Results of a study on attitudes of car drivers toward bicyclists

It appears that cars are like guns: Instruments of control and vehicles of intimidation.

It is a regular topic of discussion on TreeHugger and other sites like Streetsblog: Why do drivers hate people on bikes so much? Why, when there is a crash, do drivers (and the police) always blame the cyclist? Tara Goddard asked these questions and a whole lot more in her PHD thesis, Exploring Drivers’ Attitudes and Behaviors toward Bicyclists: The Effect of Explicit and Implicit Attitudes on Self-Reported Safety Behaviors. In it she tries to dig into what drivers are actually thinking, writing in the summary:

Drivers’ attitudes toward bicyclists, and how those attitudes may affect drivers’ behavior, are a largely unexplored area of research, particularly in the United States. Bringing together social psychological theories with existing techniques for measuring driver attitudes and behavior, this research utilizes an online survey to measure drivers’ explicit attitudes and self-reported behaviors and test drivers’ implicit attitudes toward bicyclists. Understanding drivers’ attitudes toward bicyclists, and whether those attitudes predict behaviors, is integral to advancing goals of community livability that incorporate safety and environmental sustainability.

It starts with some really interesting background on why crashes happen, including an explanation of what they call SMIDSY (sorry mate, I didn’t see you) in the UK. But it turns out that our attitudes affect what we see.

Crashes between drivers and bicyclists are frequently attributed to a driver’s failure to see a bicyclist, due to inattention or “looked but failed to see (LBFTS)” (Wood et al., 2009), and there is ample evidence from psychology that “seeing” is not purely objective but is influenced by socially directed thoughts and beliefs.

Drivers of cars also have the advantage that they are in private metal boxes looking out, so that they can think and believe what they want without retribution.

© bmw at crosswalk, from study

While the physical bodywork of a car essentially anonymizes drivers, bicyclists are visible in their variety of shapes, sizes, ages, gender, and “racialized bodies” (Urry, 2007, p.48). Drivers have shown bias in yielding behavior by the race, apparent disabled status, or age of a crossing pedestrian (see TreeHugger: Don’t cross the street while black, according to new study); while drivers in higher status cars were less likely to yield to a pedestrian. (See TreeHugger: Study reveals the obvious: The rich are different from you and me, especially behind the wheel) When interacting with bicyclists, drivers used greater passing distance when the bicyclist was unhelmeted or appeared female. (See Ian Walker’s work in TreeHugger here)

Learning about social dominance theory was totally fascinating. Humans organize into “group based social hierarchies” where the dominant groups get most of the resources. The boldface is mine:

The more legitimate a system is perceived to be, the greater in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination that dominant users will display (Pratto et al., 2006). Our automobile system, although less than a century old, is inarguably the dominant mode. The automobile is considered the default mode in much of the Western world, as evidenced by mode share and even the term “alternative transportation” applied to bicycling and walking. One distinguishing characteristic of social dominance is that “the degree of lethality . . . is often orders of magnitude greater” by the dominant group toward the subordinate group (Pratto et al., 2006, p. 3). As discussed earlier, the roadway environment has a high degree of lethality: automobiles are a leading cause of preventable death.

Big pickup truck with killer bar on front/ Lloyd Alter/CC BY 2.0

This, for me, was one of the most significant insights of the study; although it is not Tara’s work, it explains so much. Cars are like guns. They are lethal and they give power to one group at the expense of everyone else. The greater the degree of lethality, the more popular they are, which probably explains why everyone is driving big pickup trucks, which are the AR-15s of the road. They are vehicles of intimidation. It’s no wonder that cyclists and pedestrians feel threatened by cars; the system is designed to do exactly that. Tara writes:

Roadways are highly congested (and thus contested), publicly funded space, and both space and funding are a finite and limited resource. This results in the perception and reality of roadway competition as a zero-sum game between roadway users (Aldred, 2012). It may be that this “realistic” competition is a stand-in for social competition; that is, the roadway is a battle ground for social domination, rather than just access to physical space.

© Tara Goddard

Tara’s original work reinforces this idea of social domination; you see this in many of the survey results. For instance, the most anti-cyclist, pro-drivist drivers are the least likely to bother even to turn their heads to check for cyclists, which is a good way to prevent right hooks and left turn deaths. They really just don’t care. The more they dislike cyclists, the more willing they are to kill them. No wonder you get LBFTS and SMIDSYs.

© Tara Goddard

Or in the graph of “pressure to overtake,” a situation where drivers pass too close or actually hit cyclists from the rear, which is often fatal. Here, social dominance kicks in and explains much. Tara writes:

In the model of pressure to overtake, only age, social dominance, and legitimacy were significant predictors. The social dominance scale had the highest standardized coefficient. This factor scale reflects anger at bicyclist rulebreaking, willingness to excuse drivers’ rule-breaking, and perhaps most importantly, the belief that bicyclists should not hold up traffic. This suggests that drivers’ own feelings about bicyclists not holding up traffic may cause them to perceive, real or not, that drivers behind them are angry if they do not overtake. Another possibility is that they get angry when drivers in front of them do not pass bicyclists, and so they assume other drivers feel the same. … Although roadway legitimacy is modelled as the predictor of overtaking pressure, it is possible that the relationship goes the other direction – drivers who feel pressure to overtake may see bicyclist licensing and registration as a way to control bicyclists or make them behave.

So, basically, the more people hate cyclists, the more they want to regulate them and helmet them and licence them, rather than actually give them some basic safe infrastructure (which might mean giving up some precious road.)

In her look at the implications of this study, Tara Goddard suggests that since this is not just a mode war but a class war, a fight over identity, “this research provides more evidence that attitudes relating to social class (mode, or the intersection of mode and other social identities) play a role in behaviors toward bicyclists.”

She suggests that the best way to deal with it is to separate them.

While attitudes may be difficult or take time to shift, roadway design can work immediately by either fully separating modes, or slowing down interactions so that drivers can rely more on executive function and less on implicit cognitions when looking for, seeing, and behaving toward bicyclists. Infrastructure that designates portions of the roadway space to certain users may help alleviate the tensions and difficulties that drivers in this study felt when maneuvering around bicyclists.

Lloyd Alter/ Davenport and Christie/CC BY 2.0

Yes, of course. However, the lesson from this study is that the people with the power are not going to give up space for cyclists, and if they do, it will be totally second rate. As we saw with Rob Ford in Toronto and Donald Trump in America, suburban populists drive cars and hate bikes. As we see in the UK house of lords, the entitled are entitled to the entire road.

Perhaps I am reading too much into this profoundly depressing thesis by Tara Goddard, but there are a lot of angry drivers out there and the angrier they are, the more cyclists they kill. But giving cyclists separate infrastructure just makes them angrier. It’s a vicious, vicious circle.

Read the whole study here.

Comments

Bad attitudes towards cyclists come from two key factors:

1. Conflict is inevitable when there is inadequate infrastructure for bikes. Conflict with cars on the road and conflict with pedestrians on the footpath. Conflict causes mild annoyance but enough mild annoyance can grow into ire and eventually hatred. Protected infrastructure removes this conflict.

2. Cyclists are seen as an “out group”. If you don’t have any friends who are cyclists your mild annoyance is more likely to progress but if you have a friend who cycles you’re less likely to start hating cyclists. The more cyclists there are the more this effect is blunted. Protected infrastructure enables more people to cycle which increases the chances that every citizen knows someone who cycles or even cycles themselves.

Creating protected, separated infrastructure is the key to removing conflict and increasing ridership which in turn are the keys to changing attitudes.

And we have several precedents. The Netherlands and Denmark have extensive cycling infrastructure which means that practically everyone cycles at least some of the time and more than 50% of all journeys are made by bike inside the city centres. We’re also seeing the same changes in cities all over the world. Where protected cycle lanes are added, cycling rates increase.I’ve heard versions of this argument for about 20 years, but it hasn’t happened yet. Here’s why.

There are significant quantitative and qualitative differences between the U.S. and the countries you cite. Those are geographically small countries with much more densely populated cities and towns, that chose to make a significant investment in bike infrastructure.

And they didn’t ignore the issue of hearts and minds when they did it, so they invested not only in money, but in attitude and approach. This is why in Holland a motorist is liable in any collision with a bicyclist, regardless of fault. The reasoning as I was told is that they know cars are larger and do more harm, and that cyclists are vulnerable, so they’ve separated the issues of fault and liability.

The U.S. is geographically large with tons of urban sprawl and not even half that kind of public will to build separate infrastructure or codify significant protections. People do not give money for things they don’t care about, and the fact is that most Americans don’t care about bicyclists. This is why the visions of some wonderful separate system have not come to pass and are unlikely to.

Change hearts and minds. Like we did and are still working on with issues like race. Like we did with smoking.

Sounds like you’re saying it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. The attitudes prevent the political will to get the infrastructure built which means the infrastructure can’t do anything to improve the attitudes. One of them has to come first.

The reason I go with infrastructure as being the solution is that a single person (or a small group of people) in the right position can change that. Boris Johnson and Andrew Gilligan produced something like 15 miles of new protected cycleways in London over four years and that has had a huge effect on the number of cyclists in London. A small group of activists in a borough in the north east has created something they call “Mini Holland” in Walthamstow. Once people experience these completed schemes, even the ones who were aginst them start to like them.

It’s a roll of the dice getting the right combination of people into power at the same time to get this done and it may well take more than 20 years. But it’s more likely than changing the attitudes of 50% of the population so that they vote for protected cycle lanes without ever having seen one.

In the Netherlands you can go almost anywhere by bike except on their freeways, where bikes are not allowed. You’re right, and building the necessary bicycling infrastructure is the most important thing. Most places in the USA are way to dangerous to ride a bike due to the absence of protected bike lanes and intersections. At least 30% to 40% of our car trips could be replaced by bicycles if we built the advanced bicycling infrastructure that they have in the Netherlands.

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