Road Safety Week kicked off this week across Australia, an annual initiative to ensure all Australians get home safe on our roads.
And of course, no safety week is complete without addressing the needs of vulnerable road users, not only people who ride bikes but those who walk, run, scoot and skate.
In Australia, the reality is that bike riders are disproportionately represented in road crash statistics. In 2015–16, 1 in 5 road crash hospitalisations involved a bike rider. Statistics from the TAC in Victoria paint an alarming picture of what it is like out there for riders sharing the road. A person riding a bike is 34 times more likely than vehicle occupants to be seriously injured in a crash.
This is why it is so important to be increasingly upping our game when it comes to protecting people riding bikes on our roads.
Unfortunately, much of the approach to bike safety is focussed on what riders should do. Wear a helmet and reflective clothing. Use a light. Obey the road rules.
The reality is that this is nowhere near a targeted approach to reducing crash risks. A concerted effort to tackling rider safety involves changes in policy, technology, behaviour, and the built environment.
In this article we will break down some of the key issues in the bike safety domain, ones that we are actively campaigning for.
Separated and well-connected bike lanes
Where possible, we should be prioritizing bike lanes that are physically separated from the road space, better equipped to protected riders from crashes with vehicles.
There is overwhelming evidence that separated bike paths increase the safety of riders. As well as protecting riders, separation paths have the added benefit of improving perceived bike riding safety, which may boost the confidence of less experienced riders.
Bike lanes also need to be well-connected. A separated bike lane that does not connect with another safe route compromises the overall safety of the network. Pinch points at the end of a bike lane, where riders have to merge with traffic, increases the risk of a crash.
We continue to campaign for separated bike lanes to be prioritized in current and future bike planning.
Dooring
‘Dooring’ occurs when a rider collides with a car door being opened by a driver. It is one of the most common types of collision both in Australia and abroad, and it is the one crash that riders fear the most. The impact from a dooring incident is instantaneous, and riders can do little to prepare for it. In most cases, it is almost entirely due to a lack of foresight by the person exiting their vehicle.
There are many things we can do here. The most obvious is safer places to ride with separated bike lanes or ‘buffer zones’ between bike and vehicle. ‘Exit warning’ technology is also an exciting advance in car technology.
Recently, Bicycle Network, in partnership with Amy Gillett Foundation, We Ride Australia, AusCycling and RACV, proposed that a vehicle-exiting behaviour known as the ‘Dutch Reach’ be included in all road rule handbooks and learner driver materials in Victoria. This could be an exciting step forward for driver education.
Safer vehicles
Not only are we seeing more cars on the road each year, their average age is increasing. This means we have a higher prevalence of older, less safe vehicles on the road.
Australia’s freight sector is also growing, which means we are likely to see more trucks on our roads into the future.
At the same time, our capital cities are developing strategies and policies to increase the number of people riding bikes. This heightens the need for safer vehicles.
The solution is simple: mandate technologies that assist our nation’s drivers in making safer traffic decisions. This includes lane keeping systems, autonomous braking, blind spot detection functionality and, for trucks, side underrun protection.
A start is safer vehicle design. All new road vehicles must satisfy national vehicle standards, known as ‘Australian Design Rules‘ (ADR), before they enter the Australian market. Bicycle Network actively participates in the ADR Development Program in support of ADRs that will better protect people riding bikes.
Behaviour change programs, such as Bicycle Network's 'Swapping Seats', are also important tools for educating drivers and riders.
Distracted driving
When drivers are distracted they are effectively ‘travelling blind’, which causes significantly large areas of the road space to become hazardous for others. The longer a driver is distracted, the higher the risk to others.
Thankfully, we are taking steps to identify distracted drivers with the emergence of mobile phone detection camera networks. First trialled by New South Wales in 2019, these networks are now permanent features in Queensland and Victoria.
Incidentally, an early Victorian trial of the cameras found 1 in 42 people were using a mobile phone while behind the wheel.
With time, we hope to see a more expansive rollout of this promising technology.
Safer speed limits
Nearly all bike trips start in our neighbourhoods. But, understandably, the speed and volume of private vehicles in neighbourhood streets acts as a barrier to riding.
In the worst case, higher speeds increase the risk of a crash and the severity of a crash. This risk rises exponentially with collision speeds beyond 30 km/h.
Reducing speed limits is being increasingly recognised as a solution to reducing crash risks, but also improving the ‘liveability’ of our neighbourhoods. And, surprising to many, these changes have very little impact on travel times.
There are innovative means by which we can achieve slower speeds without resorting to heavy policing, such as traffic calming infrastructure and detailed local area traffic management plans.
We continue to campaign and collaborate with advocacy groups to lower speed limits.
This article was made possible by the support of Bicycle Network's members who enable us to make bike riding better in Australia.
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