ARTICLE FROM THE BOOK:
Cyclists & Cycling Around the World – Creating Liveable
andBikeable
CitiesCyclists& Cycling
Aroundthe World
Edited by Juan Carlos Dextre, Mike Hughes & Lotte Bech
Published by Fondo Editorial, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2013
ISBN: 978-612-4146-55-8

4. Safety for CyclistsT

his chapter contains two articles dealing with different aspects of traffic safety.
The first article covers analyses of traffic safety for cyclists and contains concrete
recommendations for the prevention of accidents through better traffic behavior
combined with physical changes to the infrastructure. The second article deals withtraffic safety at school, describing the Safe Routes to School projects. It contains concrete
recommendations for the development of similar projects as part of a sustainable urban
mobility policy.
In her article Traffic safety and perceived safety, Anne Eriksson illustrates how to cycle
and survive. The main topic is how to promote traffic safety for cyclists covering bothdriver/cyclist behaviour and the cycle/vehicle itself as well as the road infrastructure.
Anne starts with her daily work with traffic safety in the City of Copenhagen, where themain political goal is to increase the share of cyclists while at the same time reducing thenumber of cyclists injured. She makes the important and fascinating distinction between
safety and perceived safety, pointing out that some intersections that are perceived as
dangerous are the most secure intersections according to statistics, which shows thatsafety and perceived safety are not always aligned. The cyclist’s behavior is importantfor safety and this is taught to children and young people. It is equally important withcar driver training to assess the risk related to cars and cyclists. In her article, she uses
statistics to examine the causes of accidents involving cyclists. High speed is the maincause of accidents resulting in serious injury or death. She also highlights accidents
with heavy vehicles. Anne also describes typical accidents involving cyclists which
occur at intersections, illustrating some of the measures taken to improve traffic safety
in Copenhagen for example, separate traffic signals with pre-green for cyclists andwithdrawn stop line for cars. Her main advice is to put safety first if you want to improveconditions for cyclists.
In their article Safe routes to schools, Pau Avellaneda and Esther Anaya describe thedevelopment in the concept of safe routes to school from road safety to community
building. They trace the historical development of the projects from road safety
initiatives focusing mainly on encouraging active travel to school, up to the present day,when they see it being a part of a global policy covering the recovery of urban space,161traffic calming and promotion of walking and cycling. The projects have many othervaluable benefits such as education and engagement of school children and theirfamilies in the participative process and also community building. Although there isfocus on Barcelona and Spain in general, the article also moves outside these areas, citing
examples from UK and Italy amongst others. The authors describe the different stages inthe development of a Safe Routes to School project. Although each case will be different,
the Action Plan they outline, contains broad categories of action which will be applicableeverywhere, such as: “Public space interventions,” “Educational and formative actions,”“Communication actions,” and “Accompanying actions.” They see the possibility of using
Safe Routes to School as a starting point to reexamine many aspects of mobility, urban
space etc, or of integrating it as an important part of a global, sustainable, urban mobility
policy.

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