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news
London cyclist in traffic (picture copyright Simon MacMichael).PNGStudy finds 70% of London cyclists believe drivers mean them harm
A study into paranoia and urban cycling published in the journal Psychiatry Research found that 70 per cent of London cyclists believe drivers mean them harm. The findings are consistent with the stress-vulnerability model of everyday paranoia, which predicts an association between environments high in threat and the presence of paranoia.
323 people who regularly cycled in London answered questions to gauge their levels of state and trait paranoia, anxiety, depression and stress.
State paranoia is how paranoid people feel in a certain situation, while trait paranoia is how paranoid people are in general.
The Guardian reports that 58 per cent felt drivers were hostile to them; 45 per cent believed drivers wanted to upset them; 29 per cent thought drivers wanted to harm them; and 50 per cent said of drivers that they “have it in for me”.
In contrast, the cyclists tended to show relatively low levels of trait paranoia.
Researchers said the findings reinforced the need to make greater efforts to protect urban cyclists.
“The present research indicates that paranoia towards motor vehicle users may be common when cycling in London, and that far from being a pathological response, observed state paranoia is an understandable response to an urban environment containing significant and very real threat.
“The present findings reinforce and add a further dimension to the pressing public health need to focus on and protect urban cyclists.”
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
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21 comments
Yeah those dumb ass motherfuckers who may possibly have a slightly different experience and outlook to you, and that massive psychopathic Bose-Einstein behavioural condensate 'drivers'.
So 30% of cyclists aren't intelligent enough to realise that drivers don't care about them, their families, their friends, their lives?
As a London commuter I find the vast majority of drivers are excellent. But there are a significant amount of idiots who do not know what they’re getting wrong and arseholes who deliberately fuck you over. We’re moving to Brighton soon, where I find the driving worse. So depressing that us, the good guys, not killing the planet/people/things, are so hated for just trying to get somewhere without killing the planet/people/things.
Indeed. Makes you wonder about the legitimacy of the human race running things.
Makes me wonder if the human race is running things.
Its rare to ride without any sort of aggression or attempt at intimidation.
Riding a bike on the UK roads makes you realise how unpleasant a fair proportion of people are.
Look at the comments in any non bike social media story about cycling, they will be full of bile and hate. Those people then get in their cars and will quite happily close pass you.
Then there are others who are just plain bad drivers, how often do see cars overtaking you headlong into oncoming traffic?
But drivers (unless using zero emission derived energy) do more than potentially threaten people due to the fact their pollution kills!
So you think that people are trying to kill you.
You are just being paranoid Mr Bond.
This research would need a lot more explanation before I could understand it. I assume there's some existing schema or model or whatever the term is, that it fits into and you have to be familar with that to understand it properly? As stated it just raises so many questions.
I mean, why assume when a cyclist says "drivers want to harm me" they mean "drivers have a concious explictly thought-out plan for harming me"? Personally I don't see a big difference between that and "not giving my safety a high enough priority relative to their own interests when they have the power to harm me very easily as a concequence".
The reseearchers might think those are radically different things, I'm not sure I do or that I'd bother making the distinction if asked in a survey. Generally, in most things, what matters is actual behaviour, not what is theoretically in someone's head.
And is "drivers" supposed to mean "all drivers"? I don't doubt that _some_ drivers do indeed explcitly want to harm cyclists - you hear from them on Twitter and in news reports every so often.
On the other hand, allowing for the technical language used, it might be that this is not that different from what the paper ends up saying.
The population of London is about 8.8 million. They asked 323 London cyclists.
That's plenty if they're a representative sample of the cycling population.
You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you...
Yes, I've had drivers deliverately swerve at me.
I'm not sure that I'd define this as paranoia, more like a reasonable response to being threatened every time you get on your bike.
While I'm fairly sure that most drivers aren't actually out to get me, there are quite enough who are utterly indifferent to my safety that it is hardly paranoid to fear them. As that old poster said "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you."
And then there are the ones who really are out to get you, because you dared ride in front of them for two seconds. We've seen quite enough punishment passes on this site to appreciate that these people are out there, and although there may not actually be many of them, they are the ones you remember.
I think there's a difference between riding defensively - behaving as if the motorists are out to get you - and believing that they really are all out to get you. One is paranoia, and one isn't.
But what's the _practical_ difference? If they frequently behave as if they are out to get you - requring you in turn to behave as if they are - then functionally they _are_ out to get you. Why attach importance to what you think is happening in their inner mental worlds?
Thank you for saying that so eloquently and saving me the trouble.
I’m not considering what’s going on in their mental worlds but what’s going on in *mine*.
I ride carefully/defensively and try to consider “if that car did this, how could I get out of the situation?” (any road user would be stupid not to) but I don’t think that’s acting as if they’re out to get me, and I consider that the number of motorists out there who really want to actively run over a cyclist - actually do want to get me- is a very very small percentage of those driving their boxes on the roads (what people will say anonymously on message boards or comments btl are generally not the same as they’d say or behave irl).
So I don’t believe that I’m functionally or actually paranoid. If I was, I’d be on the bus every day and wouldn’t dare ride a bike (or drive my own car, for that matter).
Your mileage may vary.
I'm just saying the two bolded parts of your comment contradict each other.
Edit - I'm also saying I don't agree there's a significant distinction between 'being out to get you' and 'not caring whether they get you in the course of getting what they want'.
(OK, I'll concede a difference akin to that between an Islamist terrorist and the PIRA)
Not sure about how these findings are presented. Its probably more something like 1 in 1000 drivers have it in for me type stat than 50% of london cyclists think drivers have it in for them. You only remember the bad drivers and it only takes one to ruin your ride.
The study's abstract is a bit more nuanced, explaining that paranoia is on a spectrum, rather than all or nothing. So we're all a bit paranoid some of the time.
It would be interesting to know how the 323 were selected too: are they representative? And how were the questions posed? If asked whether drivers were out to get me, I suppose the correct answer would be "yes - but hardly any of them, and years of not being run down by them would tend to suggest that even that's an over-estimate".
It's incompetent and/or inattentive drivers I fear .
Only really takes one bad driver for you to go splat. It doesn't matter if it's one in one thousand or one in one million, doesn't matter if they did it out of malice, negligence or miseducation. We need segregation in cities and decent driver prosecution everywhere. That's how you make cycling safer.
You can't get people who don't have to care about their own safety to care about others' safety. Have you seen videos where the cyclist goes up to the driver after a close shave? They really don't get what the cyclist just experienced because drivers have to make incredibly significant mistakes to put themselves in danger.