Mercy Street was founded to provide a vehicle for the study of the culture surrounding our roads, and how it affects the safety of vulnerable road users.
Mercy Street operates on the principle that cyclist safety is primarily in the hands of drivers. Wearing a helmet can reduce a cyclist’s risk of head injury in a crash. Not being hit by a car eliminates that risk altogether. Wearing high visibility clothing is recommended to try and ensure drivers see you, when you ride a bicycle. It is useless if the driver is not looking. More worryingly, driver
aggression to cyclists is frequently reported, with an increase in the use of action cameras now providing video evidence of this phenomenon. It is my belief that this aggression is at least in part motivated by lack of understanding of the rules of the road as they apply to cyclists, misguided beliefs about taxation and moral – if not legal – ownership of the roads, and stereotyping of cyclists as law-breakers. Drivers and cyclists, however, do not operate in a vacuum. They operate within an environment where physical and system design communicates continuously. Design is a powerful communication tool, so what does the visual design of our roads say? What does the system design say? How does this support a situation in which the cycling modal share for Ireland is a mere 1.6%, but the cyclist share of fatalities (based on 2016 figures) is 5.3%? Mercy Street was founded to provide a vehicle for the study of the culture surrounding our roads, and how it affects the safety of vulnerable road users – particularly cyclists. This research will inform training programmes, talks, articles, and creative media artefacts aimed at changing the culture and leading to safer roads for all road users.
