Cycling vs. Cyclists - How to Do Things With Words

Following on from last week's post on how we report those killed and maimed by motorists on our roads, I'd like to talk today about cycling vs. cyclists. Essentially, it is almost always better to use the term cycling when you have a choice between the two. Here's why:

Is this a cyclist? or a kid on a bike?
Is this an anti-social law-breaker? or a child who doesn't want to be crushed to death when a motorist makes a mistake?

One of the big problems with the term 'cyclists', is that it implicitly reinforces the idea that cycling is a niche mode of transport that can only be undertaken by a hardcore, committed group of 'cyclists'; you have to know Chris Froome's body weight in order to be able to cycle to the shops to pick up some milk.

This is, of course, absolute rubbish. Using a bike to get around should be as normal as taking the bus or hopping on the tube. We don't use the term 'tube-ist', 'bus-taker', or 'train-er'. We just take a tube, bus or train when it is convenient to do so. Cycling should be equally normalised. Just a method of transport that we take when it is convenient, cheap, and safe to do so. Using the user-specific term, 'cyclist', makes cycling seem far less inclusive that it actually is, and as such, the term should be avoided.

Indeed, when local councils and governments talk about making things safer for 'cyclists', this can actually be quite unhelpful. This is because it makes it seem like the creation of cycle lanes or slower speed limits are benefits only to that very small proportion of UK that currently make journeys by bike. In fact, safety improvements are primarily of benefit to people that don't already cycle. It is precisely these 'non-cyclists' that are far more likely to take up cycling if a continuous, fully segregated cycle track is built that enables them to get where they want without worrying about dying. Therefore, the government would be making 'cycling' safer, not making it safer for 'cyclists'.

Crossrail or HS2 are not big projects that are being sold to the voting public as making travel easier for 'train-ers'. They are big projects that will make travel easier for everyone in the UK, since anyone can get on a train. It's the same with cycling. A 'Crossrail for bikes' will make travelling by bike safer for everyone in London, not just cyclists. Therefore, we should always think of it as an improvement for cycling.

We do use the term 'motorist', but there are important differences between this word and 'cyclist'. 'Motorist' is useful because the word encapsulates how difficult it is to drive in the UK. It's not like just jumping on a train or bus. You need to learn your theory, then get an expensive theory test booked well in advance and pass it. Then you need to learn to drive (more expensive) and get a driving test booked (more expense) and then pass that (not always first time). Then you need to buy a car, buy fuel, buy insurance, pay emissions tax, (pay congestion charge), and find a resident's or off-road parking space to store your vehicle. Then you need to work out where you're going, maybe buy a sat-nav, and find out where you can park near your destination (often expensive).

Compare cycling: you need to learn to cycle (free), buy a bike (cheap) and a lock (needs to be good). Then you need to work out where you're going and leave your bike at your destination or nearby.

Clearly, our government is not doing even 10% of what it needs to be doing in order make travelling by bike as safe, easy, and hassle-free as it could be (and is in Holland or Denmark, for instance). But jumping on your bike has far more in common with jumping on the tube (buy oyster card, work out route) then jumping in a car (go through all the hoops listed above). The term 'motorist' is, therefore, helpful for encapsulating the exclusive nature of motor travel by a select group. On the other hand, 'cyclist' is extremely unhelpful because it implies that travelling by a bike is similarly exclusive. It isn't. In much of Europe travelling by bike is as normal as taking the bus, and it should be here in the UK too. Using the term 'cyclist' works against this process of normalisation.

The other important difference between 'motorist' and 'cyclist' is that both terms are heavily culturally loaded; in opposite ways. 'Motorist' is a term that includes 33 million Britons. It is a term of family, allowing one to belong to a large, welcoming group. Most importantly, it is a term essential to the 'War on the Motorist' myth. This is the fatuous idea that 'motorists' are somehow persecuted in our society, a political lie manufactured by successive Conservative parties in an attempt to seduce voters, since the cost of travelling by car has actually continually decreased in real terms since 1990s). The word 'motorist' is, therefore, an extremely weighted term. The persecuted majority of good Brits just trying to do right by their friends and families.

By contrast, 'cyclists' are widely seen as an aberrant tribe. They are freaks that despite paying no road tax rudely insist on clogging up our roads. They run down old women and the blind with impunity, and often enjoyment. They are the persecuting minority, Saddam Hussein's Sunni elite, who are ruining modern Britain and deserve zero recognition from Clegg or Cameron, and still less from the irresponsibly obese Eric Pickles.

The amazing thing is that these stereotypes stick, despite the fact that motorists killed 1,901 Brits in road accidents in 2011 alone, and last year 118 Brits were killed by drivers while on their bikes in this country.

The best case scenario would be if we could transform the word 'cyclist' from a word with largely negative to connotations, to a positive one. As well as from the 'persecuting', to the 'persecuted'. However, ultimately that isn't going to happen until we have significantly more than one journey in 50 being made in London by bike. If history shows us anything, it is that minorities are consistently persecuted, ignored, and vilified. It's no different with cyclists.

In this situation it's much better to change the conversation than to try and convince the obstinate of the simple truth that one mile on a bike is a $.42 gain to society, one mile driving is a $.20 loss.

We should therefore be making the case for 'cycling', not 'cyclists',

After 78 Spaniards were killed in a recent train crash, the Spanish Government will not be improving safety for 'train-goers'. They will be making it safer for all Spaniards to travel by train. Similarly, since 69 Londoners have been killed by motorists while cycling since Boris Johnson took office in 2008, we must demand the Mayor and TfL make things safer for all Londoners who might, and could, choose to travel by bike.

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As an aside, please put Monday 2nd September in your diaries: the London Cycling Campaign are organising another #space4cycling Protest Ride. Meet at Jubilee Gardens at 6pm (for a 6.30pm start).

'A woman was injured in a collision with a bicycle yesterday' - How to Do Things With Words

In 1955 J. L Austin published his greatest work of linguistic theory, How to Do Things With Words. What Austin writes about speech-acts isn't particularly relevant but if we want to improve things in the UK it is incredibly important to consider not only what we say about cycling, but how we say it. Given how much cycling has been (and continues to be) stigmatised in Britain and many other countries this attention to linguistic detail becomes especially important.

A woman was injured in collision with a bicycle yesterday. 

How strange does that sentence sound? It reads bizarrely because it suggests that either the woman walked into a stationary bicycle or a bicycle came out of control all by itself - perhaps let loose down a hill? - and hit the woman. What this sentence does extremely effectively is absolve whoever was riding the bicycle in question of responsibility for the hurt done to the woman. The hurt was done by the bicycle, not the person in control of it. Clearly, this is not the way we have been conditioned in the UK to think about those riding bikes. This sentence would never occur in a newspaper or a blog. In fact, we wouldn't even write:

a woman was injured in a collision with a cyclist yesterday.

This still sounds slightly mendacious because in all likelihood the cyclist collided with the woman, not the other way around. We would probably instead write something like:

a woman was injured after being hit by a cyclist yesterday.

This choice of words makes clear that the blame lies neither with the bicycle itself, nor with the old woman, but with the person in control of that bicycle. Bicycles are capable of travelling at far faster (and more dangerous) speeds than pedestrians which means the onus falls naturally on the cyclist to avoid the pedestrian, rather than other way around. We can, therefore, relatively safely assume in the case of most collisions that the cyclist was at fault; he or she was probably going too fast, or trying to overtake too close to the pedestrian in question. Obviously this will not be the case all of the time, but we can understand why newspapers, bloggers, and the general public might, in the absence of more detailed knowledge of who was at fault, report such an event in this way.

All of these arguments could be applied to collision between bicycles and motor vehicles.

Motor vehicles are capable of going far faster than bicycles. They are also, crucially, capable of doing fatally larger amounts of damage. If you cycle into a lorry you may get a few bruises, but you're unlikely to seriously injure yourself. If drive a lorry into a cyclist you will almost certainly kill them. Therefore, it is relatively safe to assume that in most collisions - especially fatal ones - that the motorist was at fault in some way (and this is supported many statistical studies, including figures released in May by Westminster Council). Moreover, even in the rare cases when the motorist is not at all at fault, it is still the motorist's momentum and force that will lead to the death of the person on the bike. In which case sentences like this seem ridiculous:

three-year-old boy dies after collision with a truck.

A three-year-old boy is not going to die if he runs into a truck. He will only die if the truck runs over him. Surely this sentence is therefore an insult to that young boy's memory, because it makes the boy sound completely responsible for his own death?

We've been taught to use language in this heartless manner by a motor lobby and government that is continually seeking to normalise the deaths and serious injuries that are daily caused by motorists in this country. For instance, 1,901 people died in road accidents in Britain in 2011 alone. By contrast, between 2001 and May 2012 a total of (only) 414 British military personnel have died on operations in Afghanistan. That means almost five times as many British people died in one year on our streets, than in over a decade in Afghanistan.

Is the life of someone killed by motor traffic worth less than someone killed in Afghanistan? Why don't we care about 1,901 people being killed on our streets every year?

We don't care because people being killed by cars and HGVs is constantly normalised in our society as something to be expected, or even embraced. The newspapers rarely report it, and if they do they use language - as demonstrated above - that places the blame with the victim even as the event is being reported. We would never write, 'soldier dies after collision with a bullet'. But, sickeningly, we do write, 'boy dies after collision with a truck'.This makes us accept that people must be killed on our roads as a fact of life, when it fact it isn't. British roads don't have to be as they are. Dutch roads are around seven times safer cyclists than those in the UK, and if we had Dutch levels of road safety for cyclists in this country, around 80 of the 118 people killed cycling in Britain in 2012 (our 'Olympic' year) might still be alive.

Part of creating this change lies, I believe, in de-normalising road traffic deaths, and making them appear as they are. Namely, as the direct result (whether criminally careless or not) of those in control of the automobiles that kill people, rather than as unavoidable acts of nature. Therefore, instead of:

three-year-old boy dies after collision with a truck.

It is more correct write:

three-year-old boy dies after being run over by a truck driver.

Put in these terms, this event feels far less necessary. We want to do something about it. We want to fix things and prevent three-year-old boys being run over by truck drivers. Obviously, this is exactly how the freight and motor industry don't want us to think because it will make us demand higher (and more expensive) standards of safety equipment from lorries and motor vehicles using our roads, whether or not the driver in question is convicted of dangerous driving. It will make us demand lower speed limits in our towns and cities, because we don't want young children being run over by truck drivers, even if the child was at fault. It will make us demand higher standards of driver training from those who use vehicles that continually maim and kill us.

The sentence 'three-year-old boy dies after being run over by a truck driver' might sound unnecessarily harsh on the driver in question, but it's what actually happened. The only reason it sounds harsh is because we have been programmed to understand deaths due to road traffic accidents as an inescapable part of modern living, rather than the direct, avoidable responsibility of the motorist concerned. Which they are. If the motorist had driven differently, and/or the road itself had been designed differently, the vast majority of those that are killed on our roads wouldn't be killed. So when we report these events why shouldn't we describe what actually happened?

Therefore, in reporting new fatalities on our roads, we should at all costs avoid a language that has been conditioned onto us by a powerful motor lobby and motor-centric governments. Jasmine Gardner recently wrote a pro-segregated cycling piece in Evening Standard. There was a huge amount to commend in this article, particularly 'the idea that segregated cycle lanes wouldn't work in London is just nonsense'. However, I did notice that even Jasmine Gardner felt obliged to write:

Alan Neve was run down by a tipper truck at High Holborn.

Now, driverless cars do exist (in California). However, this tipper truck was not one of them. The above sentence is incorrect. We've been taught to write and think this way to prevent us from calling for road safety measures that might negatively affect the profitability of the extended motor industry. The correct way to report this event would be:

Alan Neve was run down by a tipper truck driver at High Holborn.

Or, better still:

Alan Neve was run over and killed by the driver of a tipper truck at High Holborn.

Alan Neve has just been killed (bringing the total number of Londoners killed on bikes since Boris Johnson became Mayor in 2008 to 69), and it is important for cycling and safe-streets campaigner to avoid the kind of language which pretends the vehicles killing and maiming those on our streets are magically driverless.

In the extremely rare case of serious collisions between pedestrians and those on bikes we don't write, 'pensioner hit by a bicycle'. Regardless of who was at fault, we would usually write 'pensioner hit by cyclist' or 'pensioner hit by man on a bike'. This makes sense.

Why shouldn't this phrasing also make sense when motorists kill and maim those on bikes? i.e:

Person on a bike killed by driver of car/bus/lorry/HGV/tipper truck.

Or, for headline-friendly brevity:

Car/bus/lorry/HGV/tipper truck driver kills person riding bike.

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Just to be clear, I'm not saying cyclists are never responsible for road traffic accidents. I'm saying:

1. regardless of who is the 'guilty party', it is manifestly the motor vehicle driving into a bicycle, rather than a bicycle cycling into a motor vehicle, that leads to people being killed
2. driverless vehicles do not exist in UK

Our use of the English language must reflect this.

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I found the TED talk below by Mikael Colville-Andersen (also known as Copenhagenize) and this article by AsEasyAsRidingABike helpful in formulating this post.