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A story hit the national press last week from the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) stating that 57% of UK cyclists jump red lights.
It hit a bit of a red light itself when the Guardian ran an alternative story shortly afterwards, claiming it was based on insufficient evidence.
Before you leap to the conclusion that I'm here to criticise one of E-Training World's competitors, please hear me out because that's not my objective at all.
The Guardian's article said:
The IAM press release is headlined: "More than half of cyclists jump red lights", and begins: "57% of cyclists admit to jumping red lights according to the IAM's latest poll of 1600 people."
I asked the IAM for more details, and what eventually came was interesting. To start with, this isn't a proper "poll", at least not in the Mori-type sense of some attempt at even-handedness.
This was something a self-selected bunch of visitors to the IAM website filled in using a web tool called Survey Monkey. They probably all weren't drivers determined to ruin the name of cyclists, but the point is there were no safeguards against this.
More disturbing still, while the press release talked as if 57% of cyclists jump lights regularly, the breakdown of the figures showed, in fact, only 1.9% confessed to this. Another 11.8% did so "sometimes" while 24.6% did "rarely", and 19.1% had done so once or twice.
OK, so it wasn't an expensive Mori poll, however for those of us who work in the driver training profession we don't have budgets that enable us to commission wide scale surveys.
Also, don't many companies keep their costs down during these tough times by using their initiative with tools like Survey Monkey?
Please also remember that our objective is to raise the profile of road safety so that less people will die on UK roads. The IAM's aim with this story was to save cyclists' lives.
As for the criticisms of the accuracy of this survey, I do not believe the IAM were deliberately trying to mislead anyone.
They did their best to draw in some data and use it to continue their road safety campaign. Please show me a PR team that doesn't try and create the most striking headline from a bunch of stats on a spreadsheet.
Of course, road safety campaigns must be evidence based. However the problem is that the Government isn't investing in road safety - so organisations like the IAM are doing their best with limited funds.
Actually if you read the comments left by readers on the Guardian's website most people are saying they believe it is about 33% of cyclists that jump red lights (this is not my official statistic, just my impression following a quick read of the comments), so you choose which statistic to believe.
The point is, without evidence and accurate data, road safety cannot and will not move forwards.
Without investment we are not able to collate the data unless we work creatively with online tools and by analysing data in our systems.
So rather than knocking the road safety organisations that are clearly trying to save lives, why don't we focus our efforts on lobbying the Government - because it doesn't even have a target for road casualty reduction!
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