Wheels of misfortune

Cycling is the new golf, but it’s also fast becoming Australia’s most dangerous sport. In a wide-ranging investigation, Inside Sport goes behind the statistics to find out what could and should be done to cull the road kill.

At 8.30am on Friday 15 December last year, Scott Peoples phoned his father Shane as usual. It was an unremarkable phone call except for one thing: it was his last.

On an unseasonably fresh morning his dad advised him to put on an extra layer and wished him well on his training ride. At midday, Shane’s phone rang again. This time it was his daughter, Erin, to tell him a cyclist – she didn’t know who – had apparently been killed on the road. And Scott wasn’t answering his mobile. Shane tried and it went straight through to voicemail. “It was then that my heart sank,” he says.

Scott was 20 years old and on the cusp of realising his dream to become a professional cyclist when he was killed by a four-wheel drive car while riding on the Maroondah Highway near Melbourne. Considered one of Australia’s best young cyclists, he had just won a scholarship to the Victorian Institute of Sport and two days after his death his family learned that he had been offered a contract with prestigious European cycling team Milram to ride alongside fellow Australian Brett Lancaster.

“His phone was wrecked in the accident and the police had removed the SIM card to see if they could find any family phone numbers but they couldn’t get it to work,” says Shane. “Later on, the phone came back to life and all these messages – increasingly desperate messages – kept coming in from people, asking if he was alright. The following day I had to go and identify his body. I said: ‘That’s not my son’. It was just his shell.”

Scott’s face lights up whenever Shane now turns on his mobile. His pictures are all over the house, his jacket is hanging up in the hallway, the poster of his hero Lance Armstrong is still above his bed.

In the hallway is Ricky’s bike.

Ricky, Scott’s 18-year-old brother, had also gone impressively through the gears of the cycling scene in 2006 and the two boys were tipped to represent Australia together and eventually compete in the Tour de France. But the bike hasn’t been ridden in 2007. “He says he doesn’t want to ride anymore,” Shane explains. “He doesn’t want the same thing to happen to him. Couldn’t put us through that, he says… He needs to get back on the saddle but it may take him a few more months yet and I don’t want to push him. I can hear Scott’s voice saying: ‘Leave him to do what he wants to do.’”

Shane’s own voice begins to crack. I’m too choked to ask another question. A tear blots my shorthand notes. While we men take a moment to stem the welling emotion, Shane’s wife, Wendy, can be heard sobbing in the other room. She can hear the conversation but cannot participate. It’s Mother’s Day. Scott was apparently just beginning to open up to his mum for the first time, talking to her about his girlfriend.

“We still don’t know what really happened that day and it could be 12 months before we have an inquiry,” says Shane, his tone suddenly emboldened with anger. “It drags our pain out. We can’t get any closure knowing there is somebody out there who killed our son. The pain inside me…I don’t know what to do with it. How would you deal with someone killing your child? He was too young to die – simple as that. He was about to live his dream. As a parent, you don’t expect to have to bury your own. If it wasn’t for the help and support of the cycling fraternity I’d have…” he trails off, choosing his words carefully. “Well, I don’t think I’d be here now.”

Peter Tomlinson is part of that close-knit cycling fraternity. As commissiare (cycling referee) of the Southern Highlands Cycling Club in Bowral, NSW, he knows the Peoples family well and Scott’s death affected him deeply. And then just a few months’ later – in April – he, too, received the phone call every parent dreads. “My wife and daughter were driving through Mittagong when they saw a crash scene at a set of lights,” he says. “The recognised the bikes: it was my son and his friend Ben. My wife called me from the ambulance. It was a horrible phone call. We didn’t know at that stage how badly hurt he was as he was unconscious.”

Alex, 15, survived with heavy concussion, several fractures and no memory of seeing the four-wheel drive that killed his best mate. Ben Mikic, also 15, died instantly on the roadside. Three days earlier, he had been accepted into the Illawarra Academy of Sport.

“It’s always in the back of your mind that something like this might happen but this has really hit home,” says Peter. “It’s just your worst nightmare to get that call. Alex was very lucky – his helmet saved his life for sure. But Ben…it’s just so terribly sad for a young boy with so much potential to lose his life like that.”

With the exception of high-profile deaths such as that of Amy Gillett who was killed when a car took out her Australia team while they were training in Germany in July 2005, these terrible losses of young contenders only usually get a paltry couple of paragraphs in a local newspaper before being consigned to the statistics.

But on the uncensored and unlimited blogs of cycling websites, these all-too-regular tragedies serve to stir up impassioned feeling and reinforce the ‘them and us’ mentality that unites the fraternity against motorists who kill 35 people on bikes each year and seriously injure 2,500 others, according to Australian Transport Safety Bureau figures. That’s not to mention the thousands of incidents that go unreported.

“For every Amy Gillett there are four or five unknowns killed on our roads while on their bikes; people just trying to get to and from work or school in an affordable and healthy manner,” says Sam Powrie, chair of the Bicycle Institute of South Australia (BISA). “More often than not such injuries or deaths have nothing to do with risky cyclist behaviour or even with exceptionally dangerous driving. It’s just bad luck.”

It’s a game of chance that many of the serious riders I speak to are no longer prepared to play. “I won’t ride on public roads now; it’s too dangerous,” says veteran cyclist Bill Salter. “I can control what I do, but I can’t control what others do. It’s dangerous and I think it’s just getting worse.”

A cyclist is 20 times more likely to be killed on an urban road than someone in a car, per kilometre travelled. But it’s a great sport and more and more Australians are prepared to roll the risk.

The new golf
It’s 7.15am and $200,000-worth of bikes are propped up outside Crave Café Deli on the fringes of Sydney’s Centennial Park. Thirty-odd riders in religion-revealing costumes are having breakfast following their twice-weekly 5.30am ride round the huge park. “The early morning pelotons are a new and rapidly growing phenomenon across the country,” says Frank Conceicao, who leads this Eastern Suburbs Cycling Club and own the nearby Albion Cycles shop. “Cycling is undergoing a boom here and we have more cyclists per head in Australia now than there are across Europe.”

There are several reasons for the rapid expansion of Australia’s collective peloton. Firstly, cycling is the new golf. All over Australia, captains of industry are apparently eschewing diamond-patterned Pringle tank tops and plus fours instead to wheel and deal in chamois-lined Lycra and clip pedals.

“It’s not about the bike,” says Dave Hunt, with a knowing nod to Lance Armstrong’s book of that title. “It’s about multi-tasking.” You’re getting non-impact exercise without breathing in an entire chain-gym’s sweat and ennui on the jarring treadmill of depressing monotony. You’re seeing a bit of the countryside – especially on the longer weekend rides. And unless you’re a particularly wheezy rider, you’re also able to engage with fellow high-fliers. “Like triathlon, cycling seems to attract that demographic of alpha male super-achievers,” says Dave. The kind who clock up 50km and $50K before there rest of us have had breakfast. Dave himself set up his own strategic consultancy in Sydney last year at the age of 28. The rest of his group is, like Frank’s, made up of lawyers, bankers, brokers, entrepreneurs and other people who know what a strategic consultancy is.

If jockeying for position with high-rollers isn’t your idea of a good time, there are many other positive aspects to cycling that have helped make it become the nation’s fourth most popular physical recreational activity, after walking, fitness/aerobics and swimming, according to a 2005 survey by the Australian Sports Commission.

The obesity epidemic is our biggest growing problem, with Australia about to overtake America to become the heavyweight champion of the world, proportionally speaking. Cycling is a joint-friendly, heart-healthy, all-age way for Generation XXL to stop eating itself into an early and very large grave. “Statistically the death rate from cycling is very low compared with that of obesity – and in improving the nation’s health, cycling helps relieve some of the pressure on ever-spiralling health budgets,” says Rob Eke, editor of the Wheels of Justice website, an online forum that campaigns on behalf of the rights of cyclists.

Cycling is also good for the environment. A 2007 Senate Committee report into Australia’s future oil supply revealed that over 30% of car journeys in Australian cities are less than 3km. It concluded by saying “cycling represents a realistic, sustainable alternative to car use” that currently contributes a third of our greenhouse gas emissions.

And then there’s simply the fact that the humble pushbike is often a lot quicker and more pleasant than swearing helplessly in gridlock traffic. A 2007 AusLink study, for example, predicts that Sydney’s already congested roads will have to handle up to 50% more traffic within 20 years at current rates.

However, for all our apparently laudable concerns about health, the environment and getting to work on time, the real tipping point is expected to be the price of petrol. “A sudden increase in petrol price will have the same effect on numbers of bike riders, and I think this sudden increase will happen within the next few years,” predicts Warren Salomon whose company, Sustainable Transport Consultants, is busy designing bicycle routes for the state capitals in readiness. Bike sales have outstripped those of cars for the past seven years with in excess of 1.1 million bikes sold each year since 2000 – double the number sold in the 1980s. Sky-rocketing petrol prices will encourage people actually to ride their bike rather than guiltily watch it rust in the garage alongside the rowing machine they bought in a previous short-lived fitness frenzy.

Considering riders are supposed to be the good guys – especially in our state capitals – they are a remarkably hated minority group. “As soon as we get on bikes we are dehumaninsed,” says Rob Eke. “We become ‘cyclists’: a lower class of road user.” There they go, simultaneously saving the planet’s ozone layer and oil reserves; saving money for our health service; saving wear and tear on roads torn up by school-run mums in armour-plated WMDs; saving congestion on already clogged up arterial routes so that empurpled motorists can actually arrive at their destination on the same day that they departed. And yet most of the time they are actually just trying to save themselves, as I discovered for myself recently from the back of a taxi one Sunday morning when I joined the rest of Sydney on the way to Bondi beach.

- “Oi, see this,” screams a cyclist, tapping – no, banging – at my taxi driver’s wing mirror in static traffic. “Try using it. You almost fucking killed me back there and you didn’t even notice.”

- “Get off fucking road!” knee-jerks the startled taxi driver. “You idiot. I kill you!”

- “Yeah, that’s my point – you almost did,” shouts the cyclist. “Look, you can’t have a go at me, mate. You made the mistake. You need to be more careful in future, OK?”

- “Fuck you!”

This kind of edifying meeting of minds is not uncommon. “There is a lot of antagonism out on the roads, especially in the cities,” says Dave Hunt. “I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had abuse shouted at me for no reason. ‘You don’t pay your taxes’ is a favourite. But I’d say 90% of cyclists also own a car, so that argument is bollocks. Bikes are classed as ‘vehicles’; we are legitimate road users. You get clipped by wing mirrors when cars – desperate to make up that oh-so-crucial two seconds – try and race ahead without giving you a wide enough berth. And you get cut up by drivers all the time who don’t even realise you are there. The number of near misses I’ve had is frightening.”

Whatever happened to the Lycra lads?
Increasingly, this anti-cycle behaviour creates a bad every-man-for-himself atmosphere where riders see no point in pedalling by the rules anymore. It’s becoming a vicious cycle. More and more ‘Lycra louts’ and ‘psycho-lists’ weave in and out of multi-lane traffic at speed like kamikaze slalom skiers. They play fearless games of lateral leapfrog with bus drivers who cannot see them, they startle and then abuse any drivers in their mazy path, they ride with iPods but without lights or thought, and worst of all, they jump the lights leaving the rest of the traffic seeing red long after they have gone green.

“Of course there is a small percentage of cyclists who behave badly,” says Frank Conceicao. “Inner-city couriers are the worst. They give the rest of us who are trying to do the right thing a bad name.”

The official line at official organisations such as Cycling Australia, the Bicycle Federation of Australia and the Amy Gillett Foundation is that this kind of flagrant flouting of the laws can never be condoned. “We need to come from a position of strength if we are to have any power,” says Melinda Jacobsen, AGF’s general manager. “How can our organisation expect to change other people’s behaviour if we can’t get our own house in order? Irresponsible cycling is not only dangerous, it is damages our attempts to build shared respect between cyclists and motorists.”

However, unofficially there is some sympathy for the red light brigade. “There is so little obvious provision for safe and responsible cycling on our main arterial roads that it's little wonder that some cyclists feel it’s legitimate to take short-cuts outside the law,” says BISA’s Sam Powrie.

For individual cyclists, jumping red lights is seen as the equivalent of a pedestrian jaywalking. “People think ‘I’ve got no rego – I’ll go,” says Hunt, who admits to doing it himself if there’s no danger.

But when entire plagues of cyclists plough through red lights at great speed, it’s a different matter. “For those at the back of a big group, it might be more dangerous to stop abruptly when the lights change than to shoot through,” explains Hunt. “You shouldn’t touch the brakes in a peloton. It’s like stopping suddenly in the fast lane – you’re going to cause a pile up behind you. So if the start of the group has gone through on a green, the rest are likely to follow, especially as they don’t want to get left behind. But sometimes people make bad split-second decisions.” Never more so than in August last year when 77-year-old James Gould was killed on a pedestrian crossing by a cyclist in Melbourne. The pensioner stepped straight into the middle of the 60kmh ‘Hell Ride’ – Melbourne’s infamous 75km Saturday morning race through the bayside suburbs, so called because “you ride like hell and it hurts like hell”.

No, cyclists aren’t blameless, but they are a lot more vulnerable. “A person on a bike is what, 100kg? You haven’t got much of a chance against a tonne of car, have you?” says Shane Peoples. “If you think you’re infallible out there, well, think again. The death of my son just proves that you can be doing everything right as a cyclist and still get killed.”

Culture shock
Whoever coined the phrase “it’s as easy as riding a bike” had never cycled in this country. If it is the new golf, it’s played with unpredictable, dangerous drivers. It’s a non-impact activity until you meet a P-plater who only looks in his mirrors to check his hair.

Todd Hiscock lost a kneecap in April when he was sent flying over the bonnet of a car that turned into his path while he was on his way home from one of Frank Conceicao’s training rides. His surgeon said he was lucky not to lose his whole leg. Todd had only been back five weeks following an accident last year in which a P-plate driver had taken out 12 cyclists, leaving him with multiple fractures and six months of headaches. “There is an acceptance amongst serious cyclists that at some stage or other you are going to get hurt; it’s only a matter of time. But you just hope that it won’t be too bad,” says Todd, who may never be able to cycle competitively again. “It more dangerous in Australia than anywhere else in the world I’ve ridden.”

The question is: why? “Because of the vast geography of the country, Australia has developed as a car culture,” explains Melinda Jacobsen. “There’s no empathy for cyclists here because there is no established cycling culture, unlike in Europe. Cyclists are a new phenomenon on Australian roads and motorists are just not aware of them. They are not used to having to share the road with them or look out for them.”

This lack of awareness goes all the way up to policy-making level too. “It’s only when you cycle and ride and walk that you see the whole scale of the problem in Australia’s cities,” says Sydney’s deputy lord mayor, John McInerny, himself a keen cyclist and scooter rider. “And it’s important that decision-makers do that. I don’t know when the last time any of our State ministers travelled into work on bike or even on public transport so how do they understand really how the rest of us live. We have to negotiate with the likes of the RTA but they are a state agency so it’s clear that their priorities are cars on the roads, not bikes.”

One way of raising that awareness is by getting more bikes on the road. Hang on, you might think, more bikes surely means more senseless road kill – especially in this time-poor society where rush hour last all day every day. But in fact, an American study published in the British Medical Journal in 2003 demonstrated that there is safety in numbers: the more cyclists, the fewer collisions because motorists modify their behaviour as their awareness increases.

That may be true, but try convincing elite cyclists to risk their careers by returning to public roads to train alongside the rev-heads. And try asking the parents of Scott Peoples and Ben Mikic whether they think cycling safety should not be left to the laws of probability and chance rather than to the laws of the land when the vast majority of collisions are preventable. “Our government is, they say, actively encouraging us all to drive less and ride more, but it provides no support at all to make that happen safely,” says Sam Powrie.

“So far all the government has done is make the wearing of cycle helmets compulsory,” says Warren Salomon. That contributed to a 31% reduction in fatalities between 1990 (when the law was introduced) and 1993, according to ATSB figures. “That was good, but it shifted the responsibility on to the individual and let the government off the hook in terms of undertaking more broad-ranging projects to make cycling safer such as introduce hands-on cycle proficiency training programmes and provide proper cycle paths.”

They say you never forget how to ride a bike, but that’s not true, says Warren. “If you’ve not cycled in 20 years, you’re a bit rusty, you’re like a driver with L-plates. There is a growing number of unskilled riders getting on the road and a motorist population who aren’t ready for them – that is a bad combination.” It is a lot of accidents waiting to happen, whatever the boffins say.

Many riders don’t know how to cycle defensively, how to communicate with motorists, the importance of knowing how to make a proper turn, of signalling clearly, of being visibly covered in lights and reflective, protective clothing. “You also need to know how to aggressively ‘command the lane’ – which means ride in the centre of it and force the driver to change lanes to pass you,” says Dave Hunt. There’s no room for uncommon courtesy – either figuratively or literally. “If you try and keep to the left and share the road, you’ll end up in the gutter.”

However, as Shane Peoples says, a cyclist can be doing everything right and still get killed. “We’ve somehow got to get the message across to motorists too, to get them to drive more responsibly,” he says. “Some of them are not fit to be on the roads.”

“Sheer inexperience is a very significant factor, people being put on their Ps before they are really ready,” says Prof Ian Johnston of Monash University Accident Research Centre. “They know how to change gears, they know how to steer but they don’t yet know how to read the road, how to adjust to conditions. We need to introduce graduated licensing that extends the learning period and increases the amount of supervised driving before they are allowed to go solo.”

Bill Salter is a driving instructor as well as a competitive cyclist, and that gives him a rare perspective. “I can see it straight away, the ones who are going to be hoons,” he says as he drives me along roads he refuses to ride on his bike. “They might pass the test somehow, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re fit to drive in my opinion.”

Looking at the statistics, Ian and Bill have a point. People under 26 comprise only 15% of driver licences but are involved in 36% of road fatalities according to the RTA. Cognitive neuroscientist Prof Lea Williams says that the brains of people in their teens and early 20s are still maturing, which might affect their decision-making and perception of risk. “It was initially thought that the brain was completely mature by the end of the teens but now we can see that it's continuing to mature up until usually about 25 and sometimes longer than that,” she says.
“It means that the brain is going through the reorganisation that's needed to be able to maximally control the more impulsive behaviours and the more automatic behaviours. So the part of the brain that matures last is the part that gives you the greatest control and the greatest ability to monitor what you're doing.”

“Problem driving is not restricted to young people,” adds John Cadogan of Wheels magazine. “Drive around anywhere in Australia, there's a culture of complacency and mediocrity on the road. If you're a complacent, mediocre, mature driver, you're the role model for a young driver who will develop into a complacent, mediocre driver. If you speak on the phone, if you tailgate, if you don't pay attention, if you drive one-handed…it's a self-perpetuating spiral.”

“A lot of us adults become very complacent in the car,” adds Amy Gillett’s mother, Mary Safe. Yes, Safe was Amy’s maiden name. “We forget that are role models for the kids in the back seat who watch us driving irresponsibly. I believe that education is the key to cutting deaths.”

Motorists are often too wrapped up in their air-bagged cocoons to truly appreciate the gritty reality of irresponsible driving. “It’s only when drivers become cyclists that the penny drops,” says Warren. “Very quickly cyclists realise what morons motorists can be – but that was them five minutes ago, that’s how they behaved before they got on a bike and understood.”

But even the most professional riders can make drastic driving mistakes. In February this year, Australian mountain bike champion Chris Jongewaard was charged with a number of driving offences after knocking fellow cyclist Matthew Rex off his bike and putting him in a coma. The pair, who were training partners and friends, had been out celebrating Rex’s 22nd birthday.

Breaking the vicious cycle
If cycling is the future – and with traffic, economic, health and environmental issues as they are, few would seriously argue otherwise – then what can be done to improve its present state?

Sydney is generally accepted as being Australia’s worst cycling city, due mainly to its size and complete lack of a planned road structure. “The current traffic situation in Sydney is hopeless,” admits the city’s deputy lord major John McInerney. “Our research says that the majority of people think cycling in this city is too dangerous and I would have to agree with them at the moment. In terms of cycling infrastructure we are behind the other state capitals and woefully behind many world cities.”

But McInerney has a plan to improve the situation and, as of March this year, $30m to put behind it over the next decade. “We want to encourage the average person to use their bike as an alternative to a car,” he says. “It’s noticeable how many more people are on bikes these days, but currently only 2% of people commute by bike. We want to raise that to 10% by 2015.”

How? By building 50km of dedicated cycle lanes in the city centre, adapting designs used in cycling capitals such as Stockholm, Amsterdam and Paris.
“One of the options we’re looking at is to have parked cars forming a barriers between the cyclists and motorists,” says McInerney. “Having looked at models from Europe, this seems to be the safest method. However, Sydney’s roads are all over the place and are all sorts of different widths, so we have to implement a range of different cycle path designs to suit what we’re working with. This might well mean that we have to move parked cars altogether from some streets.” And if there aren’t so many parking spaces, then there won’t be so many cars.
“When you look at reduced road space and reduced parking you can see that the loser in this game ultimately is the car. And that is the way the future is going.”

But the cycling lobby want more. They want tougher laws to punish negligent drivers; a free national cycling proficiency programme for adults and school children; graduated licensing to better prepare new drivers; greater emphasis on cyclists, even to the point of having a cycling test as a mandatory precursor to a driving test. They want to reduce traffic speeds, outlaw parking in cycle lanes, and reduce driving distractions such as billboards disguised as bus shelters. They want to prevent the likes of Scott Peoples, Ben Mikic and Amy Gillett from needlessly dying and the lives of others from being ruined.

“Whenever you hear about accidents, they always say how many were killed, or what the latest death toll is,” says Mary Gillett. “Statistics. It occurs to me that’s what these people become. Someone needs to go beyond the numbers and explain that behind each one is – was – a real live person.”