No-cost bicycle light survey
Background and objectives
In 2010, the blossoming Budapest cycling scene seemed to be provoking backlash from the car-centered establishment. The most obvious manifestations were a large-scale police enforcement action on the occasion of the fall Critical Mass demonstration; the announcement of another, multi-week enforcement campaign the following spring; and then some speeches in the Hungarian Parliament in which it was suggested(erroneously) that cyclists were responsible for a growing number of traffic collisions in Hungary. The MPs making airing these complaintseven proposeda requirement for operating licenses for cyclists.
In this environment, the organisers of the Budapest Critical Mass movement, Hungary’s most influential grassroots group promoting utility cycling, initiated a simple monitoring programme to obtain empirical data on an important aspect of responsible cycling: the use of lamps at night. At the time, no data was available on the topic.
Implementation
The survey’s execution followed the IT-savvy, volunteer-driven methodology that the organisers had honed to perfection in leading Critical Mass rides over the previous six years. The key ingredients were a blog, a spreadsheet and an established nationwide network of cycling enthusiasts.
Organisers posted an appeal on the community blog, criticalmass.hu, seekingvolunteers to spend a part of their evening counting cyclists and noting how well they complied with the traffic code’s section on bicycle lighting. Anyone interested could take part. All they had to do was go to a local cycling route at a certain hour and observe bike traffic for 20 minutes. For each cyclist, they needed to mark down whether they had both front and rearlamps, just a front lamp, just a rear lamp or no lights at all. They then needed to send in the data by email.
Within a matter of days, organisers posted the results on the blog, together with a link to the full dataset in the form of a Google Documents spreadsheet. The zero-cost survey produced a surprisingly robust set of data: volunteers took counts at 85 sites, 48 in Budapest and the rest in 21 smaller towns and cities. In total, 2,461 cyclists were counted.
The overall result was that 57 percent of the observed cyclists were in perfect compliance with the traffic code (havingboth front and rear lamps). The portion who had at least onelamp (just front, just rear or both) was 77 percent. The remaining 23 percent had no lamp at all ("bike ninjas" in the bike-world parlance).
Conclusions
The following autumn, a second survey was conducted and results were encouraging. The share of cyclists in perfect compliancewas up by 12 points to 69 percent. The portion with at least some lighting was up by nine points to 86 percent. And the number of unlit “ninjas” was down by nine points to 14 percent.
According to Gábor Kürti, one of the two main leaders of Critical Mass, the result was “very positive,” and with such large samples in both surveys, the improvement can be seen as real progress in lamp-use compliance. For now, there are no concrete plans on how to use the data – Critical Mass initially just wanted to get the information by quick, inexpensive means.However,it was also seen as a good basis – and maybe even an impetus -- fora future public campaign to raise awareness of the importance of bike lighting.
As Kürti noted in a post on the subject, one of the main causes of crashes involving cyclists is that motorists simply fail to notice them.According to Kürti, the reasons many people don’t have lamps at night are mostly banal: their batteries have run out or frozen, their lamps have been stolen or inadvertently left at home, etc. One way such problems could be solved if the market were to offer an inexpensive, self-charging, reliable, theft-resistant light that is integrated into the bicycle design.
Kürti figures that the portion of non-compliers whodeliberately defy the traffic code is no more than 10 percent. Police enforcement might be a good way to get this group to amend its ways, however, for the general bike-riding population, enforcement should be a last-resort measure, only after an energetic effort at communications and awareness raising.