Pushing back on poor road-safety messages

We’ve long taken umbrage with certain police and municipal road-safety campaigns. They are the kinds that make road safety the duty of pedestrians and cyclists. It’s up to pedestrians to wear reflective clothing at night. Cyclists, too. Yet, we believe every dollar, every minute of time spent trying to eradicate road violence (dangerous, negligent, reckless driving leading to collisions where people are harmed) should be spent on the perpetrators of harm, not on the victims. In 2021, 108,018 people were injured in motor vehicle collisions in Canada, an increase of 3.6 per cent from 2020. Forty-four cyclists and 280 pedestrians were killed.

In 2023, we at The Biking Lawyer LLP had spent months on new ad campaigns with road-safety creative genius Tom Flood of Rovélo Creative. You might know Tom’s biting but insightful jabs on social media against our addiction to the automobile and the pre-eminent position we give it in our society. We wanted to pair our leading cycling advocacy with some of Tom’s brilliantly cutting work.

You could say we should thank the Richmond B.C. RCMP for its great sense of timing. This past October, the organization released a video with a teen in a hoodie wearing headphones who almost gets hit in a crosswalk by a motorist. The motorist was distracted by their phone. The juxtaposition of the hoodie-and-headphone-wearing teen with the phone-fiddling driver suggests road safety, in this case, is a shared responsibility. Well, we were ready to pounce.

We had the perfect response. It went viral along with the Richmond RCMP’s video. In our ad, two automobiles—one black, one fluorescent yellow—appear with the instruction, “It’s getting dark out earlier, be sure to add a bright coat of paint to your vehicle.”

As Tom points out, we continually see the same boilerplate “safety” campaigns from our authorities. They roll the messages out with minimal thought or consideration of the landscape in which they are communicating. Our ad was done as a reaction to the all-too-common victim-blaming messaging: it’s up to vulnerable road users to make sure they are visible for their own safety. We wanted to show the need to flip the script with this misguided approach to safety.

Tom explains why the Richmond RCMP ad is so bad: “This video is a good example of missing the mark and lacking an understanding of communications and responsibility. The teen is shown doing everything right: walking on the sidewalk, crossing at a marked crosswalk, waiting for the lights to flash before proceeding into the crosswalk. The only issue is the distracted driver, yet somehow, the film shares the blame with someone wearing weather-appropriate clothing and listening to music.

“If you wanted to be charitable with the video, you could say, ‘At least the Richmond RCMP are doing and saying something to try to help. They have to deal with the real-ities of the road.’ Well, did road violence and unsafe streets sneak up on us this year, requiring us to scramble to think of quick solutions? No. We’ve had a century to figure this out with so many successful models to look to and replicate. Famously, there’s the Stop de Kindermoord movement in the Netherlands in the early ’70s that transformed urban spaces into safer, less-car-centric areas. In 2023, Jersey City, N.J., was recognized for its safety initiatives, efforts that meant the city had no traffic deaths in 2022.”

“If we had safe systems and addressed the root causes of road violence,” Tom adds, “we wouldn’t need to continually run these backward campaigns that ask everyone outside of the car to be safe so that drivers can be dangerous.”

These types of messages are particularly problematic because they come from voices of authority, which are the voices in the road-safety space that have the most influence. The messages have conditioned us. When there’s a crash involving a pedestrian or cyclist, we first ask, “What were they wearing? Did they have headphones on? Were they looking at their phone? Did they have a hood up?” In the case of a cyclist, “Were they wearing a helmet?” This upside-down approach creates a harmful distraction that allows those in power to point blame to the victim instead of addressing the root cause and taking the required steps to make real change.

Continually asking people to be more attentive when walking or cycling or rolling really just shows how distracted we are from the real issue.

Of course, we aren’t saying that pedestrians and cyclists should throw caution to the wind, or thumb their noses at legitimate ways to be safe and cycle defensively. On our hostile roads, we encourage everyone to be safe. We just think it’s also important to highlight the backwards approach to road safety that’s been normalized and that continually distracts from making the tangible change that we will all benefit from.

Dave Shellnutt is the founder and managing partner of The Biking Lawyer LLP, lawyers for injured cyclists, thebikinglawyer.ca