Since posting about mass-produced motoring helmets and later Protective Helmet-ish headbands for motorists I was curious to learn more about the latter, produced at the University of Adelaide.

It's taken a while but I finally recieved the study done in 2000 at the Road Accident Research Unit at the U of Adelaide, called CR 193: The development of a protective headband for car occupants (Andersen, White, McLean 2000).

A chap at Road Safety Policy, Department of Infrastructure & Transport in Australia was kind enough to send a link to the Australian Government website wherein the study is presented. I don't think cyclists should be bullied with helmet promotion and threatened with legislation when there exists a very real and present danger to car occupants. I think that the car lobby as well as the general population should be presented with more data and facts about the dangers of driving. It's only fair and logical. From the Australian report we can read about the background for the study: "Car crashes remain a significant source of head injury in the community. Car occupants have an annual hospital admission rate of around 90 per 100,000 population. Of drivers who are admitted to hospital, the most serious injury is usually to the head (O'Conner and Trembath, 1994). In a previous study, McLean et al. (1997) estimated the benefits that are likely to accrue to Australia from the use of padding of the upper interior of the passenger compartment. This study specifically examined the effects of the amendment to the United States Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 201 (FMVSS 201) in which passenger cars have to pass head impact tests with the upper interior. That report estimated the total annual reduction in harm to the Australian community to be around $123 million.

But more impressive were the estimates of introducing protective headwear for car occupants. The authors of the report estimated that the annual reduction in harm would be in the order of $380 million. The benefit of padding the head is that the head is protected from strikes with unpadded automotive components, exterior objects and in vehicles that predate any eventual introduction of padded interiors."

These are Australian numbers so the numbers for annual reduction in harm would be even higher in the EU or US.

The tests were a success, which is great news for drivers and car occupants: "The results from Phase 3 indicate that a headband can greatly reduce the severity of an impact to the head. HIC was reduced by 25 percent [...] when compared with an impact with no headband."

The RARU headband prototype covers 44% of impact points usually suffered by car occupants. You can see on the photos at top that the protective area was actually extended when the prototype was designed so this 44% must be a bit higher. The researchers go on to recommend further work on the subject: "The results from Phase 3 indicate that a headband can greatly reduce the severity of an impact to the head. HIC was reduced by 25 percent [...] with the use of 25 mm of BB-38 polyurethane, and 67 percent with the honeycomb cardboard prototype, when compared with an impact with no headband."

"We recommend that further investigation is made into materials of a honeycomb structure to find a material of the correct crushing strength and durability. We also recommend that prototypes be developed further to be included in a testing program that would include other vehicle structures tested over a range of velocities."

It gets extremely difficult to ignore the bull when you're looking at this kind of science.

If we're serious, as societies, about really saving lives, these headbands should be promoted on all levels. There are two positive effects: One is that there will be fewer head injuries among car occupants. The other is that we would be informing people of the danger of driving and thereby branding driving as dangerous which will only serve the cause of encouraging people to consider safer transport options like... oh I don't know... cycling? Take the Poll:

Here's a link to the Australian Government website about the motorist headbands.

Here's the study as a .pdf: The Development of a Protective Headband for Car Occupants

Elevated cycle track network - Netherlands 1950s.

Read more about how London is becoming the Village Idiot of Urban Innovation with other ideas like this one.

There's been a bit of chatter of late about a (not very) new idea for bicycle "infrastructure" in London. None other than architect Norman Robert Foster, Lord Foster of Thames Bank, OM Kt, has dusted off a student's idea and launched it upon an unsuspecting world.

Rendering of the Sky Cycle Now of course this isn't a good idea. This is classic Magpie Architecture. Attempting to attract people to big shiny things that dazzle but that have little functional value in the development of a city. Then again, Foster is a master of building big shiny things. Ideas like these are city killers. Removing great numbers of citizens who could be cycling down city streets past shops and cafés on their way to work or school and placing them on a shelf, far away from everything else. All this in a city that is so far behind in reestablishing cycling as transport that it's embarrassing. With most of the population already whining about bicycles on streets, sticking them up in the air, out of the way, is hardly going to help returning bicycles to the urban fabric of the city. With urban planning, now more than ever before, heading back to the future - back to when cities were life-sized places with rational and practical solutions for moving people around - ideas like these stand out like a sore thumb.

As Canadian author Chris Turner said on Twitter:

"You say that as if Foster and the starchitect league have ever attempted to understand how streets work in general."

Indeed.

Foster grew up on this street south of Manchester, back in an age when Manchester had around 20% modal share for bicycles. Instead of realising that modern urban planning is seeking to return our cities to their pre-car state, he insists on dishing up city-killing, Bladerunner fantasies. You would hope that Foster would seek back to his roots and embrace the kind of city he grew up in.

The first things that popped into my head upon hearing of this idea:

The Price

£220 million pounds for the first 6 km stretch from Stratford to Liverpool Street? Seriously? For that price any urban planning firm could propose a world-beating transport plan for London, the city could pay to implement it and there would still be change leftover for schools, social programmes or whatever else. What an obscene amount of money to spend on Magpie Architecture.

Bicycle Anthropology

I've read that the estimated average speed would be 24 km/h up there in the Sky. The average speed for Citizen Cyclists in Copenhagen and Amsterdam is 15 km/h. That's the speed that a few hundred thousand people sub-consciously settle upon whilst cycling through a city. There are those who go faster, sure, but understanding basic bicycle anthopology should be at the forefront of our thinking. Bicycles belong at street level. Bicycle users are just pedestrians on wheels, not to be confused with motorised traffic. Creating safe, separated infrastructure on our streets is the way forward. Back to the future. Bicycles are the most effective and powerful tool we have for re-building our liveable cities. The Sky Cycle seems to focus on the 1%. The spandexian demographic. It will never get built, of that we can be certain, but if play Foster's fantasy game, there would be a few bicycle users using it. But nowhere near the numbers that have been predicted.

The Sky Cycle idea also disregards another basic fact in city transport. Decades of experience in Denmark and the Netherlands has determined that the majority of bicycle users will cycle up to seven kilometres. The number of bicycle users drops dramatically in the 8-15 km zone. Indeed, under 10% of bicycle commuters entering the City of Copenhagen are coming from the 8-15 km zone. The Bicycle Superhighway project in Copenhagen, aimed at upgrading existing infrastructure in this zone in order to encourage more to cycle from this zone is a great idea, but they are only expecting an increase of about 10,000 cyclists when it's completed. A great number, to be sure, but unlike the Sky Cycle project that boasts of the 5.8 million Londoners living within 10 minutes of the Sky Cycle, they are realistic about numbers of potential bicycle users and their behaviour.

Oh, and in doing so they will spend between £45 million and £96 million. Not for a 6 km stretch, but for 28 routes through 20 municipalities of a total of 500 km in length that will span the entire network spanning the entire Greater Copenhagen region. The Sky Cycle will be the greatest transport flop in history, simply because it fails to understand the importance of bicycle traffic in urban planning. Also because it's a stupid idea, but hey.

New Wine in Old Bottles

It's not a new idea. Look at the drawing at the very top. Stuff like this has been around for awhile. Has it ever been built? No. Rationality ended up winning the day. The California Cycleway in Pasadena, built in 1900, was a similar idea, one that provided an A to B route from Pasadena to Los Angeles, but even it only lasted a couple of years and ended up being sold for lumber.

The City of Calgary has had a pedestrian walkway system in their downtown core since 1970 called Plus 15. Another city-killing idea that strangles street life. I can recommend watching waydowntown, the urban planning mockumentary by Gary Burns, which is unflattering towards the Plus 15, to say the least.

Just Do What Other Cities are Doing Funny how the rising stars of bicycle urbanism like Paris, New York, Chicago, Bordeaux, Barcelona, Dublin, Seville, etc etc, haven't bothered with lofty starchitect visions. They just rolled up their sleeves, dusted off their rationality and started tackling their urban problems with infrastructure and traffic calming measures.

While Foster and too many others are obsessed with commuting instead of bicycle culture, others cities are on the fast track to going back to the future. Using far less money and getting far better results much quicker.

Absolutely everything we need to reestablish the bicycle as transport and to modernise our cities into more liveable urban spaces has already been invented a century ago.

De 28 ruter på samlet set ca 500 km. rutenet, er vurderet til at koste mellem 413 mio. kr og 875 mio. kr - See more at: http://www.cykelsuperstier.dk/content/faq#sthash.yrYcuNX1.dpuf

De 28 ruter på samlet set ca 500 km. rutenet, er vurderet til at koste mellem 413 mio. kr og 875 mio. kr - See more at: http://www.cykelsuperstier.dk/content/faq#sthash.yrYcuNX1.dpuf

Unlike so many others dazzled by the fact that this idea has been pushed forward by Norman Robert Foster, Lord Foster of Thames Bank, OM Kt, I refuse to be blinded. It's a ridiculous idea that shits all over the efforts of so many of my colleagues around the world who know better.

Remember, this, Norm... you're only as good as your latest idea.

Much is said and reblogged/tweeted about the famous 180% on cars in Denmark. Back when rationality was fashionable, this series of taxes was put into place to try and discourage people from driving but also to try and win some money back for society for the destructive nature of automobiles. We know, for example, that for every kilometre ridden by bike, the Danish coffers recieve 23 cents.

For every kilometre driven by car, the Danish state pays out 16 cents.

Those numbers are from the "Socio-economic analyses of bicycle initiatives - methods and cases", produced by COWI in 2009.

For a more local feel, if you ride in Copenhagen from Øster Allé to Nørreport during rush hour here's the societal benefit and loss:

Bicycle: 63 cents net profit for society. (3.65 DKK)

Car: $1.15 net loss to society. (6.59 DKK) Another way of calculating it is that every time someone rides a bike 1 km, society earns 23 cents. Drive a car 1 km and we pay out 91 cents. So you can see that it has previously been important to reclaim some of the money that we've been throwing into a big, bottomless hole by subsidising car culture. It's basic economics. Even with that tax, we still cannot get our money back. Worth noting that these numbers reflect the aforementioned taxes on cars in Denmark. I think I'd throw up a little bit in my mouth if someone could calculate the net loss in countries without such taxes. So. What ARE these taxes of which we speak? First let's look at what cars cost, based on the Danish cost of living. In Denmark a basic compact car will cost you about 100,000 DKK. ($17,400). A new Honda, depending on model, will cost between 200,000 DKK ($34,700 USD) and 500,000 DKK ($86,900). A new BMW, again depending on model, will set you back between 400,000 DKK ($69,500 USD) and 2.5 million DKK ($434,360 USD). That probably looks nasty pricey to many out there, but the cost of living here in Denmark is high. Wages are high. Things are expensive to visitors. For example, minimum wage - if you work as a bartender at the age of 20 or something like that - is around $20.00 USD per hour. On top of the list price of the car, here are the taxes that make up the 180%. But please consider the disclaimers that follow.

The 180% on top of a basic car price

Sales and registration: 106,960 DKK ($18,583 USD) Ownership tax: 44,562 DKK ($7742 USD) Insurance tax: 8412 DKK ($1461 USD) Fuel tax at 15,000 km/year of 15 km/liter: 50,989 DKK ($8,857 USD) Total taxes over 12 years: 210,922 DKK ($36,643 USD) So all that looks like a dreamy scenario for those who are working towards the Paradigm Shift of replacing the deadly cars in our cities with intelligent transport forms. Wonderful that Denmark taxes motorists for the destruction they cause in our cities and in the country in general We still hear misconceptions out there about these taxes. Things like , "they only ride bikes in Denmark because they can't afford a car". Nah. Nice try. In Copenhagen, car ownership is at 29.1%. It's even lower in certain neighbourhoods; Nørrebro (14%) and Vesterbro (17%). But people don't own cars because they don't need to. There are a host of other transport options, including the bicycle. Out in the distant provinces, when a young person - usually a young man - turns 18 the first thing he does is pay the $2000 fee for a driving licence course and then, upon successful completion, buys a car. So cars are not inaccessbile to Danes when 18 year olds can afford them. And this brings us to the current reality. Since the 180% taxes came into effect, the Danish wages have increased dramatically. So they are no longer as prohibitive as originally planned. In other words, they are rather irrelevant. Car ownership has been rising consistently over the past 15 years at least. Even the gas prices here - currently at about $2.17 per liter (roughly $8.70 per gallon) are lower than they were in the 1970s, at the height of the two energy crises. What's more, I heard today that the fuel tax, which as I understand it carries a certain environmental aspect, is also increasingly redundant. Simply because cars are more fuel efficient and "environmentally-friendly" than when the taxes were implemented. The money earned by the Danish state on these taxes has fallen from 24 billion DKK ($4.1 billion USD) to just 14 billion DKK ($2.4 billion USD). While these famous 180% taxes were meant well back in the day, they are rather comical now. The automobile burden on our society is greater than at any point in the last 40 years.

All the more reason to raise the taxes - through simple rationality and economics - and to invest in better public transport, car share programmes and bicycle infrastructure.