I have been asked to talk about the risks linked to pedestrian-cyclists conflicts.
There are of course risks involved in crashes or near-crashes between cyclists and pedestrians where
they – legally or not – share the same space, such as for example a sidewalk or a pedestrianized area.
There also is the issue of the perceived danger – and reciprocal irritation – between both road user
groups.
I decided I will not talk about the elderly person that fell due to a less considerate and maybe too fast
cyclist, ended with a broken hip and finally died unrecovered 6 months later. I will not talk about the
cyclist that had to avoid a pedestrian on the cycle track and broke his arm.
We all know or have heard about such people. But let me ask a question. The answer should only
include people you did personally know prior to the crash, so not anyone you met the first time after the
crash
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How many pedestrians do you personally know that where killed or injured, to the level that an
actual intervention at a hospital needed to take place, by a cyclist?
How many cyclists do you personally know that have been killed or injured by a cyclist?
How many pedestrians or cyclists do you personally know that have been killed or injured by a
motorized vehicle?
So let’s put this in perspective. If it were a fight – like some unfortunately perceive it – we would say
“choose your enemy”. Let’s not polarize it to a pedestrian-cyclist conflict.
To come back on the original question to talk about the risks linked to pedestrian-cyclists conflicts, I
would say that the largest risk is that we confine it to a pedestrian-cyclist conflict. The real issue is
however most frequently that we simply fight for the little leftover space that we were confined to. An
important part of the public space that was available has been given to motorized mobility in the second
half of the previous century in the western world (and this still happens today in the developing
countries). Pedestrians got the leftover space, after not only car mobility (the driving lanes) was catered
for, but even car immobility (parking space). Basically, the pedestrians often got a kind of buffer zone
between the houses and the car world. Sometimes that buffer happened to be wide and comfortable;
often it ended up to be narrow, irregular, uncomfortable. Cyclists could share the space with the
motorists, till that space became so hostile to cyclists that many gave up (and became motorists) and
the remainder ignored and/or forgotten about. With the revival of cycling, some of them see the
sidewalk or pedestrian zones as a safe place to be. To them, the sidewalk is often perceived as the safest
path, or the path of least resistance. Also local politicians, faced with the changing mobility dynamic
forcing them to provide space for cycling, taking space from the pedestrians is often the path of least
resistance. Converting a driving or parking lane into a cycle lane typically results in strong hostile
reactions from either the powerful car lobby or the local retail. And we pedestrians typically have no
powerful lobby and just get irritated, because we perceive that what the cyclists do to us is basically the
same as what the motorists did to the cyclists.
My plea here is that we should not be fighting with each other over the crumbles of the pie left over for
sustainable mobility. Let’s work together to get a fair part of the pie. And let’s see it broader than just a
pedestrian-and-cyclists versus the car conflict. It is about how public space is used. That includes
appropriate shares of the space for the different road users, and sometimes clear choices in case the
available surface cannot cater for everyone’s wishes, fully in line with the policies and the views we have
over which kind of mobility should be stimulated. And it does not only include cars. It also includes
terraces, all kind of urban furniture including light poles, parking meters, publicity etcetera. If we would
use the energy that some cyclists and pedestrians use to fight each other instead in a joint attempt to
have a better allocation of public space, life would not only be much nicer and comfortable, but the
physical risks of crashes between cyclists and pedestrians would strongly be reduced too.