Spatial Modality and Abuse: Why Women Cyclists Die in London (Pt. 4/5)

How do culturally constructed female roles and external threats in public space play a part in the disproportionate number of female cyclist deaths from large vehicles in London from 1999 to 2014?

Discourse of Stasis

Returning to a point made in part one, campaigners for road danger reduction are keen to construct a discursive demarcation between recreational cycling and transportational cycling in order to avoid this danger being discussed as a sporting, rather than urban planning, issue. It should be clear from this text so far that there is nothing to suggest a causal relation between road danger and any existing discrepancies between male and female athletic ability. However, this remains an underlying implication within discussions of this phenomenon. In this section I will argue that public discussion and education around these incidents does not prevent such injuries, but instead perpetuates them by constructing an Othered road user that absolves Transport for London and other authorities from the responsibility to take infrastructural measures to protect all road users.

To understand this othering process, we must first consider the demographics of London’s commuting cyclists. The Office for National Statistics (Ons.gov.uk, 2015; and also Ctc.org.uk, 2015) provides a very clear portrait of the London cyclist: white, male, between the ages of 20 and 50, with above-median income. Cyclists are also more, not less, likely to own a car than non-cyclists (Publications.parliament.uk, 2015). This is, to some extent, a contradiction with common British discourses about cyclists being scofflaws unworthy of their one-directional access to public road funds (Philips, 2012). The discrepancy between discourse and demographic data is in fact a cause of the large amount of discussion that has surrounded long vehicle fatalities involving women. Isolating and dissecting such an aberrant-looking, yet constantly recurring, statistic, allows road danger to be framed as a gender problem affecting women (which is not, in a broad sense, dissimilar to the aims of this paper, yet is approached in a very different way, and with very different intent). This in turn appeases the privileged demographic who may otherwise demand large-scale infrastructure changes to protect them from such dangers, without upsetting those who have negative perceptions of cyclists.

Whether it manifests as a conscious decision or not, there has been a vested interest in sustaining this gendered danger through neglect or passive educational models. For example, one of the “solutions” TfL and the Metropolitan Police have relied upon has been “Exchanging Places Events,” which offer women the choice to sit in a stationary truck cab (Content.met.police.uk, 2015). This gendering of road danger allows for two simultaneous, contradictory factors: a stasis in the urban planning required to reduce all road danger, and the continuation of London’s triumphalism as a cycling city. In this sense, the mystery behind the deaths (and the deaths themselves), create a Foucauldian silence around the broader, constant road danger that all cyclists encounter in London, and constructs an environment where cycling ability, framed around gender, becomes synonymous with road safety. Because ability, rather than infrastructure, is considered a cause of these disproportionate female deaths (and so, also, less capable, feminized male cyclists), TfL is absolved of undertaking expensive, and politically divisive, action.

The process of othering road users is not new. Robert Davis describes how Asian drivers in the United States and women drivers in the United Kingdom have historically been categorized as bad drivers in not especially subtle ways (Davis 1993, pp. 23-26). Davis in particular highlights the ubiquity of such language, arguing that gender is “not a significant variable for most professional road safety analysts. However, it constantly appears in conversation among lay people.” (Ibid, p. 24) Bounding particular road users together in a uniform categorization perceived to be less capable of traveling safely is beneficial for those who exist outside these bounds. The result is the construction of a silent stasis that bounds innate culpability at a group level, and personal error at an individual level for those outside this category.

Davis is especially critical in discussing this method of avoiding tackling road safety issues, describing the construction of “categories of deviants who can be scapegoated for their antisocial behavior.” (Ibid, p. 25) This construction not only leads to negative perceptions, lack of sympathy, or the physical threat described in the previous section, but actively absolves institutions such as TfL and the Metropolitan Police from their responsibilities to prevent such danger. Davis concludes succinctly:

Isolating particular minority groups is an absolutely classic way of maintaining the status quo by refusing to identify problems as being closer to home—it is always easier to criticize small groups than to generate and support the much more necessary self-criticism.
(Davis 1993, p.26)

While female cyclists do not contain the potential to cause harm to others in any significant way, we can nevertheless consider that through the continued discussion of the danger women face on London’s streets, the discursive category inhabited by London’s female cyclists is Othered. Death, paradoxically, becomes the reason not to prevent death, framed in such a way that repositions culpability away from those most responsible for enacting change. By suggesting that cycling road danger is a female problem, the media, the Metropolitan Police, and TfL set in motion a narrative which in turn leads to conclusions that women are dying because of their timidity or their cycling ability. This, naturally, plays to the ego of the largely privileged male demographic of urban cyclists in London, despite the fact that statistically it is their group that makes up a disproportionate amount of the overall cycling casualties (Urwin, 2015; Gov.uk, 2013). This is associational public space in a very literal sense; men acting together in tandem, to paraphrase a criticism of Arendt’s view of public space that is elaborated on succinctly by Benhabib (2011, p. 102), to maintain “concepts of differentiated gendered mobility” that “challenge liberal notions of freedom [and eliminate] possibilities of travel” (Uteng 2005, p. 1057). Intentionally or not, a stasis is created, which perpetuates this particular road danger for women, but also maintains an unequal and unsafe road environment for all cyclists.

More parts next month.

Discourse of Stasis

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