Road Safety: The New Philosophy An Interview with Mayer Hillman

Mayer Hillman is well known for his controversial views on road
safety and his challenges to "official" thinking on everything from 
cycle helmets to how we should measure danger. This interview
first appeared in Inroads, Journal of the Institute of Road Safety
Officers, in 1995.
The Policy Studies Institute is a fairly non-descript modern
building set in a quiet street between Mornington Crescent and
Regents Park.  It was set up in the Depression years as a 
non-political educational charity with the aim of undertaking 
fundamental research into economic and social questions which
could then be used to inform policy making.  Since then it has
built up a reputation for high quality but often radical work which 
is not afraid of calling government policy into question.
Mayer Hillman, of course, fits this mould perfectly.  Along with 
John Adams and John Whitelegg he is one of the elder statesmen 
of the alternative approach to road safety, with even his early 
work showing signsof uneasiness with government policy.  His 
books and reports (he has written over 30) are usually greeted 
by the road safety establishment without enthusiasm and are 
thought of as at best misguided and wrong, and at worst, as 
downright dangerous.  His recent work on cycle helmets is a
good example.
There are signs, however, that this is changing, with even the
Department of Transport commissioning work from him and he 
seemedquite pleased when I said that quite a few road safety 
officers read his work with interest, although there were still a 
number of fundamental concerns which made many uncertain 
about the new approach.
As we chatted over coffee I was intrigued to learn that he had 
livedfor quite a while in Scotland and that his parents were from 
Glasgow and Edinburgh.  It was also interesting that he had started 
life as anarchitectural planner and had designed a 
pedestrian-oriented town back in1955.  Given the trends in town 
planning in the  fifties he was well ahead ofhis time.  This led to 
his doctoral thesis in 1970 in which he took a stance against the 
Buchanan Report.  He is now in his sixties and claims his mind
is slowing down which I found amusing since we, or rather he, 
talked solidly for three hours!
A central feature of his approach is that the Department of
Transport's thinking on road safety is flawed.  It relies almost 
exclusively on reducing accidents rather than danger.  He says 
that they are wrong to claim that our roads are safer because 
accidents are going down.  The reason they are falling is because 
the roads are actually more dangerous.
He realises this is a fundamental challenge to "official" thinking, 
i.e. the DOT, road safety officers etc. as well as the general public 
as it seems so obvious to take accidents as a measure of danger.  
Yet to do this doesn't take the complementary side of it into 
account, where the most effective way of reducing accidents to 
children is not to let them go out on the roads, or to have them 
travel in a car which approximates as close as is considered
aesthetically acceptable to a tank.  One has a much higher 
chance of survival in a tank than in a Deux Chevaux or a little
Fiat. Even in the Fiat you  have a far better chance than the 
pedestrian or cyclist.  He thinks the answer to reducing risk therefore 
lies in reducing motorised mileage.
He referred to the last chapter of One False Move where he, and
co-authors John Adams and John Whitelegg, had presented 
some ideas for measuring road safety.  One of these was the 
volume and speed of traffic - the more vehicles on a road and 
the faster it moves, the more dangerous the road.  Injuries, as
he and Stephen Plowden had shown in Danger on the Road in 
1983, would also be more severe.
This, of course, runs counter to the whole culture of our society
which believes that the more people who have cars and can 
use them, then the better off society is. When it comes to policy 
then, he says, it is not just a question of adjusting it here or there 
- it needs to go into reverse.
He gave an interesting criticism of the way in which data is
presented in Road Accidents Great Britain.  This has table after 
table showing accident rate per head of population or mileage 
travelled by for example cars and motorcycles without adding 
the numbers who are killed or injured by that vehicle.  It seems 
almost outrageous to him that the figures should be presented 
without taking this into account.
To illustrate this point he asks people what the safest form of
transport is.  Obviously a heavy lorry because if you are driving 
one it is unlikely you will be killed.  He then asks what the most 
dangerous form of transport is.  Again it must be the heavy lorry 
because if you are hit by one you are more than likely to be killed. 
The lorry is safe or dangerous depending on whether you look at 
it from the driver's point of view or that of other road users.
He showed me a table he had prepared to illiustrate this.  In
accidents involving heavy lorries, 93% of the fatalities are to  
other road users and not the driver.  The car is about 53% - in 
the words of John Adams, for every driver killed someone else is 
too.  Pedestrians will be 0%, so the safest forms of travel are walking 
and cycling.  He says we have to start putting it the other way 
round, using the language of vulnerability - cycling isn't dangerous, 
cyclists are vulnerable.
We switched to environmental measures like reducing the volume
and speed of traffic which he believes are a very important way of 
reducing accidents and increasing safety (accepting the distinction 
between the two - they are complementary, not superimposed).
Although the DOT had made a dramatic shift in the last couple 
of years in its attitudes to traffic growth, it would have to move 
even further because of the strong links between transport 
policy and road safety policy. It is a question of whether we  try 
to accomodate the ever increasing demands of traffic growth or 
whether (as he had argued at an Institute of Civil Engineers
conference 20 years ago) we should be setting out goals for 
transport policy - what we are trying to achieve. Clearly we can 
cope with the growth in traffic by diverting resources to building 
more roads but this is just reacting to demands; we need to
prioritise transport modes to achieve social and environmental 
goals (as opposed to balancing them as is often done in transport 
planning).
He admitted to having had an "enlightenment" about cycling a
couple of days before. Up till then he had thought the order of 
priority should be walking, cycling, public transport and then 
personal transport (cars).  He now puts cycling before walking
because it offers better scope for becoming independent of 
motorised transport as it is faster and more convenient, and also 
because of its great benefits to health.
This brought us to the BMA report -Cycling and Health- which he
had written. He had looked at alternative ways of promoting 
health and cycling came out very favourably; much better than 
swimming, for example, where there is only one swimming pool for 
every 46,000 people.
He explained the concept of "life years" which he had used.  This
allowed him to make a comparison of the life years lost in road 
accidents against the life years gained through improved fitness.  
He took each cycle death in 1989 and looked at the acturial 
evidence as to how long a person of a certain age could expect 
to live and multiplied that by the number of deaths in each age 
group in order to arrive at a figure of approximately 11,000 life years 
lost in cycle fatalities.  To calculate life years gained he looked 
at some American evidence of the increased longevity of those 
who cycled regularly and this showed that people could expect 
to live two years longer.  When this is multiplied by the numbers 
of those who cycle regularly, as revealed by the National Travel 
Survey, you arrive at the extraordinary ratio of 20:1.  In other 
words, he says, for every life year lost through accidents, 20 
years are gained through improved health and fitness.
This links in to taking road accidents as the measure of road 
safety instead of danger because if one thinks that,  one will 
try to reduce the risks (he was talking about child cyclists) which 
means restricting their freedom of movement and so affecting their 
health. Many surveys show that children are increasingly unfit 
because they are not getting the exercise that people used to get.  Society needs to find ways which will reduce the danger to the
degree that children are able to get around on their own.  This 
of course will be a benefit to parents, particularly mothers, who 
will no longer need to engage in this ridiculous escort from the 
age of 3 to 11.
I asked about the role of traffic calming in achieving this.  He
thought such schemes were excellent, particularly when they 
reduced speeds in residential areas.  He referred to Christopher 
Chope who had said that local authorities should be able to 
designate 80 per cent of residential areas as suitable for traffic 
calming.  However, the money for this hasn't been found, largely 
because it is going into road building. He was encouraged that at 
last the DOT was recognising that road building merely generates 
more traffic, as with the M25.  The relevance of this to road
safety is lost.  Obviously, if mileage is increased by 50 per cent, 
the danger is increased too.
When I asked about the road lobby he mentioned a book he had
co-written - Wealth Beyond Measure - about the new economics.  
He says that one has to come to terms with the fact that society 
isn't well served by, nor can it expect, continuing economic growth.  
The notion that more roads, more car ownership and car use, 
more fuel consumption and so on is good for economic growth 
is a complete nonsense and yet economic growth measures like 
GNP and GDP are used by governments all over to illustrate
what is alleged to be progress.  He says it is a real dilemma.  If 
GNP goes up, if more damage is done, it's not a good thing; and 
yet the idea is there that the shorter life consumer durables have, 
the more employment and resource consumption there will be.  In 
terms of sustainable futures it is a complete nonsense.  The point 
he was making was that road safety fits into wider social and 
environmental issues like health and the economy. He reiterated 
the scope of the bicycle for dealing with this problem.  Not only is
it cheap, it incurs no pollution and the cost of catering for it is 
very low compared to other forms of transport.  And because we 
continue to use accident tables which make it out to be one of 
the most dangerous forms of travel, its health benefits are lost.
I referred to the article in Inroads about Chris Fox's visit to China
where there were only 37,000 offficial vehicles in Shanghai but 
7 million bicycles.  He didn't look convinced when I said she had 
been promoting the use of cycle helmets!
We talked about the changes in official attitudes to road safety
(I was referring to his book Danger on the Road: The Needless 
Scourge which well illustrates the low priority of road safety a 
decade ago).  He thinks the change may have stemmed from a 
reappraisal in the public mind of the unquestioned benefits of rising 
car ownership and use - it was taken for granted a few years ago. 
 And once one starts, pollution, congestion and other aspects 
start coming in.  He mentioned the equity issue - people not 
having cars - which was the first study he did on joining the PSI 
(Personal Mobility and Transport Policy) .  This looked at different
groups in the population and how their travel needs were met.  A 
gap was immediately apparent between groups like children, the 
elderly and young mothers, and the adult motorist who had the
bulk of the provision.
We touched on the question of responsibility, or culpability for
accidents.  I said that a lot of RSOs were now reluctant to ascribe 
blame to children as used to happen quite often.  He has 
strong feelings about this, and mentioned the AA Foundation study 
which suggested that children were mostly responsible for their 
accidents.  He would place responsibility, not on the child or the 
parent, but more or less totally on the driver.  The driver, being in 
charge of a car, should drive in such a way that they can take
avoiding action.  If a child has a momentary lapse of attention and 
acts carelessly like running into the road after a ball, he doesn't 
think a motorist begins to be justified in saying that it's the 
child's fault that he's dead or that it's the parents fault that he's 
dead.  The child was behaving in a perfectly natural way which is 
to be careless - we're all careless - if we weren't, we would be 
machines. He related an account of a skirmish he had had that
morning with a driver which illustrated very well the attitudes of 
drivers to cyclists.
I asked what he thought about cycle training as I had the
impression that he thought this was ineffective.  He said that 
obviously one had to learn the skills to be able to ride - there are 
basic lessons which need to be learned.  He thinks however 
that far more effort needs to be put into creating conditions for 
cyclists so that a momentary lapse of attention doesn't lead to 
severe injury or death.
Rather interestingly he said he didn't mind slight injuries; these
could be a useful part of the learning process.  He thinks it 
unfortunate that children should be denied the experience of 
learning by falling down and hurting themselves; it is part of 
growing up, of taking risks and suffering the consequences of 
taking undue risks.  Without the coping mechanisms they
can develop through slight accidents, they in fact become more 
exposed to risk.
With his recent report on cycle helmet wearing, he had found that
people were not reading what he had written.  He was not saying 
you shouldn't wear a helmet nor that it wouldn't afford you some 
protection. What he does do is point to the consequences that 
would ensue if road safety officers, the retail trade and the 
manufacturers were to tell people that these are only designed 
for falling off a bike and will afford little protection if you are 
hit by a vehicle. What would happen is that cyclists who still 
bought the helmet would ride in the full knowledge that it was 
of very limited value; and much more likely, would not bother 
buying it if it was only going to help them if they fell off their 
bike
He disagreed with the point I had made in a review of the report in
Inroads that making riders aware of the limited protection of helmets 
should prevent them from feeling they were safe and taking risks.  
He thinks the evidence is against this; it might happen at first but it 
will wear off. He quotes the analogy John Adams makes of the
acrobat taking far more risks if there is a safety net. If the 
acrobat tried to imagine that the safety net wasn't there, they 
could probably do it for a little while and be more cautious.  But 
they know the safety net is there and the feelings of security will 
come back and they will take more risks.
I asked about the effectiveness of road safety education and cycle
training.  He thinks that when a child passes the cycle test the 
message going out to the parents and the child is that the child is 
now much safer on the roads.  This then licences the child to go 
out on the roads and expose them to more traffic than before.  
The training then results in the children having more accidents 
than if they weren't trained, rather like cycle helmets.
He talked generally about this process, how it applied to advanced
driving where drivers would want to exercise their new skills, and 
how drivers in cars with better brakes or better acceleration would  
brake later or feel more able to overtake.  He makes the analogy 
where he will ask which of two drivers, one with good brakes and 
one with bad brakes, will be more careful when driving.  This 
illustrates the whole argument about improved performance and it 
can be extended to road safety education when a person applying
their skills or knowledge could find themselves exposed to
more danger than before.
He stressed that this did not mean, as is often construed, that one
should not have road safety education or cycle training or better 
brakes.  But he says the reality reveals that the best way of 
improving safety on the roads and reducing accidents lies in 
measures that will reduce the volume and speed of traffic and 
will bring about an increasing transfer to the safe modes, by which 
he means those that do not pose a risk to other people.
He made an interesting point about recent deaths in the Highlands
where the people were taking risks for themselves and should be 
at liberty to do this.  With driving one can also risk one's own life
but should not put other lives at risk through one's driving.  He 
thinks a higher value should be attached to the lives of other road 
users which could be put at risk from any one road user.  He 
emphasised the point about the figures which he feels do not go
far enough.  There should be a multiplier factor for lives at risk
through anothers behaviour - they are much more valuable in 
moral and ethical terms than the life of the person driving fast and 
prepared to take the risk for themselves.
I said that many RSOs might accept his points about a road being
dangerous not because of the number of accidents but because of
restrictions on mobility and so on.  They would feel however that the measures he is proposing about traffic volumes and speed etc 
are in the long term future, so that we must continue with cycle 
training and our educational programmes.  He picked me up 
immediately on the  phrase "restrictions on mobility" (which I had 
meant in the sense of being too dangerous to cross) and 
emphasised that the rise in motorised mobility had lowered the 
mobility of people without access to cars, particularly children.
With regard to my point about what RSOs feel, however, he is 
not saying in any sense that road safety should stop.  People 
need the skills for driving before they take to the roads, and so on. 
But he does think that these are secondary approaches 
compared to the primary approach of creating a much safer 
environment in which people can get about.
We covered a number of other issues including DBST and any
influence the PSI might have on politicians.  They do not engage 
in lobbying as it is a research institute although he recognised that 
others might promote the ideas that he and others like John Adams 
share.  The Institute is not Labour-oriented nor indeed to any 
other party although he had been involved in three Labour Party 
Transport Groups, initially on the invitation of Tony Crossland 
back in the 1960's.  He felt they probably had no better insight 
into transport that the Conservatives, and overemphasised public
transport because of links with the unions.  he had spoken to
Kenneth Carlyle at a conference some time ago and had found 
him open-minded - although there were no civil servants around 
at the time!  He sometimes finds it frustrating dealing with civil 
servants as they never lock horns in debate - I get the impression 
Mayer likes a good argument!
My mind went blank when he mentioned Double British Summer
Time and how it could save accidents - to be frank, the Scottish 
road safety community always feels someone is trying to pull a fast 
one when this is raised.  There is almost a folk memory of accidents 
going up when they tried it years ago and an uneasiness about 
trading lives saved further south with those lost further north. This 
attitude is of course just the sort of thing Mayer is arguing against 
in his report "Time for Change".  He spoke about the adverse 
media coverage it always received in Scotland and the lobbying
by the agricultural and construction industries, and the general 
trend of his case.  Interestingly enough we received a letter from 
Daylight Extra, the campaign group, in the office recently which 
caused collective groans as we had to reply to it. This meant 
reading up on the subject which to our mind took us away from 
more important work.  There may be a clue here to people's 
reactions to the work of Dr Hillman and others - the subjects dealt
with are sometimes not central to our concerns and yet have to be
responded to.
After having thanked Dr Hillman and gone away with a couple of
reports to study I felt that we need people like him to challenge our 
thinking. There is a lot of truth in what he says and even where his 
ideas do not convince us they undoubtedly point to areas which 
need close examination.
My final thoughts as I walked past Mornington Crescent
underground station which was closed for restoration, waited ten 
minutes for the bus and then walked a mile up to Camden Town 
was wishing that I had brought my car!