This is kind of clever:
Maybe I’m a sucker for this sort of thing—but it gave me a good chuckle.
Still, after thinking about it a bit, I wondered: can a clever ad really make cyclists safer?
I suppose it’s possible. Obviously, advertising has been known to change people’s behaviors and perceptions. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t exist.
But if anything, the ad proves that focusing on 2 things at once is really, really hard!! I watched the video a couple of times, and I simply couldn’t watch for the moonwalking bear and also count the basketball passes—even when I knew the bear was coming.
For me, then, the ad doesn’t underscore how important it is for drivers to stay alert to the unexpected. Instead, it demonstrates almost the exact opposite: this kind of alertness is almost impossible to sustain. Presumably, staying on task, and ignoring what seems irrelevant, is a survival skill that’s been reinforced by millions of years of evolution. When we’re engaged in something that requires a lot of our attention—like driving, or counting basketball passes—we simply ignore anything that’s not an immediate threat, or visually striking.
To me, this suggests that merely announcing that people really ought to pay more attention to cyclists is a bit like announcing that chocolate cake isn’t the foundation for a healthy diet, or that television is kinda stupid. Millions of years of evolution tell us that frosting is an unalloyed good, and that flashing colors and attractive faces are fun to watch. So, evidence be damned, we load up on cake and Lost. In the same way, drivers navigating in heavy traffic will still tend to overlook the occasional, isolated cyclist. Nagging will only change things on the margins.
More generally, I worry that this sort of ad reinforces an unhelpful way of thinking about big social problems: namely, that the best solution is to convince people to make good choices. The dominant frame here is that social change is like retail consumerism—and making the smart, thoughtful choice seem “cool” (or otherwise desirable) will carry the day.
Color me unconvinced. I think the cool factor, in particular, is overrated as a motivator for big behavioral changes. Besides, for every person who thinks that watching out for bicyclists is rad, there’ll be another who thinks that drag racing is a blast. So if you really want to change behavior, making the good choices the easy ones, and bad choices the costly ones, seems much more important. See, for example, Germany, where bike fatalities fell by 64 percent over 25 years, despite a boom biking. How’d they do it?
[T]he necessary techniquesand programs already exist and have been proven to work extremelywell. They include better facilities for walking and cycling,traffic calming of residential neighborhoods, urban design sensitiveto the needs of nonmotorists, restrictions on motor vehicleuse in cities, rigorous traffic education of both motoristsand nonmotorists, and strict enforcement of traffic regulationsprotecting pedestrians and bicyclists. American cities lackonly the political will to adopt the same strategies.
In Germany, they didn’t just run some ads; they spent money and time on the things that were proven to improve bike safety. Perhaps most importantly, they did something that captured drivers’ attention even more than a moonwalking bear: they made them legally liable for collisions with bikes and pedstrians:
Even in cases where an accidentresults from illegal moves by pedestrians or cyclists, the motoristis almost always found to be at least partly at fault. Whenthe accident involves children or the elderly, the motoristis usually found to be entirely at fault. In almost every case,the police and the courts find that motorists should anticipateunsafe and illegal walking and cycling.
In a way, this turns bicycles and pedestrians into threats—hit them, and it’ll hurt you. That’s bound to focus a driver’s attention a lot more than a cute ad campaign ever could.
Of course, none of this should be construed as a critique of the ad itself—just the cultural context that makes an ad campaign seem like the most effective public safety strategy. All the carping aside, it’s a cute ad. Let’s hope it saves some lives.
Matt the Engineer
Hmm… I love the idea of making cities more bike-friendly by means of physical changes and policy changes, and I’m not opposed to leaning liability toward the driver (it just seems fair). But I’m not convinced that there’s a strong causal relationship between such legal changes and behavior. It resembles the argument for the death penalty – people won’t murder others if there’s a threat that they’ll die because of it (as if murders were so rational at the time of the act to care about the difference between life in jail and death). The thought of killing or maiming ourselves or others is (or should be) constantly in the back of our minds when behind the wheel. It’s driven into our minds from driver training films, and reinforced every time we have a close call, fender bender, or worse. I just don’t believe adding the fear of a slightly more stringent lawsuit to the potential consequences is going to scare anyone into driving more carefully.(quick comment on keyword verification – can you make 0’s and O’s look a bit different from each other?)
Richard
Don’t let the ad disturb you too much. It is based on a blind spot we have. You were watching for passes between white, so your brain made the rapid shortcut to ignore anything that was black – like the bear. If the bear had worn a bright orange vest or had worn blinking lights, you would have noticed it.I’ve ridden in traffic for a large part of my life. There are a lot of things that can be done to fix the situations as you have mentioned.Truthfully, what changed my life with biking was getting a rear view mirror. None of us would feel comfortable in a car without rear view mirrors (most cars have 3 these days). Biking with one makes it possible for me to know exactly where the cars are and what they are doing. That and a really loud, booming voice are my two greatest tools for dealing with cars.
Matt
Clark, I completely agree with you about the need for accommodating bicycles with smarter policies, much stronger and stricter enforcement, and above all, substantial investments in extensive new bicycle infrastructure (particularly in the form of “routine accommodation” in which all new public works projects have to address cycling needs). However, my interpretation of the intended over-arching message of this very clever ad is this: you will not see what you do not expect to see. While we are working towards better policies, enforcement, and facilities, I think it makes a lot of sense to encourage drivers to look for cyclists. But it is absolutely not the only, or best, solution.
David Hiller
Clark,Great post. Can’t tell you how many times this was forwarded to me in the last two weeks.As you point out, looking is important for safety. However, it’s important to note that speed is the single most important factor as far as accident severity is concerned.Remember high school physics: 1/2m * v2=momentum.Extreme momentum is the obvious consequence of having land use that’s so spread-out that to accomodate our travel time tolerance we need to go faster than is safe in urban areas. To deal with the safety implication of that speed, we build wider, straighter roads, clear the sight lines, etc. All things that contribute to, you guessed it, higher speeds.Speed also effects your visual scan area. The faster one is traveling the more the brain disregards extraneous peripheral information. Finally, high volumes of high speed traffic are listed as one of the main reasons people don’t like to ride with traffic (and it do anything for the qualitative experience of pedestrians either).Another feedback loop.
Morgan
I think Matt has it correct. I tried to find some data about deer crossing signs as a parallel example but came up empty after 15 minutes of looking.
David Levinger
A good thing about the ad is… we now can define the problem of driver inattention with a fun term “the moonwalking bear problem” that keeps the issue in the consciousness of policy makers.On Clark’s points, the ad as taken within the UK cultural context is very different than it is within the US context. In the UK, they enforce “due care” laws stringently; in the US we actually do have “due care” clauses in State law, but even police officers and driver’s ed teachers are unaware of them. In the US, the unfortunate message of the ad is not to drivers, but to cyclists (wear radioactive yellow). Real fixes to these problems requires that we move beyond the “individual responsibility + punishment” paradigm that pretends that safety problems arise when crashes and fatalities occur due to individuals’ problems. To really change behavior, we need cultural change that establishes “catchment approaches” affecting 100% of the driver population.There is a way, now we just need a will.