From our guest blogger, Georgie Hobbs

Bad drivers are blamed for road accidents. People are too old, too young, too drunk, too male, too female or simply too witless to drive without incident in the city. Or so we think. (Others might add archaic urban planning with narrow roads (in)complete with dodgy cycle lanes to the mix).

But could a far darker force be at work?

A new study from America, that land of the car, now suggests that road fatalities are less linked to a generic poor road awareness – from forgetting to strap yourself in to slugging booze at the wheel – than to the local murder rate.

If you’re a road user in Baltimore, Maryland (home of the body bag-heavy show The Wire and America’s twelfth most dangerous city) you’re more likely to die than if you’re sharing a road with the students of Amhurst, NY; home to New York State University and America’s lowest murder rate.

The study, in the high-minded journal Traffic Injury Prevention, posits that yes, income and alcohol abuse do of course contribute to road-related deaths. But nothing matters as much as murder. Even the wearing of seat belts was eclipsed by the homicide rate, a bigger factor too than sharing the road with OAPs and men. (The effect of women drivers was not taken into account).

So, what does this mean? One murder can cost multiple lives. The stress factors that culminate in homicide (anything from the strains of poverty and domestic instability to the blood lust of a spurned lover) are not locked behind closed doors but run rampant on city roads. Road rage as litmus test for a healthy populous. And while hitting the road can offer a freedom and a sense of solace from the strains of modern life, it’s doubtful that driving is the therapy adverts would have you believe.

Cycling on the other hand…

Look at Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Murder wise, they rank among the safest and most cycle-friendly countries in the world, let alone Europe. But Britain, world renowned for Pashleys and the clogged city streets in which to ride them, has a murder rate more than double that of Austria’s. Coincidence?

Does a pro-cycling lifestyle contribute to a safer community more generally, and not just on the roads? Possibly.

Granted, Vienna hardly shares the same socio-economic problems as Detroit (ironically a city associated with high murder rates as much as America’s depressed motor industry) but if repressed stress can result in increased traffic accidents, than maybe the reverse is true too. Perhaps the calm of cycling can spread to the rest of the city infrastructure.

What do you think – does this news means city cyclists should stay inside for fear of an increased risk of death, or we should persevere to spread the good word?

Thanks to Mind Hacks to flagging up the study in the blog post; Traffic accidents as social interactions gone bad.

Andrea here:

The video on top, from the “Kopf an” campaign in Germany reinforces the feel-good factor associated with walking and cycling.
The correlation noted by the authors of the study can be understood if one sees the car as Satan, Kali, Mara, i.e. the temptress that exploits the dark side of human nature and leads one to act selfishly and aggressively. In those societies where the car-Kali is left unrestrained (and which inevitably have high road death rates), murder is high; in the more civilised societies where the car is restrained, people are more in tune with their better nature and are less likely to commit violent crimes.