Status Anxiety

22 March 2008

My cycling accident proves my point that road users rely on their ears. We need to be noisier

I was fortunate in another sense, too. Since moving to Acton I have started taking my four-year-old daughter to school on the bike. I always make a point of strapping her in — she sits in a little saddle that is bolted to the crossbar — but I now realise that if the bike was hit by a car, she would not be thrown clear. Rather, she’d be attached to the bike as it went cart-wheeling down the street.

My theory as to why cycling is so dangerous is that road users rely far more than they realise on their ears. You notice this with pedestrians all the time. If they can’t hear anything coming, they will simply stroll out into the middle of the road without looking. Similarly, if car drivers can’t hear another vehicle behind them, they’ll make a sharp turn without bothering to check their mirrors. That’s why the driver of the Mercedes opened his door without looking — his ears told him it was safe. The fact that he was a cyclist himself and should have known better just goes to show how instinctive our reliance on auditory information is. If our ears tell us the coast is clear, we don’t bother to look.

The solution is to make bicycles noisier — and, until recently, I had a battery-powered police siren attached to my handlebars. The problem was, it was too loud. Car drivers became confused when I used it, often pulling in sharply to make way for what they imagined was an emergency vehicle, and pedestrians would literally jump into the air with fright. This was a lot of fun to begin with, but I began to worry that I might give some elderly person a heart attack. There were also my children to consider. They got into the habit of detaching it from my bicycle at six o’clock in the morning and then sneaking into my bedroom and setting it off next to my sleeping head.

What is required is a portable device that makes exactly the same noise as a car engine. I am convinced it would reduce the chances of being hit by another vehicle by at least 75 per cent. Until that happens, I may have to resort to giving my daughter custody of the police siren when she’s sitting on the crossbar. I fear the cardiovascular unit of Hammersmith hospital won’t be able to cope.

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.