestrian” or “horse rider” etc) do in fact define who people are within the specific context of their use of the road – these are the words that are used in the Highway Court, in legislation, and in the justice system.

You may not define yourself as a “cyclist” when you’re riding your bike – but the law does. So it’s different to the other examples you provide (although I’d mention that while writing an email may not make you “a writer,” it would make you “the writer” of that specific email).

The changes made earlier this year to the Highway Code has also underlined the official approach to categorising road users by the means of transport they are using at the time, including through the new Hierarchy of Road Users, aimed at protecting the most vulnerable.

I’ll come back to the specific story you mention later on this post, because it comes from the US and first I want to address the broader issues we face in the UK in terms of tribalism.

We have always sought to underline that it is more likely than not that here, people who ride bikes also drive cars (in fact, the likelihood of someone who cycles regularly to own a motor vehicle and hold a driving licence are consistently found in consumer research to be slightly higher than in the population as a while).

Where the story merits it – one kind of story that comes to mind is when we are reporting on an anti-cycling column in a newspaper, or ‘debate’ on radio chat show – we will usually draw attention to the overlap between cyclists and drivers.

We won’t do that on every single story we publish that mentions a “cyclist” or a “driver” – it’s just not practical to do so, and we credit most of our readership to understand the nuances beneath those words, after all we’re aware that while they will be on road.cc because it is a cycling website, they are also drivers.

Does road.cc have “the moral obligation to counter the normalisation of the ‘cyclists vs [insert other category of people]’ narrative,” as you put it?

Well, we like to be accurate (and are required to be so under the Editors’ Code, but I’m not sure “moral obligation” is the correct way to phrase it, but in practice, as outlined above, we do counter it through explaining the background where it is pertinent to do so.

To go back to the earlier example, that includes by reporting on “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images” (as the Editors’ Code puts it) that have been published elsewhere (with certain media outlets or commentators, of course, regularly featuring).  

I like your final suggestion. I’m not sure that Bad Headline of the Day would merit a series of standalone articles in the way that Near Miss of the Day does, but certainly something where we could consider a Forum thread or regular comment on the blog.

EDIT – Sorry, forgot to add the below:

PS – Going back to the story you highlighted, we do have certain criteria we consider in trying to determine whether the story is about a “cyclist” or a person who happens to be riding a bike, ie how central was the bike riding to the story?

One typical example involves assaults – sometimes it is clear that someone assaulted by a gang is an innocent victim who was maybe riding home from work (which would make it a cycling story), in other cases, the person may have been attacked because they are a member of a rival gang and just happen to be on a bike (so not a cycling story). At times, it’s unclear from the information available which situation we are actually dealing with.

Added to that, it can be a particularly difficult call to make at weekends, since we run a skeleton staff then which makes it more difficult for whoever is on news duty to seek a second, third or even (perhaps unsolicited) fourth opinion on whether to cover the story or not.

In this case, yes it was a borderline one but the cycling was I think relevant to the story, so we were correct in covering it.

[hawkinspeter]

chrisonatrike wrote:

No true driver would say that.

Just because you’ve commented doesn’t make you a commentator

[chrisonabike]

No true driver would say that

No true driver would say that.

[chrisonabike]

Love this – it would improve

Love this – it would improve titles too:

The person identifying as a woman in a relationship with someone who performs duties on behalf of a military group of France.

The person who may cook amongst many of their other professional responsiblities, the person who has been accused of criminal misdemeanors by a state but shouldn’t be defined by that, his person linked with him through a now-outdated religio-political relationship construct identifying as a woman and her lover.

[John Stevenson]

I’m pretty sure we didn’t

I’m pretty sure we didn’t cover that story, because why would we? That Drummond had been training to do a triathlon was entirely irrelevant to the incident which happened in a pub. No roads or bikes involved.

I think lobbing in ‘triathlete’ to the headline is just about trying to add some colour to the story and having ‘charity triathlete’ in the standfirst seems to be an attempt to lighten the image of someone who was clearly in drunken psycho mode at the time.

This isn’t especially unusual. A man who attacked a burglar in his home with a hammer was described as a kickboxer. A fella who had a mental health crisis and claimed there was a bomb on a plane was characterised as a British soldier. A man who attached three women as they left a concert was described as an ex-soldier. This is reporters using anything they can find out about the person to avoid just putting ‘man’ and to make the story more interesting.

 

[OnYerBike]

I disagree that one has to be

I disagree that one has to be a professional at something for the word to apply – someone driving a car IS a driver and someone riding a bike IS a cyclist.

In the article you quote, I think the fact that he was riding a bike is pertinent – as far as I can tell, the incident escalated from some kind of road collision or altercation between the cyclist and the driver.

That’s not to say headlines are always well worded – I remember seeing this article reported on (although I can’t find the Road.cc article on it?) and in that case the “triathlete” in headline is entirely unwarranted (the tenuous link being that the perpetrator had been training to participate in a charity triathlon as part of their rehabilitating, before relapsing onto drink/drugs).

[Rendel Harris]

 In the world of cycling, and

 In the world of cycling, and on road.cc particularly, we hear about “cyclists” and “drivers” on a daily basis.

On a website for cyclists written by cyclists that is devoted to cycling the fact that we hear about cyclists is not entirely surprising. How do you suggest road.cc reframes the dialogue without these signifiers, “One group of people is disagreeing with another group of people over road space”? “A person using one mode of transport that doesn’t define them was injured in a collision with a person using another mode of transport that also doesn’t define them”? 

[brooksby]

Quote:

…he happened to be riding a bicycle …

or, as we like to call it: “cycling”.

[hawkinspeter]

Quote:

The sole act of driving a car does not make one a “driver”

It most certainly does

[Author]

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