Cycling, Safety and Sharing the Road: Qualitative Research with Cyclists and Other Road Users

This report presents findings from qualitative research carried out with cyclists and other road-users in June 2009 by Simon Christmas Ltd, the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) and SHM, as part of the wider research programme, Road User Safety and Cycling, being led by TRL on behalf of the Department for Transport.

This phase of work has been largely ‘descriptive’, aiming to provide a map of the diversity of safety-relevant motivations, attitudes, perceptions and behaviour among cyclists and other road users (ORUs).

Cycling sits at the intersection of a number of policy priorities – from road safety to health promotion and carbon reduction. We hope that the findings in this report will prove useful to a range of audiences; but our focus throughout the design, delivery and reporting of the research has been on issues of road safety. All of the distinctions we make, being based on qualitative work, would benefit from quantitative validation and scaling.

The conclusions are as follows:

• Cycling is not a single homogeneous activity, but a number of different activities that share the use of a two-wheeled unpowered vehicle.

• Cyclists in our groups tended to conceptualise serious accidents as collisions between a cyclist and another vehicle. The risk of being killed or seriously injured in a single cycle accident was not front of mind.

• Cyclists in our groups used different behavioural approaches to manage perceived risks from ORUs, in the context of choices and limitations created by the bike.

• There were important attitudinal differences between adults and young cyclists. Children do not have experience of driving a motorised vehicle, and so lack an understanding of the perspective and needs of ORUs.

• Cyclists and ORUs explained the failures of road sharing in different ways, ranging from acts of aggression to failures of expectation or other situational factors.

• There was higher empathy for car drivers across all types of road user than for minority road users such as cyclists. There was also evidence of a stereotype of cyclists, characterised by failures of attitude and competence.

• The evidence suggests a failure in the culture of road sharing, with a lack of consensus about whether, and how, cyclists belong on the roads.

• Some infrastructure may create further room for disagreement about the norms of road sharing. Different types of cyclist also have differing, and potentially conflicting, needs from infrastructure.

• When it comes to encouraging cyclists to make themselves safer, it may be easier to promote visibility than helmet wearing. Promoting visibility could also be linked to the promotion of safer road-sharing.