Rethinking freedom of the road - Transkribering

2026-06-03

The subheadings follow the headings in the PowerPoint slides shown in the video.

Watch the replay of the webinar here.

Introduction

Jones Karlström, deputy director of Cykelcentrum, gave a short introduction and welcomed all to the webinar, then presented the program and a brief thought model.

Program

This is today's program:

• Freedom for the pike is death of the minnows’: Regulating freedoms, and unfreedoms - Ian Loader, professor of criminology, Oxford University.
• Panel discussion and questions from the audience.
• Break
• Overtaking of cyclists: Regulation, behaviour and perceptions - Katja Kircher, research leader, VTI.
• Panel discussion and questions from the audience.
• Break
• Operation close pass - Sergeant Jamie Wilkinson
• Reflections

The iceberg model

This is just something that I would like to introduce. Some of you might know it already. It is called the Iceberg Model. It reminds us that what we see, the event, is only a small part of the story. And to solve the real problems, we must look below the surface and look at the patterns that repeat, the structures that shape those behaviours and the mental models that drive how people think and act. When we address these deeper levels, we can create solutions that are not only effective but also long-lasting.

The deeper levels include assumptions, values, and beliefs that guide our thinking and actions. It also influences how we interpret situations and our decisions.

In my opinion, one of these core values is freedom, which we will talk about today. So, we will start at the bottom of this iceberg and reflect on what freedom is and probably work our way up and down this. So, keep this in the back of your mind.

Now it's time to introduce our first presenter, Ian Loader. Ian is a professor of criminology at Oxford University. He has published so much. I tried to look everything up. Among other things, he has published 65 journal articles and seven books, but there is much more. And he is currently engaged in a project called Car Harm, Automobility and Objects of Criminology. We are incredibly honoured and pleased to have him with us at Cykelcentrum’s webinar. Today, he will give a presentation with the title Freedom of the Pike is Death of the Minnows: Regulating Freedoms and Unfreedoms. So please welcome Ian Loader. The stage is yours.

Presentation by Ian Loader, professor of criminology, Oxford University

Ian Loader - Thank you very much, Jones. Welcome, everybody. Thank you very much for coming along. What I want to do in my time today, to kind of hopefully provide some kind of frame for our discussions this morning, is to reflect on how we talk about and regulate different kinds of mobility freedom and the relationship between them.

My hook for this, as if I can be excused a pun, is the quote in my title from the English socialist writer of the early 20th century, R.H. Tawney, in his book of 1931, called Equality. And what the quote gets at, I think, and what is going to be relevant to the discussion today, is the kind of relationship between freedom and unfreedom. And Tawney's point is that the lack of regulation and control for some people's exercise of freedom, especially those of the most powerful. Produces various forms of unfreedom for the least powerful. Now in mobility terms, I take it to be the case that the privileges of domination are enjoyed by users of motor traffic, and especially cars. So, they are the pike in the story this morning, and I'm going to start there.

Freedom for the pike?

Right from their inception in the late 19th and early 20th century - differentially across multiple social groups - cars have long been associated with a particular conception of personal freedom. They've enabled people to travel great and previously unimaginable distances. They've liberated people from a feeling of stuckness in place. They provide a kind of door-to-door flexibility that has freed people from the strictures of railway and bus timetables and fixed routes. They also offer, and I don't think we should ever forget this, a kind of freedom from the inconvenience of other people. They enable people to enjoy a private cocoon where they get to choose the company, the music, the silence and get some valuable me time.

Now, that conception, that understanding of the relationship between the car and personal freedom, is partly a matter of ideology, by which I mean is a kind of position, a view of the world that has long been promoted and organised by the car industry itself; through its promotional materials, through its car adverts (which there's one on the screen), by promoting lobbyist groups of various kinds. In respect to which there is a long, from the early stages of the 20th century, kind of relationship between the motoring lobby and organised forms of political liberalism.

But I think we also have to acknowledge that that conception of freedom is also for many people the situated experience of driving. In other words, the car offers a particular relationship between a machine and an environment which is experienced by many people as something quite close to the essence of being free, to be able to move around in ways not under the control and tutelage of others or governmental authority.

Now, we should be clear at the outset that, if you want to get all fancy for a minute, in political theory terms, this is a particular conception of freedom, which Isaiah Berlin famously called negative freedom. In other words, it's a freedom from; it's a freedom to be left alone, a freedom from interference
by others in an individual's personal autonomy. So, on this conception of freedom, what driving offers is the capacity to move around, as I said, as one sees fit, to use one's hard-earned property as one chooses, and to exercise self-determination in relationships that most basic of human desires, the capacity just to freely move around.

The second thing to say is that the relationship between automobility or driving and personal freedom is in many respects partial and to a certain degree, illusory. It's important to bear in mind in this discussion that driving a car is in fact illegal. In fact, that's one of the things that distinguishes it from cycling and walking, by which I mean that driving a car only becomes a legal thing to do under a very particular set of circumstances pertaining both to the vehicle itself and to the person who's driving it.

So, the legality of driving in relation to the car depends on that vehicle meeting certain safety and emission standards, for example, on passing an annual test in a state authorised garage, the failure of which results in the owner not being able to use their personal property. The driver of that vehicle has to be trained. They have to pass a state authorised test and be granted a licence. They can only drive that car legally if they agree to wear a seat belt, not to drink, to pay attention. They are governed by the stipulations of various kinds by private insurance companies. Increasingly, as anyone who has a modern car will know, the behaviour of the driver is also now governed by the car itself, which is set up to correct various kinds of human error.

When one starts to move around, the question of where one can freely go is determined by instructions and regulations of various kinds. A whole series of rules determine where one can drive a car, at what speed, in what directions one can travel and not travel, when one has to start and stop, when one decides to park one's car – and it's important to remember that cars are parked about 96% of the time - parking a car is governed by a whole series of micro controls and sanctions. And the whole enterprise exists under the regulation of the police and various kinds of automated surveillance. And I think it's one of the interesting features of the history of motoring, as it has brought especially middle-class populations, who conceive of themselves as law-abiding, into a relationship with police authority that they didn't previously have. So, the point I'm trying to make here is that the ideology and experience of driving or motoring as a form of mobility freedom coexist with the fact that driving is a hyper-regulated form of existence. And to drive is to bring oneself under the supervision of both public powers of various kinds and the stipulations of various kinds of private corporations.

The third thing to say is that the exercise of mobility freedom in motorised vehicles is made possible by the creation of an infrastructure that enables car-based mobility to take place. Now, in this regard, driving freedom comes a bit closer to the other conception of freedom that Berlin stipulated, which is freedom to. In other words, it's a freedom that is only made possible by the activities of the state, one in creating a kind of system of rules that makes it possible, but also providing a certain amount of physical infrastructure.

I won't go into this now, but in the history of that infrastructure, two decades are particularly important. One is the 1920s, and one is the 1960s. And they're important because they are moments in which, across large parts of the global North especially, streets and cities were essentially remade to enable car-based travel to be possible and remade in many instances in such a way it has become difficult and in some contexts close to impossible to navigate through public space in any other way.

Now, to the extent that that becomes true, driving doesn't become a choice. Driving, there are all kinds of contexts, and anyone who's ever been to an American city will have experienced this. There are all kinds of contexts, not only in America, but also elsewhere, where individuals are essentially coerced into a form of automotive freedom. That's not a conception of freedom that one gets promoted by the car industry, but it is nonetheless an experience for a large number of drivers who experience driving not as the kind of embodiment of human freedom, but as some kind of necessity, who somehow feel that they are dependent on an object, some of whom can scarcely afford to keep it. They experience driving as a form of stress and high pressure, so on and so forth, and whose daily experience is not of the freedom of the road, but of routine experience of congestion. Congestion, it should be added, is a product of all sorts of other people exercising their individual freedom at the same time in limited amounts of public space.

Death for the minnow?

These considerations, I think, lead us to a point which I've come over recent months to think of as being central to how we think about cars and how we think about systems of automobility, which is to say that they operate as what I've described here as a system or as an agent of environmental ordering. What I mean by this is that cars and car systems have become the single most decisive influence on the organisation of especially urban space. There are also going to be spaces between towns and cities.
In ways that have come to dominate the experience of that space by people who both drive and don't drive, and in space that have come to be organised by the preoccupations and concerns with speed, efficiency and flow, as a result of which we are all called upon, whether we drive or not, to pay constant attention to the environments through which we operate and in which we dwell. I think it's probably important to add that that's also true of cycling, though it's true of cycling at a significantly lower degree of magnitude. So, the point I'm trying to make is that when I say that automobility is a system of ordering, in a sense it imposes itself and interrupts the habitats and the environments of other humans and indeed non-humans, with the result that in an important sense there is no outside of automobility. To live in the modern world is to exist in a world which is physically, politically, experientially, aesthetically and existentially dominated by car-centric mobilities.

From that starting point, we come to the minnows. And this is my way into really trying to think about the relationship between the freedom to drive on the one hand and the unfreedom of others generated by the fact that car-centric mobility systems are not only systems of freedom, of convenience, of a sense of control over people's lives that have not only been tied up with questions of status and aspiration, both individually and collectively, but are also productive of various kinds of harm. And I just want to briefly itemise what I think some of those are. Others may be able to add other things.

Firstly, as is well known, as I've just hinted, cars consume significant amounts of space. I was reading this week that a car travelling at 30 kilometres an hour takes up 70 times the amount of physical space that is required by, for example, a bicycle. And that space is also, under situations of automobility, increasingly possessed by drivers who often think that their relation to that space is some kind of exclusive ownership.

The result of that is that not only have the other kinds of users of that space been regulated and disciplined and moved to the margins. In some cases, all kinds of possibilities, the example that comes up often at the moment is places for children to play outside, have been removed from the physical environment of our cities. This is also a problem that over the world is getting worse by the fact that the car industry is producing, as is now well known, increasingly larger and heavier cars. And a whole range of terms such as car spreading have now been coined to try and capture that. So, the consumption and ownership of space is one aspect of that.

The second aspect of that kind of harm production is the significant impact that motorised transport has on the quality of the environment in which humans and non-humans operate, in particular in relation to what I here call air and soundscape pollution. Transportation is responsible for 23% of global CO2 emissions. About 70% of that comes from private motor vehicles. Cars are also responsible for significant amounts of particulate pollution, most of which doesn't in fact come from tailpipes, but comes from the disintegration of both brake pads and tyres. That's been found to have all kinds of health-damaging effects. Cars are also responsible for significant amounts of soundscape pollution, both from rolling noise and from propulsion noise, which again has been found in various studies to have various kinds of harmful impacts on those who experience it. So that's the second aspect of this.

The third of these is probably the most well-known and the most discussed, which is the injury and death on the road. In the country in which I live, in the United Kingdom in 2024, 1,602 people were killed in motor collisions, 82 of whom were cyclists. There's, of course, a pattern to those injuries, both in the UK and across the world, which we're happy for us to talk about. At the last count across the globe, 1.2 million people were killed in road collisions. Another 50 million were seriously injured. Cars on this planet are the biggest global killer of children and young people between the ages of 5 and 29.

Relatedly, I think we need to spend some time thinking about what I've here called the kind of subjective insecurity generated by car-centric environments. By which I mean, the kind of experience of, especially urban spaces, generated environments in which the prevalence and the speed and the behaviour of vehicles, though microaggressions of various kinds, create a kind of environment of insecurity or fear, both for other road users and for people who simply inhabit that space. And there are all kinds of ways in which we start to register those things. I’m thinking about, for example, near misses, which by definition go radically under-recorded. But I think the importance of registering this in this discussion is because in all kinds of ways, that general kind of environment of insecurity that's created by traffic-heavy environments, not only makes cycling less safe, but has an important and significant structural suppression of many people cycling in the first place, or for example, allowing their children to cycle in the first place.

Re-thinking mobility freedom

So, what do these considerations lead, well, me at least, to think? I can't tell you what they lead you to think. We'll get to that in a short while. There are three things I think are worth saying in bringing this to a conclusion.

The first is they seem to me to provide some grounds for wanting to rethink the relationship between mobility and freedom and between cars and personal freedom in particular kinds of ways. And I've been particularly struck in this context by reading a book by an American political theorist, Elizabeth Anker, called Ugly Freedoms, which I can heartily recommend. She importantly says that what she terms ugly freedoms have two dimensions. Well, there's three, but there's two that are relevant to this discussion. The first she means by ugly freedom, what she describes as freedom enjoyed only through the subjugation of other groups and populations in various kinds, such that there becomes a kind of very close, even internal relationship between the enjoyment of freedom by some and the subjugation or marginalisation of others.

Secondly, and I think very importantly for this context, she says that a kind of a feature of ugly freedoms is what she calls the disavowal or denial or effacement or sometimes conversely celebration of that subjugation by those who get to enjoy that freedom in the first place. So, there's a kind of failure to recognise that the freedom of some, usually dominant groups of certain kinds, is enjoyed at the expense of others.

Now, that doesn't seem to me such a bad place to start when we think about the relationship between the car and personal freedom in the following respects. I think that we – we can have a discussion about who the “we” is – that modern societies have a very hard time acknowledging that car-centric mobility systems not only provide personal freedom, convenience, so on and so forth, all the things that we come to know about car-based mobility, but are also in important senses systems of harm production. And I wonder, and this is a challenge I've currently posed myself, how differently we would think about questions of law and regulation on the road if we centred that fact, that car-based mobility is a system of harm production, and not simply the fact that it is also associated with convenience and aspiration of status and freedom, so on and so forth. So that's the first point.

The second point is, I'm partly in acknowledgement of some of this. There are, as is well known to many of you in the room, I suspect, many city authorities over recent decades have been engaged in various efforts to regulate and control the car and its relationship to the environment in particular kinds of ways. There are whole examples of what these might mean. Partial bans of cars from certain areas of cities, low traffic neighbourhoods and superblocks, removal of parking and reallocation of space for dedicated cycle lanes, introduction of low emission zones, congestion charging, which I now live in a city where, one of the cities on the planet where there is congestion charging, reduction of speeds in built up areas, so on and so forth.

We also know that those measures, at least at the point of their inception, have become extremely controversial and in many settings have generated a quite vehement opposition on the grounds that these are both an attack on the rights of motorists, but importantly for present purposes, are an infringement, an interference in the personal freedom of people to decide how they get around and how they use their car.

Now, I'm not so convinced about that. And I'm not so convinced about that, even if one keeps the conversation inside the boundaries of individual conceptions of freedom. And I rather think instead that the measures I've just described do two things. One is, firstly, that they are nothing really more than a modest application of J.S. Mill's harm principle. So, John Stuart Mill, in a famous book called On Liberty, which many of you know, published in 1859, which was, in all kinds of ways, a kind of celebration of the virtues of individual freedom. Nonetheless, in the context of that book, turned his mind to the conditions under which it was possible for states to interfere with individual freedom. And in that context, he stipulated something that has become famously known as the harm principle. And Mill writes that "the only legitimate reason why government can interfere with an individual's personal liberty is to prevent harm to others". And I think there are all kinds of ways in which if you stay inside the framework of individual freedom, one can think about speed restrictions, congestion zones, ULES zones, modal filters and the like as effectively applications of that very principle of harm reduction.

The second thing to say is, I think what all those measures that I've just described in various ways do is to reopen a question that over the course of the 20th century increasingly got closed down. And that's the question of what streets are for. And there are two ways in which you might want to think about this. One is a question around accessibility. In other words, who should- what kinds of road users, what forms of mobilities should have legitimate, safe and inclusive access to streets as a way to get around? And we can put that in the discussion. But also importantly, I think it raises the question of streets not only as places through which people move, but as places through which people dwell. In other words, it reopens the question of how thinking about streets as not only routes, not only pathways,
but as places of care, of nourishment, of play, of interdependency, of conviviality, of solidarity and community. And to that extent, presents a kind of challenge to various kinds of autocentric conceptions of what streets are and who they are for.

So, all this suggests, thirdly, and in conclusion - and if anyone's interested, I've written with a couple of geographers a kind of paper on this, which you can go and look at - there are all kinds of ways we need to rethink the ways in which we calibrate the relationship between mobility and freedom. And then there are all kinds of reasons, not least under conditions of kind of climate breakdown, why we need to reimagine freedom in more collective terms. And I think in mobility terms, that means asking serious questions about those forms of mobility freedom, which seem to make some kind of sovereign claim to be able to impose upon the lives and movements and habitats of others, and about thinking about what it might mean to imagine forms of mobility which enable all people to get around freely under conditions of non-domination. And at that point, I will close. Thank you.

Panel discussion

Jones Karlström - Thank you so much for the presentation, Ian. It was very, very, very interesting. A lot to digest also.

I would like to welcome our panel for this first discussion, which is Katja Kircher, who is a research leader here at VTI. Welcome, Katja. And then also Niclas Nilsson, who is working at the Swedish Transport Agency, is currently also working on a governmental assignment for regulating overtaking of cyclists.

First of all, Katja and Niclas, do you have any reflections or questions for Ian after the presentation?

Katja Kircher - Well, thank you very much. I found it, of course, a very inspiring presentation. It rhymes very well with what I'm going to say afterwards. So, I'm very happy about that. And for people, let's say, who have been working with these topics for a while, it's sort of, I mean, it was very well phrased, but it's also something that we have fought about a lot. So, I was wondering, how can we get out of the bubble, and how can we reach those people who maybe today live with the privileges of motoring and perceive them as the freedom that you describe? And how can we take it a step further to see that the situation will change?

Ian Loader - Do you want me to answer that now, or should we take a range of questions?

Katja Kircher - If you can, but I mean, I think that is an important next step in the discussion as well, how to change the world, basically.

Ian Loader - Well, the short answer to that is, I don't know, and if I did, we may be in a better place. There's a different answer to that.

For large parts of my life, I spent my time writing about the concept of security. And I think the reason I got interested in writing about the concept of security, because I, so this is a bit of a digression, but I will get back to the point, is because I took exception to the way in which the potential meanings of that and implications of that idea had been colonised by certain kinds of institutions and political forces, if you like, and given a certain kind of meaning that came to associate it with, surveillance and crackdowns and law enforcement, so on and so forth.

Whereas in my mind, security had all kinds of other meanings that I don't need to go into now. The reason for mentioning it now is that I think I was attracted to that because there was something about doing that which involved trying to engage people on what they took to be their strongest point, not on their weakest point. And I think I've been attracted to the concept of freedom in this discussion for something like similar reasons, which is that the relationship between freedom and automobility has become so central. I mean, not just to how the car gets kind of promoted, but to many people's really visceral sense of what it means, what the car has come to mean to them, that there is some value in this discussion of one, just trying to unsettle that association in the ways that I tried to do this morning.

But also, just to point out that other conceptions of freedom are available and that we can think about that relationship between how people get around, by what means and what it means for human beings to be and exercise freedom in different kinds of ways. So, I think the project has been an attempt to try and to begin to do that with that aspiration. At the moment, it's taking the form of a kind of long and rather abstract article, but there are other forums in which you can articulate, but that's the motivation.

I think there's something problematic about the way in which the value of freedom has been attached to one form of mobility that I want to try and unsettle.

Niclas Nilsson - I have a question for Ian as well, Jones.

Jones Karlström - I also want to say to Jamie Wilkinson, he's also part of the panel. He's from the West Yorkshire Police Department. Go ahead, Niclas.

Niclas Nilsson - Thank you. Thank you for a very fine presentation, Ian. I have a question not about the past, from the 20s or the 60s, but I look a little bit into the future and those autonomous or automated cars who would the discussion is that it would in some way, save the world, say something, say someone. But when the discussion came up with automated cars, it was the safest car. And now it's also a discussion about how they're going to complement the public buses or trams in some way and make it easier to come around. Do you have any thoughts about that, about the new era of automated vehicles in the cities? Thank you.

Ian Loader - Yeah, I do have thoughts. And also, I'm in the early stages of a research project, so I'm allowed to say this. I also have questions and things I'd like to know more about. And I think the thing I'd like to know more about- maybe there are some people on the call who know more about this than I do - is what exactly is the kind of vision of the world or a vision of a supposedly better world that those who are deeply, materially and emotionally invested in autonomous vehicles that they're trying to create. And I'm genuinely open to kind of just wanting to hear some good answers to those questions. But in the absence of them, let me tell you what I currently think. So, I'm not the first person to say this, but the puzzle I have with autonomous vehicles is; if they are supposed to be the answer, what is the question to which they are in fact the answer? Now, I guess the best possible version of the answer to that question is that they will make the roads safer. They'll make the roads safer by eliminating a significant cause of road injury and death, which is human error.

So, to the extent that that is in fact true, there are lots of potential benefits from creating vehicles which exercise more control over the human driver than they currently do. And we were already, as I hinted at in the discussion, we're already some way down that track. Even if we know there is a pathway that ends with the driver being removed entirely. But there are three things that one might say.

Firstly, as Peter Norton has pointed out, the motor industry, since the get-go, since its inception, has been promising us utopias of various kinds, most of which have never been delivered. And he makes the point that a world of fully autonomous vehicles might just turn out to be one of those utopias, which is forever out of reach. So, there are reasons to be sceptical that a world of fully autonomous vehicles will ever come into existence.

Secondly, we need to take this very seriously. There are all kinds of non-safety reasons that are currently animating the investment in autonomous vehicles, of which I might just here mention two. One of which is that the modern car is basically being turned into a data extraction device. In other words, one of its functions is to extract data from its users to fold that data out, aggregate it and sell it at a profit. My understanding, at least Tesla for a while, it may still be true, is listed on the stock exchange as a data company, not as a car company. Relatedly, I think one of the things that annoys certain people in this world about driving is that while people are driving, their attention has been distracted from being able to watch adverts. So, if you can create a system of mobility that gets people's attention away from the road and focused on advertising, there is an awful lot of money to be made. I say that because I think one needs to be aware of the various layers of motivation that are animating this.

Which brings us to the crux of this matter. And I think it's what, let's stick to cities because cities are the most complicated places and the places in which autonomous vehicles have to coexist with people walking and people cycling. And there the question that I asked at the beginning of my answer, what kind of world is the motor industry trying to create here, I think becomes very important and very uncertain.

So, there is a version of this world, which I understand to be both impossible and economically unviable, which is, you create an autonomous vehicle that, to put it crudely, stops if a pedestrian steps in front of it. Now that would radically upset the kind of road hierarchy. It would also produce a world in which cars would become much, much less desirable to their users because they were effectively being controlled by everybody else in their environment. So that's not happening.

My understanding is that autonomous vehicles are currently being trialled to behave as a careful and competent driver behaves, to use the legal formulation in the UK. And careful and competent drivers still come with traffic risk. So that's, so it may not be that they are going to produce safer roads in the way that we think they are.

Secondly, there are whole kinds of other downsides of car-centric mobility systems, which autonomous vehicles just aren't going to touch and risk making worse. So, I fail to see how they will deal with the problem of congestion. There may be all kinds of ways, and this has already been borne out in some cases: the autonomous taxis end up just doing lots of what get called ghost or zombie miles, just driving around with no one in them looking for custom. In which some of the well-known problems of car-centric mobility systems actually get compounded by autonomous vehicles, not solved. So, I think in my most depressed moments, I just feel there are monumental distractions from much of what we know to be the solution to urban mobility problems. And it has two wheels, or it's a bus, or it's a train.

So, I think my position is one of a mix of deep scepticism and a genuine curiosity to know more about what kind of world the promoters of this technology are in fact trying to create. That was a longer answer than I originally intended.

Niclas Nilsson - Thank you very much.

Jones Karlström - Yeah, but it was a very interesting answer. And I think I like that, the part about the hierarchy of domination also, and speaking of freedom. Where do humans end up in that streetscape in the hierarchy? Do we end up below the hierarchy of self-driving cars or above them? Yeah.

Ian Loader - So, here's a worry. So, my little reference to the 1920s was an allusion to Peter Norton's famous book on Fighting Traffic, where he in great detail describes the kind of conflicts that took place in American cities when the car first arrived. And it was a conflict that basically involved the motor industry trying to get the street users at that time kind of out of the way. And that was the context out of which jaywalking was created as a criminal offence.

One worry I have is that we are about to see a new version of those conflicts in which we create a world safe for autonomous vehicles by disciplining everyone else to get out of the way. I think it's not beyond the bounds of possibility for someone in an AV company to say, well, the only way we can really get these things to work effectively in cities is if you promise us that the pedestrians are going to be kept under control. And keeping under control can be done in all kinds of ways, by barring roads, by only legally allowing people to cross roads at crossing points, by creating an offence of jaywalking that doesn't exist in large parts of the world currently. So that's my worry, that we're about to engage in a new version of a contest over the use of public space between this technology and other people who want to make a legitimate claim to use that space, principally cyclists and pedestrians.

Jones Karlström - Thank you. Jamie, do you have a question also for Ian?

Jamie Wilkinson - I totally enjoyed that, Ian. Thank you. I really like your point that the starting point for driving is that it is illegal, and I think that has been lost. I think it is seen as a divine right almost, and it isn't. It's a privilege. I think that we've lost it, but that should really underpin everything. I do wonder, something you talked about in terms of the domination of the motor industry. Do you think there's almost a perverse comparison to the cigarette industry? And how long it took to change a methodology where we, I don't know in other countries, but in the UK, sporting events were sponsored by large multinational cigarette brands and sports clothing and all the rest of it. And now, you know, where we are with smoking bans in public, you don't ever see a smoking advert on TV, but such was their finance and their lobbying power that it took forever. And do you think there is a similar lobbying power with the motor industry that's going to make it very, very difficult to balance the priorities of road users?

Ian Loader - The short answer to that question is yes. I think an awful lot of organisational and commercial effort goes into both promoting the kind of freedoms and the car as a form of mobility and to kind of suppressing and injecting doubt into what we know about its harmful effects. And you can draw analogies here with smoking, with organised climate denial, so on and so forth. I mean, I've not done the work to show that that's the case, but I know of people who have or are doing it. It's also very striking to me, the inside bits of the public health world.

There are people in the public health world who get very animated about the harms of car-centric mobility, both direct and indirect, and have explicitly drawn that analogy. I can point you in the direction of people who have written about that. So, I think there is something to be said for getting us to think about cars in a way that's rather more directly analogous to the ways in which we thought about cigarettes. And there are all kinds of ways in which you can make the connections. And I've done it at various points. But I also, but there's a lot of work to do. Because I think if you walk out into the street and tell the average Joe and Joann that their car is no different in its harmful effects than a cigarette, then you're in for an interesting conversation that way.

Jamie Wilkinson - Yeah, definitely. And my final observation is something that I've been quite passionate about for a while, which is the social acceptance of road death. Take an example today: there is a lot of news in the UK about a dreadful stabbing incident in the south of the country. And you know, it is headline news in all the newspapers, on the TV. But you very rarely see anything about a road death. And if you look at the numbers, should it be an absolute social outcry that those numbers are happening year in, year out, and no one's really talking about it.

Ian Loader - Yeah, I mean, I share that concern. I think for a long time, in all kinds of ways, we have come to normalise injury and death on the road. And we could make it part of a long conversation about the ways in which that's happened. But to some extent, I've become slightly obsessed by the 1920s, because I think of the 1920s in all kinds of ways in which a certain kind of settlement was established. And the rates of injury and death in the 1920s were just off the charts. Unbelievable. But at the same time, that seemed to me the decade in which - at some level modern societies, for the most part, it was America and Western Europe - kind of decided that at some level, mass injury and death was a price worth paying for the freedom and convenience of being able to get around in a car that we all privately own. And in all kinds of ways, there's been a kind of road safety discourse and regulation and politics that have attended the development of the car, and that basic settlement has kind of remained in place.

And you very kindly pointed out that we've forgotten that driving a car is essentially illegal. I also think we've created a world in which most people don't think it's dangerous.
And it's difficult for people to have that thought because it's hard to see something I do on a daily basis. We think it's only dangerous if people do it irresponsibly, while drunk or while distracted. Whereas I think my starting point here is actually, moving around in built-up areas in a two-ton machine at a reasonable speed, that's just a dangerous thing to do. And that needs to be our starting point for how we think about how we regulate that form of movement and how we think about its relationship to other users of that space and to the environments through which it moves. And I think my sense is we've got that relationship radically wrong. But we've got it radically wrong for a long, long time.

Jones Karlström - Thank you so much. I think we've already passed the time for the break, but maybe we can have a short question from the audience, Anna, if there is any?

Anna Niska - Yeah, there was one question in the chat regarding your reflection and the question regarding the autonomous vehicles, because you said your answer was kind of reflecting the urban view, but we also have huge, sparsely populated areas, and distances that are too big for cycling and no public transport. So, should we also abandon autonomous vehicles in those situations?

Ian Loader - Not necessarily. I mean, as I said to you in answering the first question, this is a world about which I need to know much more than I currently do. My understanding from the conversations I've had and what I've read from people who are kind of insiders is that the technical problem of getting autonomous vehicles to operate on motorways or in relatively sparse rural areas is not so much a technical challenge. The real technical challenge is working out how to get autonomous vehicles to work at scale in city environments where there's lots going on and lots of other users of this space. So, there may be all kinds of settings in which sparsely populated areas are where autonomous vehicles may in all kinds of ways bring benefits that vehicles prone to human error don't. I mean, they may also bring kind of safety benefits for people who use those roads for other purposes to provide an advert for your talk, Katja.

So no, if the question is about autonomous vehicles, it may be that my view is not that somehow, they can never bring benefits and there are no circumstances in which they would significantly improve safety on the roads for all road users over and above what we have currently, and it may well be that the rural roads are an example.

Jones Karlström - Well, I think we need to have a short break at least. But thank you so much for the presentation and the conversation here afterwards. Thank you so much again, Ian, for a fantastic presentation. And you will all be back then 5 minutes past. See you in a little bit.

Ian Loader - Thank you, everybody.

Short break.

Jones Karlström - Okay, welcome back. And now it's time for me to introduce my colleague, Katja Kircher. She is a research leader here at VTI and one of the few researchers who, I would say, focus on cycling in a rural context. Katja will present some cutting-edge research that might question what you think is a safe overtaking distance of cyclists. The floor is yours, Katja.

Overtaking of Cyclists – Regulation, behaviour and Perceptions – Presentation by Katja Kircher

Katja Kircher - Thank you, Jones. So, now expectations are high. Thanks a lot. I'd also like to acknowledge and thank my colleagues, Jakub Sliacan and Lennart Ochel, who play an essential role in this work.

Slide 1

At a construction site, would we consider letting a two-ton steel block fall from a height of 10 metres if there is a cycle or pedestrian path right next to it? Let's say 1,5 metres away without a fence. And by the way, the speed at impact would then be 50 kilometres per hour. And for a 70 kilometres per hour upon impact, the height would be 20 meters.

On a rural road, it is considered appropriate to drive a two-tonne steel construction past cyclists or pedestrians with 50, 70 or higher speeds at a distance of, let's say, 1,5 metres. And I'm sorry for UK people, of course, here I have right-hand traffic in the pictures and generally.

I have to admit that I don't have the figures for how many people in Europe are killed by weights dropped at construction sites. But we do have the figures for rural roads.

Road Traffic Fatalities – Rural Areas in the EU (2024)

These are the fatalities on rural roads in Europe in 2024. And if we only look at collisions involving cyclists and cars, we see that they killed 406 people in that year, and 97.3% of those were cyclists. In collisions involving heavy vehicles and cyclists, which killed 125 people, 99.2% were cyclists. And we have to remember that a good bunch of people do not cycle on rural roads or avoid certain roads out of fear. But staying alive out of fear is not a good safety indicator.

The tacit preconditions

And let's not forget, and we have heard about that already before, that we already tacitly have accepted rather impactful preconditions once we start discussing how to perform an overtake. It's preconditions that are treated as self-evident, even though they aren't. We accept that motor vehicles will be on the roads, that is, in public space, and that these vehicles are allowed to travel substantially faster than cyclists.

We know that it is much nicer for cyclists not to get overtaken or not to have to consider cars at all. So, one could argue that the least a driver can do is to introduce as little harm to the situation as possible.

What are the implications of fast motor vehicles?

Having fast motor vehicles on the road means that we also have people who do not dare to walk or cycle on those roads at all, which means - as we have heard - limits the personal freedom, as Ian explained before. It is also detrimental to health, accessibility and transport justice, apart from all the implications for the environment, nature and climate.

According to our own research, around one and a half million adult Swedes cycle less than they would like to because of this, and probably a larger share of the kids. There are around 10 million people in Sweden.

How to regulate overtaking then?

If we want cycling to be a viable option accessible to as many as possible while we still keep fast moving motor vehicles on the roads, how should overtakes be regulated? Let's discuss three conceptual approaches.

First out is the compliance-based regulation: that is, prescribing exact limits. And that is quite common practice, often through absolute lateral distances. There are variations between countries and in some cases, it's moderated by speed or location. It looks like it's clear and scientific, but it is also quite rigid and hard to enforce. It is not supported by evidence and does not really give cyclists any agency. Also, it may send a wrong message, turning the minimum distance into a target distance.

Another option is the performance-based regulation. And examples that can be found in legal documents are phrases like “give plenty of room”, “overtake as if overtaking a car”, or to” leave space such that one would not drive over the cyclist should they fall”. Both compliance and performance-based approaches are still driver-centric. They focus on a minimum, regardless of how much space there actually is available on the road. So, would there be a third way, as a basis for regulations, that is less engineering-focused and maybe more humanistic?

In other areas, we try to minimise inflicted harm if we have to harm people. We provide extra comfort where we can.

Interestingly, the current Swedish regulation for overtaking, regardless of the overtaken vehicle, is to keep a what's called “reassuring distance”. Sadly, though, it's not specified how this should be interpreted, but it could be taken as a starting point to inflict as little harm as possible.

Which overtakes are “reassuring” for cyclists? (1/2)

How should a reassuring overtake be executed? We did a study in our virtual reality cycling simulator that you can see here to find out, and we validated the results in real traffic. In the simulator, the cyclists were overtaken by virtual vehicles on different road types. And the cyclists in the simulator rated those overtakes and could require changes that we then implemented on the fly. Such that we eventually could determine the ingredients for what a reassuring overtake is.

Which overtakes are “reassuring” for cyclists? (2/2)

Our participants belong to three different groups of cyclists that were self-described. People who cycle on rural roads for training, those who do so for commuting, and those who only cycle in town and therefore do not cycle on rural roads at all.

We found that most cyclists felt reassured when being overtaken with a full lane change, and a speed reduction before the overtake was initiated enhanced that feeling. On narrow roads, that was the case because the available space is limited, so a lower speed feels better, and on wider roads, because speeds are higher to begin with.

It turned out that cyclists who ride for training were more, in a way, hardened and accepted smaller margins, but this also implies that if we base our conclusions solely on people who cycle today, we exclude a large group of potential cyclists right from the start because we never meet their requirements.

Swedish regulations concerning cyclists

Let's have a quick look at the Swedish traffic regulations that are specific to cyclists. You can see some of them. They seem to be centred around driver efficiency and convenience rather than being beneficial for cyclists. The hard shoulder is often the least smooth part of the road and littered with debris.
And to be able to chat with your fellow cyclists, which is a very normal thing to do when two people are in a car, you might want to ride abreast. And the obligation to ride as close to the right as possible takes away your agency and is also detrimental to your visibility.

As mentioned before, Sweden currently has no specific regulations on how to overtake cyclists. The general requirement is to overtake any vehicle with a reassuring lateral distance, as we said. But now the Swedish Transport Agency, and that's nicely in the form of Niklas, who is here today, got a government commission to investigate how to regulate overtaking of cyclists. And of course, we hope for a suggestion that actually has the potential to make a difference for cyclists.

Do regulations work?

So, the question arises: do we know whether overtaking regulations work in other places? Interestingly, there are almost no scientific evaluations of passing distance laws that employ before and after measurements. There's one notable exception, and that's a recent study by Sinclair and Nolan in Australia, who measured lateral clearance before and after the introduction of a new regulation that stipulates 1 metre for speeds up to 60 kilometres per hour and 1.5 metres for higher speeds. They found a marginal improvement in clearance on lower speed roads that coincided with the introduction of this rule. And on higher speed roads, no change was detected.

Also, in other countries with compliance-based laws, violations seem to be frequent, even though most natural clearances prescribed by compliance-based regulations are not perceived as reassuring by cyclists in the first place. Why is that so? Do people not care? Or is the compliance-based approach wrong? Are their communication or enforcement lacking? Or does the issue lie at the system level with a problematic traffic culture?

Who has control over the situation?

Let's dissect the nature of an overtake.

If the cyclist has to stick to the right, they have no agency at all. They do not easily see what is going on behind them. And if they saw, what is their choice, apart from riding into the ditch?
The driver can see, predict, plan and control the situation. The driver can choose when, where, at what speed and with what clearance to overtake. And this is a fundamental difference in power as is. And in addition, we have the facts of weight, speed and protection. This is reflected in how the two road user groups perceive their confidence in using rural roads.

What do cyclists say?

These are answers from people who cycle regularly on rural roads. We collected them while recruiting participants for a study on overtaking and real traffic, and we asked, how do you experience cycling on rural roads? I let you read a little bit.

What you see is that while the respondents enjoy cycling, many of them mention fear and discomfort caused by motor traffic. It's a common feeling that a few drivers behave particularly bad and on purpose.

What is your opinion about sharing rural roads with cyclists?

We also turned the thing around and asked drivers. In the survey within our current project called ComCy, which stands for Comfortable Overtaking on Cyclists on Rural Roads, we asked 1000 respondents, representative of Swedish drivers, for their opinion about sharing rural roads with cyclists. Their answers depended somewhat on whether they also reported using active transport, or not. If they do, they tended to be a bit more positive towards sharing the road with cyclists. They also motivated their choice with free text answers. Let's look at some quotes.

And drivers?

Here you have those who were positive, the neutral ones, and the negative ones on the right. The drivers who had indicated a positive opinion about sharing the road could express genuinely positive aspects of cycling for society, the environment and the individual and some related to their own experience as cyclists.

Some also conditioned cyclist presence on their behaving well, which was a common theme also for the group taking a neutral stance. The lack of alternative infrastructure was acknowledged too, especially by that group. Drivers with a negative opinion towards sharing the road could question cyclists' right to the road and comment on their allegedly bad behaviour.

Interestingly, overall, the presence of cars on the road was not questioned. Referring back to what Ian said about driving being illegal, except for in certain preconditions.

From a car-centric regulation…

With that background, coming back to the question above, which paradigm should we use to regulate overtakes and what should be our priority?

A conceptual difference!

Maybe we can compare the minimum requirement approach to a minimum sleeping requirement. Would we host people like this? (minimum sleeping requirement). After all, for sure they'd catch some sleep.

Or would we rather provide this, make them feel comfortable and at ease? (a comfortable night)

…to a respect-based approach

The underlying paradigm should be to minimise harm and to grant the cyclists agency. And this can be achieved by overtaking with a full lane change or a corresponding manoeuvre if there's not, like a middle marking. And this would be predictable for the cyclist. The cyclists would know where the cars will be.
And that, combined with the speed reduction, is also a possibility to communicate the driver's awareness to the cyclist. They can hear that somebody's reducing their speed so they know they have been acknowledged. And to provide agency, the limitation to riding abreast and the requirement to keep to the right edge must be removed as well.

Glimpses of Data

Let's have a quick look at some data that we collected during past and ongoing projects. These data all stem from bike mounted loggers that record the clearance to overtaking and oncoming vehicles, the location of the event and the speed of the overtaking vehicles. From the location, we can via open street maps access various variables, like speed limit, grow width, and so on.

Time between overtakes

We are currently collecting data with the help of cyclists riding their usual routes. The project is ongoing, but I share a little glimpse. And I also have to make a little warning. These data aren't yet quality-controlled and cleaned, even though they should be okay overall. But this is mostly to provide a background for what I presented above.

It makes sense not to throw all overtakes into the same pot, as undulating small country roads are quite different from rural roads connecting cities. They differ in width, speed limits, sight distance, actual driven speeds, and, of course, traffic volume, among other factors. The rather cursory check indicates that road width may be a promising differentiating factor to look at.

This is a cumulative function of the time that passes; that is for a region in Sweden now, so I don't say it's representative for everywhere. But this is for the time that passes between overtakes per road width category. And the scale here is logarithmic. You can see that on very wide roads, the times between overtakes are much shorter than on roads of middle width. And for very narrow roads, they are a lot longer still.

For half of the overtakes on very wide roads, less than a minute passes before the next overtake occurs. On very narrow roads, for half of the time you can ride for maybe 10 minutes before you get overtaken again.

In absolute numbers, though, most overtakes were logged on roads with narrow width, which is here 4.5 to 6.5 meters, probably because those roads are frequent and they are also popular with cyclists. So here the 50th percentile lies at around 2 minutes. And the frequency of overtakes on wide roads fits right into the pattern. Basically, we see that traffic density increases on wider roads.

Oncoming vehicles – overtaking vehicles

These data are accumulated from several rides. On the left-hand side, we have a map indicating the lateral clearance to oncoming vehicles, which we also log. And red represents a small clearance. It's going to green, which is 3.5 metres or more. On the right-hand side, we have the same colour representation for overtaking vehicles.

First of all, we can see that there is more oncoming traffic than overtaking traffic, and that is, of course, due to the cyclist travelling in the same direction as overtaking vehicles, such that the relative speed in the latter situation is lower. We also see that in most locations, oncoming vehicles are closer than 3.5 meters. Only on the road up here [pointing]. I hope you can see. Only on that road, they are consistently at least 3 metres away. And this is due to most of the roads in this area being rather narrow.

There are also places where overtakes don't really occur. For example, here [pointing]. It also seems that lateral clearances for oncoming and overtaking vehicles are more similar on narrow roads, like I said, than on wider roads. And let's have a closer look at that.

Overtaking passes – Oncoming passes

So here, that's box plots with the overtaking and oncoming clearance. So overtaking is red, oncoming is green. We see that with increasing road width, overtaking clearances increase, the red boxes, but much less than they could, given where the oncoming vehicles are. We also see that even on wide roads, there are some drivers who overtake with very small clearances.

On very narrow roads, up to 4.5 metres wide, overtakes and oncoming passes happened with, more or less, the same clearance. On 4.5 to 6.5 metres wide roads, most overtakes in this data set occurred. As I said before, the road type is frequent, and cyclists use those roads a lot. The median for overtaking clearances for those roads is around 30 centimetres smaller than for oncoming vehicle clearances.

On roads of 6.5 to 8 metres width, the difference increases to 1.2 metres. For the widest roads, we did not consistently log oncoming passes, as on those roads, there's typically a shoulder where the cyclists ride, and therefore, overtaking vehicles do not change lanes, and oncoming vehicles are sort of pretty far away. This shows that, especially on the wider roads, there's plenty of room for improvement.

>3 m

And this is a road outside Karlstad, in Sweden. We conducted a dedicated data collection on that road. And in this picture, we see the locations for all overtakes with the clearance of over 3 metres going eastward at that direction. The areas marked red contain basically no overtakes with that clearance.
Here, there and there [pointing]. In these areas, visibility is bad, so there is a hilltop and curves and overtakes with a large lateral clearance cannot be made without risking a head-on collision with oncoming traffic hidden from view.

<2 m

Now, let's look at overtakes on the same road, conducted with less than 2 metres clearance. While there are some narrow overtakes along the whole road, they accumulate right inside the red areas with low visibility, which means that instead of not overtaking in these areas, drivers overtake with smaller margins, which is uncomfortable for the cyclists. Also, in some of these areas, there is a centre line that is solid, prohibiting overtaking.

Oncoming traffic

On the same road, we saw that overtaking clearances are clearly linked to the presence and location of oncoming traffic. It's of course not surprising that the clearance is smaller when oncoming cars are present. The surprise is rather that instead of refraining from overtaking when oncoming traffic will interfere, there are drivers who choose to overtake anyway, just like when visibility is low.

Implications

We can interpret the data presDid you miss the webinar on June 3? We gave a very interesting, international webinar on cycling, law, and safety.ented above such that in Swedish traffic today:

• Drivers regularly overtake cyclists even though visibility is bad.
  
• Drivers regularly overtake cyclists even though oncoming traffic is present.
  
• They regularly overtake cyclists closely, even though there is more room available.
  
• People cycle substantially less than they would if they had good quality access to the road network, which at least partially could be achieved with good overtakes.
  
• Swedish Traffic Regulation stipulates a reassuring distance to the overtaken vehicle. And ours and others research provides evidence-based guidance on what cyclists consider reassuring.
  This is regularly breached when more tourists overtake cyclists.
  

Conclusions

To work towards those transport policy goals on the previous slide and achieve increased accessibility for cyclists on the road network, cyclists must be able to use the roads without fear. Part of this is that it must be clear to drivers when and when not to overtake cyclists, and how. It must be possible to enforce that at scale.

While steps can be made in the right direction through specific rules and information on overtaking, a systemic approach is needed on a higher level. We have to scrutinise the priorities that are currently taken for granted and seriously question the car-centric motonormative system.

We need to apply the same reasoning that we use when not dumping weights from high up right next to walking or cycling people. We need to get our priorities right. To link back to Ian's presentation, whose freedom are we willing to sacrifice for what? Thank you.

Panel discussion

Jones Karlström - Thank you so much for a very interesting presentation, Katja. Very clear. I welcome back the panel with Niclas Nilsson from the Swedish Transport Agency, Jamie Wilkinson, Sergeant at the West Yorkshire Police Department and Ian Loader, Professor in Criminology at Oxford University.

So, firstly, to the panel here, do you have any reflections or questions for Katja after the presentation?
Yeah, Jamie, go ahead.

Jamie Wilkinson - Thank you. So, two or three questions. My car tells me when I'm too close to something, which is very helpful. It beeps at me, front, back, sides. I can't think it's ever beeped at me when I'm passing a cyclist, which is probably a positive reflection on me, but I do wonder what those settings are. I'm assuming that they are designed to help me prevent damage to my car rather than prevent injury or damage to something on the outside. I don't know if you've kind of looked at that at all.
Um, do you want to do them one at a time?

Katja Kircher - Yeah, that would be good, because my memory is not that long. So yeah, it's a good point. I think that would probably again reflect some sort of minimum clearance, right? I don't really know how such a sensor would work, because of course, you need to establish your clearance before you are right next to the cyclist, since you can't immediately shift the car sideways. I'm not super good at knowing what radars and other sensors can do today, what is feasible to have in a car. I would think, if we still base it on the infrastructure, and if we just say that either you change the lane or you go to the other edge of the road, that is quite clear and you wouldn't even need sensors and you wouldn't need this feedback that, now you were one centimetre too close, but one centimetre farther out, that will do the trick. So I think that is sort of the, I don't know whether that answers the question or whether that is like a good response, but I think it's where we need to shift the idea, from not being too close to being as far as away as you can to provide this personal space or this freedom to choose your own position within a space that you know will be clear.

Jamie Wilkinson - Yeah. So, one of your slides talked about the rules in Sweden around cycling. I can't remember the exact words, but it was essentially cycling as close to the edge of the road as possible. Whereas in the UK, when cyclists are kind of taught through a programme called Bikeability or other things. We talk about primary and secondary positions, and the easiest way to describe that is primary means follow me and secondary means pass me. It's interesting that they're that way around because primary means essentially, I'm going to cycle in the centre of my carriageway to stop you from passing me because it's safer for me. Whereas if I think it's safe for you as a driver to pass me, I will move more towards the edge into the secondary position, which means I'm giving you the opportunity to pass me. There's quite a different mindset there.

Katja Kircher - Yes, I agree. And I think that is very interesting because, as far as I can read from the traffic regulations in Sweden, it is very much focused on efficiency for motorised vehicles. There's not that consideration that the cyclists also have a purpose and they also have the right to the road and to be there. It's rather like the whole idea that motorised traffic should flow freely. So we'll try to make the others as little obstacles as possible. I really like the UK approach. I'm not sure how well it works. I mean, in practice, or whether that's still an ongoing shift of culture or something like that. But I would really think that is the approach to take to not only have one specific rule for overtaking, which is, to draw upon another example, we have the introduction of these bicycle streets. But that basically labels everything else as a car street. So instead of making like punctual little things, I think we need to shift the whole idea of how we regulate public space and that people who do not need a licence to operate vehicles should have the natural right to be, like you say, in the primary position. And it still means if you take the primary position, you kind of use your own body and your own life to make this communication or to show that now is not a good place or a situation to overtake. So, I think there's still this power balance that we have to consider. But generally, yes, I think that it's a much better approach to give the cyclist the agency and to let the people who have a natural right to be in public space be there.

Jamie Wilkinson - Yeah, thank you.

Jones Karlström - Can I just add something there? It also depends, I think, on who we think of when we think of the cyclist. Is that, like you said, hardened people that are riding on the rural roads a lot? Or is that a child cycling to go fishing or something? Because they might not, I don't know, should they take the responsibility for the safety and place themselves in the middle of the road to stop a car from overtaking them? I think that is just something to reflect on.

Jamie Wilkinson - It definitely relies on the driver being on the same page and not just understanding but also appreciating.
And yeah, maybe that's an issue.

My final comment. Your overtaking data and where you highlighted spots where no overtakes were taking place. Can you link any environmental design to that, or does your data potentially have the opportunity to influence environmental design where the road layout and the infrastructure that is around that layout actually help to encourage drivers to take a safer approach?

Katja Kircher - So yeah, in the one where we did the dedicated study on the one road, overtakes took place, except that they weren't with a wide clearance. We had these spots where people generally didn't overtake in a good way. But on the other hand, it could be a coincidence because it's not a very highly trafficked road, but also there is a hill and a curb. It might be, because it is not a very much traffic road, that people would be patient and wait it out. At the moment, I mean, we should have that in the data so I could look whether people have been waiting behind the cyclist and then overtaking or whether there was just nobody there. But I think that is definitely something that we should look into when we collect more data and when we can be a bit more confident in seeing that there are places where people actually on purpose do not overtake or whether that was only a coincidence. So, I don't have a really good answer yet. Sorry.

Jamie Wilkinson - No, no, that's fine. Thank you.

Jones Karlström – Do Niklas or Ian have any questions or reflections after the presentation?

Ian Loader - I mean, these may be more observations than questions, but let me try and end it with a question. Your summary of the current driving regulations for cyclists on rural roads they seem quite shocking to me. Because they are written in such a way as to send the message that comes close to saying that cyclists shouldn't be there, and if they are there, they're an inconvenience, and they ought to do their best to get out of the way. So, I mean, I don't know how many people read them, but they very clearly send a message about who belongs in that space and who doesn't belong in that space.
But the question then becomes, well, how might we best think about how you might reconfigure those?

Two thoughts occurred to me; then I'll pose my question, one of which is someone in the chat in relation to the earlier-talked-about tractors. Tractors are interesting in this context because tractors are another irritant for drivers on rural roads, at least in this country, because they go too slowly and they're in the way. But there are two things about tractors. What drivers tend to take more care about is passing tractors because they're bigger than them, and they could come off worse. But tractors also physically occupy more space.

So, my sense about this is, can you write regulations and produce public messaging which communicates the idea, and this obviously will only work in some settings more than others: the space between a cyclist and the middle of the road belongs to the cyclist. They can do with it what they legally will. If they want to fill it with a friend so they can talk, that's totally fine. In this country, they often need that space to avoid potholes. So, one of the major reasons why you want clearance is that you have to swerve unpredictably. But in a sense, the message to a driver is to treat that cyclist as if they were a tractor or another car. You don't get to occupy that space, even though it looks like it's vacant. And I wonder whether that's the way to go.

My question was, in the models that you introduced at the beginning, compliance, performance and respect. Have you come down in favour of one or the other, or some combination of those, as the kind of way to make progress in this field?

Katja Kircher - Yeah, so if we only look at overtaking as a singular case, apart from the whole culture and everything, then I would of course go for the respect-based model. But then again, I wonder, do we still need a minimum, or does it mean that if you can't overtake with respect, then you don't do it? And do we need to go back to metres and centimetres or yards and inches? I don't know what people prefer. But in a way, I would rather only go for the respect-based, but that would also mean, that we need this insight that cyclists are people and that drivers are people and that we should meet each other on a human scale and go away from this whole engineering-based approach to driving where we maximise efficiency and speed and count time gained and all these things. So, I think it requires a lot to fully go on the respect-based model, but I think that should be the ultimate goal, at least in my opinion. I'm not sure what you are saying.

Jones Karlström - Maybe Niklas has something to say about that, or has a different reflection, comment or question.

Niclas Nilsson - No, I had a different reflection, sorry. I don't have an answer for you, Katja, to your question. I have another question.

Katja Kircher - Good.

Niclas Nilsson - Thank you, and thank you, Katja, for a really nice and interesting presentation. Well, about Swedish traffic rules and other European countries’ different traffic rules, there are some things to know: most of the countries follow the conventional road traffic and the conventional road signs and signals, and different countries do it in different ways. That's how it is. And, as I can see, most of the Nordic countries are using it in mostly the same way, and then we have quite large differences between the other European countries, as well as in Britain, in Holland and so on. So that's the one reason for how the traffic rules look in Sweden, for now.

And then the assignment I have now, to report to the government, is to see if there are some openings for passing by cyclists both in urban and non-urban places. But I just want to say that the traffic rules are based on the unanimous discussion about conventional road traffic in the beginning. So that's why we have those rules as we have them, and we also, as is in Britain, have a long history to change if we want to make any larger steps about how to behave against each other in traffic. I mean, they're almost 100 years old now, those different international legislations, at least from the 40s, I guess. Thank you.

Jones Karlström - Thank you, Niclas. So one of the questions I've prepared is an easy one. Is a minimum passing distance law necessary? And if so, what value should it be based on? Only numerical values, or core values that are important to you as a person or to us as a society? I think this is something that is linked to what Ian talked about in his presentation. What values are important, because you can measure the distance here, as Katja can do. But it might come back to the legislation that you said is 100 years old, Niclas. What values were those based on? Yeah, go ahead, Katja.

Katja Kircher - Yeah, it's only a reflection because that is a risk I felt with showing the data because there are quite a number of studies out there on overtaking in rural areas. It's more or less - I don't say the only research, but it's one of the studies done on cycling in rural areas. It's a lot about overtaking and then going with this engineering approach, measuring the exact distance, trying to be as accurate in centimetres as possible, and then building models of what influences this clearance. And then people come up with, oncoming traffic influences that, let's say, if there's a road marking in the middle or not, and stuff like that. And then they kind of calculate how many centimetres on average that changes. And that, to me, is a bit of a dangerous approach because again, we kind of engineer it and we lose the human aspects of it, and also, is the mean distance what we're interested in? Is it not that we want to get rid of the lower ones or those that are below a certain limit, or do we want to maximise?

So how should we report the data that we get? Should we use all these measurements only because we can? I mean, it's easy, or we found it's not very easy, but it is at least possible to measure the distance to overtaking vehicles.

I think it is very important that we, like you say, we need to start with the questions. What do we want to report? What do we want to look at? And how can we then illustrate these points with the data that we are able to get? Because, of course, some data we can't easily get at. So, we might need to use a proxy. But I think that is the important part that we don't lose, as you say: the visions are the idea out of sight and start with that and then think, how can we use the data to illustrate those aspects?

Jones Karlström - Thank you, Katja. Does anyone want to add to that? Otherwise, I think Anna wants to get some questions from the audience, I guess.

Anna Niska - Yes, there is a question from the chat here regarding the distance. Would it be easier for the enforcement, for example, in a court to rule out if the distance has been too low? Is that one of the reasons why you should have a minimum distance of 1.5 or 2 meters? What do you say, Katja?

Katja Kircher - I would say it is easier to say whether somebody changed the lane completely or went into the position where oncoming traffic is, if you don't have a centre line. And there is actually a scientific article - I think the author is called Lamb, and there were probably other authors as well - where they looked into these different types of rules, where they basically state that it is practically impossible to measure, like to really measure the distance between an overtaking vehicle and the bicycle. I mean, if you instrument all bicycles, and even then, as we do, we still don't go down to the last centimetre because there could be a mirror that we don't have our Lidar hit, and they move a little bit during the overtake and all that. So, it's not easy to get an exact measurement and definitely not from somewhere else. How would we do that? With a police car driving behind? And then, it is very hard to enforce that. But as I understand it, maybe - I don't want to take anything from Jamie here, but if bikes can use cameras and if camera footage would be possible to use, then that could have an effect at scale, because then you can easily see on a camera whether the overtaking vehicle was making a full lane change or not.

Anna Niska - And there are two specific questions also on your studies, Katja. One was if you have also looked at the position that the cyclists have, if there's a correlation between overtaking distance in relation to what the position has been of the cyclists, if you have measured that? Also, if you have looked into winter conditions, since it’s a Nordic country?

Katja Kircher - We start with the lateral position. We would really like to be able to measure that. As you saw in the picture of this logbox, it's rather small, and we want it to be rather small and portable. Maybe if we could use the camera and then do some image recognition, it might be possible to identify the edge of the road in some way or another, but we haven't really found a good method. And as I've seen in other studies, nobody really does that in natural environments, because I think it is very difficult. GPS is, of course, not accurate enough. So, unfortunately not.

I can also say we have applied several times to do a study where we control the lateral position, because cyclists choose the lateral position carefully. So, in some places, you would go more to the middle and in others, you would go more to the edge. You cannot really look at it as a factor that is independent of other things. So we wanted to do a study where we actually do control the lateral position so we can use it as a factor. But it's been rejected every single time we applied.

And winter conditions. Yes, we have collected data also in winter, but we haven't looked at it differently. But I would think that typically - that's a speculation based a little bit on what we've seen while doing the studies - that in winter, usually, if you have snow and ice on the road, cyclists would probably try to ride where there is as little ice as possible, and so that limits the width of the road functionally, so you get closer passes.

Jones Karlström - Yes, and I think that will be the last question for this part of the webinar. Thank you so much, Katja, for the presentation and to the panellists. Thank you.

Now it's time to welcome Sergeant Jamie Wilkinson from the West Yorkshire Police Department. We are really honoured to have him here to talk about Operation Close Pass. So welcome, Jamie; the floor is yours.

Operation Close Pass – An innovative approach to improving safety for cyclists
– Sgt Jamie Wilkinson

Jamie Wilkinson - Well, thank you very much. Good morning. My name is Jamie Wilkinson. I'm a police sergeant at West Yorkshire Police, which is in the north of England, and I'm based in Bradford, which is the second largest city in West Yorkshire. We have a combination of urban, semi-rural and rural areas within our patch.

So just a bit of context to me, I've been a police officer for coming up to 25 years. I've worked across various environments within policing, including patrol, roads policing, schools policing and partnerships. My current role is that I lead a small team focused on tackling anti-social vehicle use and promoting Vision Zero, reducing death and serious injury on our roads, not just through enforcement, but also through engagement and education where possible.

Operation Close Pass

Operation Close Pass is essentially an operational policing approach, but we're going to talk about how it works in practice, what we've learned from delivering it so far, and what elements might be transferable, particularly given the international audience we're talking to today.

What is Operation Close Pass?

So, what is it? At its core, it's about observing overtaking behaviour in real time and then dealing with it. So we use a plainclothes police officer cycling on the road in a normal manner, as any other competent cyclist would do. There's no provocation, there's no set-up or ambition to target anything; it's just normal riding behaviour.

So, when a driver passes too closely, we're going to look to engage with them and stop them shortly afterwards. What we found there, the key to that is that immediacy, that we're talking to someone about something that they've just done, not something abstract or theoretical or hypothetical. Although enforcement sits behind it, and enforcement is an option that is there throughout. Actually, the focus is on education and helping drivers understand what a safe pass looks like. If indeed they really know what it is in the first place.

So what I'll do is, I'll play a short video that was filmed last year at one of our close pass operations that gives you a sense of what it looks like.

[Video presentation with Jamie Wilkinson's voice] With my past policing career, I've worked in road policing, and I've dealt with death involving cyclists. And having to deliver that news and deal with the aftermath of a collision is one of the worst things you can do. And how the family must feel is, you know, so many times multiplied how I feel. And if we can do one little thing like this, just to change perceptions and change behaviours, then we're achieving something.

Close pass is an operation where we deploy a police cyclist to ride up and down a location and flag any motorists that pass too close. And then we pull them in, and we give an opportunity for an educational improve the roadside with one of our partner agencies as an alternative to prosecution.

So, we have a mat here that is produced specially for close pass, which we placed a bike on. It's a mock road. And it's clearly marked with the area where traditionally a cyclist is likely to ride, including the fact that they do sit out from the curb because of the lack of drainage. We're then talking about another metre and a half as a minimum to give the cyclist space when you're passing it, which takes you quite out into the middle of the road.
So, the message we're giving really is, if it isn't safe to overtake, then just be patient and just wait. There will come an opportunity. The cyclist has every right to be there. And if it slows you down, it's going to slow you down by seconds or minutes at the most. And it's just not worth getting it wrong and putting somebody at risk.

Core Objectives

That was one of the operations that we ran last year. Particularly, what you see in that is the mat that we use for education, which I'll touch on a little bit later. So, what are our core objectives through Operation Close Pass? We're trying to tackle behaviour that sits most likely below the level most prosecution systems would deal with. It's not designed to tackle that dangerous behaviour, albeit we'll deal with that if it comes up.

So the behaviour that we're looking to engage in, and educate around, might not meet a threshold for dangerous driving or what you may see a careful and competent driver falls below, but it would still be unsafe, and it obviously has an impact on how people experience the road as vulnerable road users.

The aim is early intervention. It's to help drivers improve their understanding and change their behaviour before something more serious happens. I come with that experience in my previous role, particularly as a road policing officer, where I have attended incidents involving cyclists that might seem as a small misjudgment, but ended up with either life-changing or fatal consequences. So, when I speak about it, I do have that learned experience, and it isn't an ambition that some people might think is unrealistic. We can say these things have the potential to turn into something far more serious. And I think it's important that you have that legitimacy behind you when you're talking about it, because those moments do stay with you, dealing with those incidents, dealing with the family of the people involved in those.

For me, anyway, it really underlines why that early intervention matters. Not only because of the devastating consequences for the family or the cyclist, but also the impact on drivers who, in the main, are decent people going about their daily business, who have just made a minor error. But, you know, the impact of a significant collision stays with a lot of people and affects a lot of lives. And I think because I can do that and my colleagues can do that, it gives it that extra legitimacy.

Typical Deployment Model

The typical deployment model, as I mentioned earlier, is a plain-clothes police officer, not undercover, just in normal cycling clothing. Cycle a predefined route. We try to find somewhere that's not too hilly because it's hard work, and where they can cycle in both directions, in normal riding behaviour, the sort of behaviour that we would expect a competent cyclist to undertake.

Their bike is fitted with front and rear cameras. They also carry a police radio so they can communicate with other police officers present. So if a close pass happens, they'll tell their colleagues over the radio, the vehicle details, the registration plate, the colour, etc. We'll then pull that vehicle over, ideally straight into that defined spot. If not, we'll stop it and bring it back. And we want to deal with them there and then because that's when the incident is fresh in their mind.

Identifying a Close Pass

So how do we identify a close pass? Well, we've talked a little bit in the earlier sessions about distances and 1.5 metres, 2 metres, things like that. There is no defined close pass. It's not just about measuring a distance. What we're looking at is the context. So, the speed, road layout, traffic conditions, weather, and visibility. What might make a close pass unacceptable in a certain situation might be less unacceptable on a different day. So, as I said, we're not looking to catch people; we're looking to identify people who are getting it a bit wrong and give them an opportunity to learn about that.

From the cyclist's perspective, the same gap can feel very different depending on how and where it happens. That's why you want a competent cyclist who can make that judgment prior to flagging a driver up. So, we are applying our judgment against clear expectations of a base level of what safe looks and feels like.

Close Pass operation examples

So, in the next slide, I've got some examples from our close pass operations of vehicles that we have brought into our educational inputs. [Showing a video of close passes, filmed from the bicycle.
There is no sound on this video.]

What you're seeing there are fairly everyday interactions, nothing unusual, nothing that we would certainly in UK law class as dangerous driving. Clearly, from a cyclist’s perspective, they are uncomfortably close. And I've taken a still here from the one involving the lorry. You can almost feel what the cyclist must feel at that point. I mean, that's even without getting that sense of the noise and the wind that is likely to sort of cross their path as that passes. From inside that lorry, it'll be a different feeling altogether. Might not feel particularly close, certainly wouldn't get a sense of vulnerability. I do wonder what that driver's vision of that cyclist looks like, particularly bearing in mind the trailer that he's pulling.

Again, I speak from personal experience: when you've dealt with a serious collision involving a cyclist, and you're at the roadside, even though you're not present at the time of the incident, you do still get that sense of the cyclist's vulnerability. And I think that changes how you view interactions with drivers. You're not talking about something theoretical, and I think that's quite important.

Legal Basis (UK Example)

Like I touched on, in the UK at least, there is no specific close pass offence. So we're looking at road traffic offences such as careless and inconsiderate driving, driving without reasonable consideration, which are the lower end of driving offences, minor errors of judgment.

As Ian touched on, the sort of accepted level is that of a careful and competent driver, someone who's passed the driving test who understands the rules of the road. And the layperson would say, they're driving okay.

Things that become more serious, like a more serious sense of dangerous driving, we're probably not going to look at education. There is only one word different, but for dangerous driving in our law, it's a behaviour that falls far below that of a careful and competent driver. That's more significant, and we will deal with that if that happens.

But what we're hoping to engage and educate around is that lower level. So, we don't need any new introduction of anything for this to work. We can work within existing legislational standards.

Roadside Education

We stop the driver shortly after the incident, and then there is a short, structured conversation. The first bit that we will do as police officers is to check that all the documents are in order, their license, and their insurance. We'll do an eyesight test that again fits within police legislation, which is being able to read a number plate 20 metres away. We'll make sure that they are, in fact, driving legally to start with.

They'll then be offered the opportunity of a roadside education as an alternative to prosecution for driving without due care and attention. So, there is still that hanging over their head, and generally it encourages them to take on the educational input, which is no surprise, really.

So we have the mat, a cycle and a vehicle all set up, ready to go, which gives them that visual explanation of cycling space and movement in a sterile situation.

Roadside educational input taking place following a Close Pass incident

This is actually the lorry that we saw in the video clip and the photo. This is the driver of that lorry receiving the educational input. You can just see how big that lorry was, for a bit of context.
Now, the key bit to this is who delivers. This is not delivered by the police. This is delivered by a partner agency. In our case, we work with the local council. The local council has a road safety team who do various things, including school inputs and whatnot. They deliver this, and that differentiation is quite important. The barrier that is sometimes there between the police and the public is removed because we're not doing this and we're not sort of wagging the finger, the big stick, saying do this or we will prosecute. It just gives it that softer and less confrontational touch. It also tends to reduce confrontation, and it changes the way that interaction happens. It becomes a two-way thing between the person delivering the input and the driver.

It's where this is being delivered that the penny drops or it clicks for the motorist as to what's happening, where they get the chance to actually stand and look and feel what it looks like and understand why they're there, what the rules say and what the Highway Code says. The Highway Code in the UK is not law, but it's a book of guidance, essentially, that says this is how we should use the roads: drivers, cyclists, horse riders, and pedestrians. These are the rules of the road that we expect everybody to follow, and it's referred to through the driving test process, and it is used as a measure for determining whether certain driving offences may have been committed.

When that's talked about, the hierarchy of road users is referred to, and some changes in the Highway Code going back to 2022 that give more power essentially to vulnerable road users. So those sorts of things can be talked about.

Communication Style

It's very calm; it's non-accusatory. There is nobody saying you have done this wrong, and therefore we expect this of you. It's addressing a behaviour, but it's not judging the behaviour. It just sets it up that it's an opportunity to learn from a situation that has evolved. We're focusing on behaviour, explaining risk and we're setting future expectations on the basis of completion of this 10-minute roadside input that the driver just goes about their business with no further action.

What we find is that approach tends to open the conversation rather than it being a lecture or a one-way conversation. It doesn't shut down people. The drivers actually engage in that process.

Enforcement Threshold

We do have an enforcement threshold and there are occasions where we will fall back on enforcement. If, for example, the speed is excessive or the driving is aggressive or dismissive of a process, or if there is a high risk. Or, we do document who we've stopped, if we have repeat behaviour. When we check drivers through, they may already have convictions for driving offences. It may be that we feel that it's not appropriate to go in at a low level with an individual. Or indeed, if a driver says, no thank you, I don't want to have your educational input at the roadside. Then, we have the evidence on the video cameras, plus the observations of the cyclist; we can fall back on prosecution as an option.

Operational Insights (Bradford)

What have we found from our experiences in Bradford? It's most effective where we have fairly contained urban roads. We don't want big, wide two-lane carriageways or such narrow roads where it would be impractical to pass anyway. We need a road that has sufficient traffic flow that does allow drivers to pass safely, but it's not so wide that we're not likely to come across anybody who deserves to be stopped. So a little bit of research on the type of roads that work is helpful.

But these tend to be places where drivers feel that they should overtake, if that makes sense, because of that perception of having priority, even when it's maybe not safe at times. The idea, you want a road where there are opportunities, not setting people up to fail. But where there are parts of the road layout that maybe you wouldn't ideally overtake.

And what we have found is that it's quite visible. The cyclists themselves aren't particularly, because they look like any other cyclists, but we'll have uniformed officers. We'll have a fairly well-visible check site with the big mat, the cycle, a van or a car up there, and a couple of police cars or police motorbikes around to actually catch drivers up and stop them. So, the operation itself is quite visible. That gives some reassurance in more general policing terms to the public that the police are present, but also to the cycle community; it's very clear what we're doing.

It gives us an opportunity for some good media visibility. And the operation itself, it does encourage self-reflection for drivers, but then something they can leave us after that 10 minutes and they will have things to think about; the educational input is such that they will be able to think about those things.

Common Driver Responses

How do drivers actually respond then? Generally, quite positively. I know, maybe sometimes it's because they want to get it done and get on with their day. But actually, the sort of comments we get, “I didn't realise it was that close”, so “I thought I gave enough room”. Then, when they've seen the cyclist's perspective, “I wouldn't want that done to me”, “I wouldn't feel comfortable in that situation”. You can see that the understanding shifts from the perception of the driver to the perception of the cyclist. And the lack of awareness is probably something that we see repeatedly, and that moment of realisation as it sinks in.

There is a wider knock in terms of my colleagues who then have to deal with such collisions involving cyclists; if we start to deal with that less, that can only be a positive.

Impact Indicators

What do we think the impact indicators are? There's an immediacy around acknowledging a behaviour. Because of that immediacy, it's quite difficult to talk; I can't remember, it's a long time ago, I drive every day. And many say that they will approach cyclists in a different manner next time.

People tend to remember being stopped by the police. So that helps to reinforce what they've learned and the shared road standards that are talked about.

Strengths of the Model

Strengths of the close pass model: it's low cost, you need a mat that we tend to get provided through funding, through sort of local government organisations or various sort of working groups within that.
You need a bike, you need cameras. Again, they're fairly low cost if people don't already have their own stuff through other means of enforcement and policing time and a partner.

A partner agency to work with, that's really important. We use the council. You could use the fire service. You know, certainly in the UK, they are very heavily involved in road safety. Again, they will be that non-confrontational partner to do the educational side of it. You could do it with police officers, but I'm not convinced that will be as effective.

It complements the road safety measures; it's not replacing anything. You can use it on a large scale; you can do it fairly low key. It's just something additional.

Limitations and Risks

Nothing's perfect, so what are our limitations, our risks? It's not a substitute for other safe road design. If we're having repeated locations, there may be something more significant that needs to change. It does require a consistent delivery. It can't be something that is just done very occasionally as a bit of a sound bite or a media exercise.

You do need the right skills. You need officers who understand safe cycling, ideally have a genuine interest in it and a partner agency that is able to deliver the educational input. It can lose credibility if it's just sporadic or if it's, like I said, symbolic, just for a media sound bite or something like that.

You need to be - not every day, every week even, but certainly through the summer months where there's a lot more cycling because of the light and the weather - something that needs to happen with a certain degree of regularity.

International Transferability

Bearing in mind today's audience, it is internationally transferable. It's okay. Everyone might have different legal frameworks, but this can fit into it because it isn't an enforcement thing in itself. It is something that is designed to fit around already established rules essentially. It's real time, it sets behavioural expectations and it's grounded in lived experience.

Media interest

Yes, it does get good media interest, and I need to launch on that. Even as far as Chicago, we had a comment on a cycling forum about one.

Key Takeaways

The key takeaway is that unsafe overtaking is a behavioural issue. And then roadside education can shift norms and behaviours. The enforcement and empathy are not opposites, they can work together and that small interventions we believe can have those lasting effects.
Thank you.

Jones Karlström - Thank you so much, Jamie. I have asked Sonja Forward, who is a senior researcher here at VTI, to share some reflections, but we don’t have much time left. Maybe if you have a few reflections now, Sonja, and then we can get some more reflections from you during the coffee chat later on. So, please go ahead, Sonja.

Reflections from Sonja Forward, VTI

Sonja Forward - Okay, to start with, thank you for the presentation, really interesting. And I fully agree with you that education and enforcement need to be linked. If you only have the fine, the risk would be that they were, oh, the police is just a nuisance. They're just here to get money, and they don't understand the problem.

I think it's really good that you also make them reflect because we know it's a habitual thing. They tend not to reflect on why they're doing it. If it works, it's fine, and they don't see any problem with it. And if they don't bike themselves, the risk is that they don't understand the feeling of being overtaken closely. So, I think that you actually following up with reflections afterwards is really useful.

And I think another thing is that the why is also important, because I've done a lot of studies looking at dangerous overtaking. And we know that what I perceive as dangerous, they don't see as dangerous, because they think they're so skilled. They think they're able to do it; they won't cause an accident. So that is the kind of perception we need to address as well, that sort of illusion of control, the illusion of their own skills.

Another thing is, of course, you need trained policemen, I imagine you have that, who don't just tell them the rules, but tell them about the consequences, but not only consequences with regard to accidents, because they do tend not to happen very much.

Consequences for the feeling of the cyclist so they start to empathise with the cyclist. So, it's not just telling them the rules and regulations, but also making them understand the feelings of the cyclist. But I think it's really interesting.

And I also like that you have a connection to the media, because it needs to be followed up. I would also suggest that if you could do it regularly, on and off. It would be really useful, not just having it one-off, because people need to be reminded of this. And then briefly, we also need to be reminded that the road is also for cyclists and not just for cars. So really interesting. And I think that the Swedish police should copy this, definitely.

Jones Karlström - Thank you so much, Sonja. I hope that you can stay for the coffee chat and share some more reflections on the webinar. Now it's 11.30, so this is the end of the official program, and I would like to thank everyone for attending and a big thank you to the presenters and everyone who has participated as a panellist.

The recording will be turned off now.