First thing on the morning of February 4, 2009, I took my bike after dropping my daughter at school and headed off to a meeting in Central London. Unusually, because there was still snow and ice on many of the side streets, I headed along the busy, main Brixton Road. Then, around 9.45am, as I approached a street called Grove Way, a silver van suddenly appeared in my path as the driver made a sudden turn from behind me into a side street. I grabbed my brakes in a panicky effort to stop - but was too late. The van caught the front of the bike, knocking it to the left. The impact sent me tumbling off to the right. I landed in the road on my elbow and right hip.
I don't, however, know much more about the crash than that. Although I called the police and there was - officially, at least - some kind of investigation, I have no idea how the driver either failed to see me or miscalculated his turn so badly. I know, in fact, far less about this crash - which affected me personally - than I do about scores of crashes and other mishaps on other transport modes, where societies in Europe, North America and many other parts of the world have decided almost no mishaps are tolerable.
The Metropolitan Police justified their failure to do anything meaningful about the driver who knocked me off my bike on the basis that I hadn’t suffered “life-changing injuries” - even though that was pure chance. In air travel, the maritime industry and railways, meanwhile, any failure or misbehaviour that could have posed a risk of danger to life, limb or property is thoroughly investigated and the report published, in an effort to reduce the chances of the same circumstances’ recurring. I’ve read scores of such reports over the years, awestruck by their meticulousness.
The gap in standards is particularly glaring in the United States, where I now live. I’ve spent a fair amount of time this year reporting on the exhaustive efforts of the US’s National Transportation Safety Board to discover what caused the overheating of batteries on two Boeing 787 airliners in January. Although no cause was ever discovered, the incidents – which caused no injuries except a very minor one to an airport fireman – led to the grounding of the entire 787 fleet for several months.
By contrast, collisions involving road vehicles – including incidents where there’s substantial evidence of criminal intent – are regarded much the same way as the weather - with an accepting, resigned shrug and a “What Can You Do?” Ray Kelly, the commissioner of the New York Police Department, made the official complacency over traffic deaths unusually explicit last week when he told Sarah Goodyear, a reporter, that traffic deaths in New York City were essentially inevitable.
"We do have 8.4 million people," Kelly told Ms Goodyear. "We do have a daytime population that’s over 10 million people. You’re going to have a lot of traffic and you’re going to have accidents."
Such complacency is surely a huge part of the reason why the US - which in most years suffers no passenger deaths in commercial aviation - still suffers around 33,000 road fatalities annually.
It's safe to say that Ray Kelly wouldn't have thought it worth his officers' while to draw up one of the no-injury-but-potentially-serious accident reports I best remember reading. The report, by the UK's Rail Accident Investigation Branch, explores in painstaking detail what led a freight train to roll backwards for several miles in the early hours of August 17, 2010. It unearths a potentially widespread safety problem that would otherwise have gone unnoticed until something far worse happened.
The driver involved was on the first of a series of night shifts and had struggled to get enough sleep before starting work, according to the RAIB. After encountering caution signals, he slowed his train – a load of shipping containers – as he climbed the Shap incline in north-west England. He seems to have become drowsy and, at 2.04am, the train came to a complete halt before starting to roll backwards. The driver was still alert enough to keep cancelling warnings that he had been inactive too long or that he was passing signals. After five minutes, noticing that he had just passed a signal the wrong way at speed – the train reached 51mph – the driver applied the brakes and halted the train.
Such no-injury incidents are almost never investigated on the roads. In New York, even when drivers kill people after “losing consciousness” as the freight train driver did, the police don’t seem very interested. I pass every morning on my cycle ride to work the site in Brooklyn Heights where on February 22 an SUV driver veered off the road and hit and killed Martha Atwater, a 48-year-old writer, who was coming out of a shop with bagels for her family. The driver has never, as far as I know, faced any charges. I know of no explanation as to why he swerved off the road, beyond some vague mutterings about a "medical condition".
The RAIB justifies its concern about the Shap incident by its potential to have caused serious death or injury if circumstances had been only slightly different. Had the train travelled a little further backwards, it would have hit a turnout into a siding a speed, potentially derailing and blocking the busy main line. “The incident caused no injuries or damage,” it says. “However, the consequences could have been worse.”
The report eventually singles out as critical to the incident's cause a factor that a typical police investigation would never turn up. It identifies that the standard railway industry model for predicting how tired certain shift patterns would make staff were out of date. It recommends that train operators scheduling staff shift patterns change them to alleviate the risk. It is entirely possible that that recommendation has prevented a serious crash since.
There’s no doubting the wider effectiveness of rigorous investigation and identification of the causes of crashes. On the UK rail system, for example, only one passenger has died in the last 10 years in an accident caused by the railway (another five passengers and a train driver died in a crash in 2004 when a driver committed suicide by driving his car onto a level crossing). The system carries well over 1bn passengers a year. Causes of scores of incidents that Ray Kelly would dismiss as “accidents” have been singled out and dealt with.
Compare that with how many questions remain unanswered about what happened to me that day in 2009. The most obvious is how the driver apparently failed to see a six foot five inch man in a red jacket on an empty road, against a background that was partly white with snow. I suggested to the police that they check the driver’s mobile phone records. Only those who suffer "life-changing injuries" or death merit the cost of such a check, however.
The driver who hit me was working as a contractor installing a new radio system for the police. Did his bosses expect him to answer the ‘phone when driving? How quickly did his bosses expect him to get between different police stations? Had they made reasonable accommodation for that day’s bad weather in what they were asking of him? Had they given him navigation equipment that required him to take his eyes off the road too long?
The answers wouldn’t just satisfy my curiosity. They would show the driver’s fitness or otherwise for a job involving substantial driving around London, when he could threaten other people. They’re questions that relate to the working practices of everyone driving for the same employer and on the same project.
New questions about traffic crashes go unanswered by the day. In New York, where I now live, the police seem to have accepted at face value the word of the driver who maimed a group of children in Queens, New York in September that he mounted a sidewalk because he mistook the accelerator for the brake. That might, however, mean that car brand has particularly confusing pedals – a fault that should be rectified. Alternatively, he might have been on his telephone, or something else entirely. It’s worth noting that the driver in the West Coast Main Line incident originally blamed an equipment fault for what happened, before investigation produced a more detailed picture.
There are even more obvious questions about the suitability to drive of Mohammed Himon, the driver whose taxi severed the leg of Sian Green, a British tourist, on a sidewalk in midtown New York in August. Green herself has said Himon – who had a bad driving record to begin with – was trying to ram Kenneth Olivo, a cycle messenger, when he mounted the kerb. Himon has faced no charges of any kind and has had his taxi licence returned.
Society has good reason to regulate some means of transport more tightly than others. The incident in July where a runaway crude oil train crashed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, wiping out much of the town and killing 47 people, illustrates the catastrophic potential of freight train runaways such as that on August 17, 2010.
There are also substantial benefits to having personal motorised transport widely available to private individuals. They probably couldn’t survive regulation as tight as that of the aviation or rail industries.
But there surely has to be a case for showing at least a little more curiosity about why the roads of increasingly risk-averse rich countries continue to kill so many thousands of people annually. I suspect greater investigation would show that far more crashes are avoidable than Ray Kelly or many other do-nothings suggest. I doubt public tolerance for current levels of road deaths – around 2,000 annually in Great Britain and 33,000 in the US – would survive long amid a more rigorous effort to understand the reasons behind them.
I don't, however, know much more about the crash than that. Although I called the police and there was - officially, at least - some kind of investigation, I have no idea how the driver either failed to see me or miscalculated his turn so badly. I know, in fact, far less about this crash - which affected me personally - than I do about scores of crashes and other mishaps on other transport modes, where societies in Europe, North America and many other parts of the world have decided almost no mishaps are tolerable.
The Metropolitan Police justified their failure to do anything meaningful about the driver who knocked me off my bike on the basis that I hadn’t suffered “life-changing injuries” - even though that was pure chance. In air travel, the maritime industry and railways, meanwhile, any failure or misbehaviour that could have posed a risk of danger to life, limb or property is thoroughly investigated and the report published, in an effort to reduce the chances of the same circumstances’ recurring. I’ve read scores of such reports over the years, awestruck by their meticulousness.
 |
| On another mode, they'd find out what was causing all this |
The gap in standards is particularly glaring in the United States, where I now live. I’ve spent a fair amount of time this year reporting on the exhaustive efforts of the US’s National Transportation Safety Board to discover what caused the overheating of batteries on two Boeing 787 airliners in January. Although no cause was ever discovered, the incidents – which caused no injuries except a very minor one to an airport fireman – led to the grounding of the entire 787 fleet for several months.
By contrast, collisions involving road vehicles – including incidents where there’s substantial evidence of criminal intent – are regarded much the same way as the weather - with an accepting, resigned shrug and a “What Can You Do?” Ray Kelly, the commissioner of the New York Police Department, made the official complacency over traffic deaths unusually explicit last week when he told Sarah Goodyear, a reporter, that traffic deaths in New York City were essentially inevitable.
"We do have 8.4 million people," Kelly told Ms Goodyear. "We do have a daytime population that’s over 10 million people. You’re going to have a lot of traffic and you’re going to have accidents."
Such complacency is surely a huge part of the reason why the US - which in most years suffers no passenger deaths in commercial aviation - still suffers around 33,000 road fatalities annually.
It's safe to say that Ray Kelly wouldn't have thought it worth his officers' while to draw up one of the no-injury-but-potentially-serious accident reports I best remember reading. The report, by the UK's Rail Accident Investigation Branch, explores in painstaking detail what led a freight train to roll backwards for several miles in the early hours of August 17, 2010. It unearths a potentially widespread safety problem that would otherwise have gone unnoticed until something far worse happened.
 |
A Nissan Maxima whose driver killed himself crashing
at 100mph in Manhattan. "Hey," asks Ray Kelly.
"What else do you expect in a big, busy city?"
|
Such no-injury incidents are almost never investigated on the roads. In New York, even when drivers kill people after “losing consciousness” as the freight train driver did, the police don’t seem very interested. I pass every morning on my cycle ride to work the site in Brooklyn Heights where on February 22 an SUV driver veered off the road and hit and killed Martha Atwater, a 48-year-old writer, who was coming out of a shop with bagels for her family. The driver has never, as far as I know, faced any charges. I know of no explanation as to why he swerved off the road, beyond some vague mutterings about a "medical condition".
The RAIB justifies its concern about the Shap incident by its potential to have caused serious death or injury if circumstances had been only slightly different. Had the train travelled a little further backwards, it would have hit a turnout into a siding a speed, potentially derailing and blocking the busy main line. “The incident caused no injuries or damage,” it says. “However, the consequences could have been worse.”
The report eventually singles out as critical to the incident's cause a factor that a typical police investigation would never turn up. It identifies that the standard railway industry model for predicting how tired certain shift patterns would make staff were out of date. It recommends that train operators scheduling staff shift patterns change them to alleviate the risk. It is entirely possible that that recommendation has prevented a serious crash since.
 |
| A driver builds up to the 186mph top speed on a Eurostar London to Paris train. Imagine if his actions faced as little scrutiny as a motorist's. |
Compare that with how many questions remain unanswered about what happened to me that day in 2009. The most obvious is how the driver apparently failed to see a six foot five inch man in a red jacket on an empty road, against a background that was partly white with snow. I suggested to the police that they check the driver’s mobile phone records. Only those who suffer "life-changing injuries" or death merit the cost of such a check, however.
The driver who hit me was working as a contractor installing a new radio system for the police. Did his bosses expect him to answer the ‘phone when driving? How quickly did his bosses expect him to get between different police stations? Had they made reasonable accommodation for that day’s bad weather in what they were asking of him? Had they given him navigation equipment that required him to take his eyes off the road too long?
The answers wouldn’t just satisfy my curiosity. They would show the driver’s fitness or otherwise for a job involving substantial driving around London, when he could threaten other people. They’re questions that relate to the working practices of everyone driving for the same employer and on the same project.
New questions about traffic crashes go unanswered by the day. In New York, where I now live, the police seem to have accepted at face value the word of the driver who maimed a group of children in Queens, New York in September that he mounted a sidewalk because he mistook the accelerator for the brake. That might, however, mean that car brand has particularly confusing pedals – a fault that should be rectified. Alternatively, he might have been on his telephone, or something else entirely. It’s worth noting that the driver in the West Coast Main Line incident originally blamed an equipment fault for what happened, before investigation produced a more detailed picture.
There are even more obvious questions about the suitability to drive of Mohammed Himon, the driver whose taxi severed the leg of Sian Green, a British tourist, on a sidewalk in midtown New York in August. Green herself has said Himon – who had a bad driving record to begin with – was trying to ram Kenneth Olivo, a cycle messenger, when he mounted the kerb. Himon has faced no charges of any kind and has had his taxi licence returned.
 |
| A burnt-out minivan on the West Side Highway: just one of those things, Ray Kelly thinks |
Society has good reason to regulate some means of transport more tightly than others. The incident in July where a runaway crude oil train crashed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, wiping out much of the town and killing 47 people, illustrates the catastrophic potential of freight train runaways such as that on August 17, 2010.
There are also substantial benefits to having personal motorised transport widely available to private individuals. They probably couldn’t survive regulation as tight as that of the aviation or rail industries.
But there surely has to be a case for showing at least a little more curiosity about why the roads of increasingly risk-averse rich countries continue to kill so many thousands of people annually. I suspect greater investigation would show that far more crashes are avoidable than Ray Kelly or many other do-nothings suggest. I doubt public tolerance for current levels of road deaths – around 2,000 annually in Great Britain and 33,000 in the US – would survive long amid a more rigorous effort to understand the reasons behind them.
