The Zaveruha Doctrine of Responsibility
What in blazes is the Zaveruha Doctrine of Responsibility?
It’s this: A person is fully responsible for how he influences others. On a bicycle or in any other aspect of life.
If you use ridicule or sarcasm, you are responsible for the actions people take as a result of your ridicule or sarcasm. If you give bad advice, set a bad example or otherwise mislead, you are responsible for people who follow your example.
An old girlfriend taught me that, in a way that stung at the time, but it stayed with me. It’s a good story.
In the autumn of 1972, I was a feckless college junior. I had just dropped my life savings on a Motobecane Le Champion racing bike. That bike checked all the boxes: Reynolds 531 tubing! Campagnolo Nuovo Record derailleurs and Campagnolo Nuovo Tipo hubs! Hutchinson sew-up tires! Stronglight Model 93 cotterless crankset! Brooks Professional saddle! I was fit and fast, and loved riding that bike as hard as I could.
The Crash
One day, I took an impressionable young freshman, Lee Grunes, out for a ride. And I decided to show off. I let loose a mighty sprint on East Possum Hollow Road, seeking the cheap thrill of out-sprinting my inexperienced companion, who was riding a cheaper, heavier, slower bike.
Lee tried to match my sprint. His foot slipped, he lost control, the handlebars went sideways, and he fell. Hard. He writhed on the ground in front of me, in searing pain. He said he’d broken his collarbone.
A passing motorist took us to the college infirmary, where the broken collarbone diagnosis was confirmed.
“You caused that crash.”
I felt sorry for Lee, but it didn’t occur to me to feel any guilt or shame. Until my then-girlfriend, the lovely and elegant Susan Zaveruha, heard what had happened.
“You caused that crash,” she scolded.
And she rubbed my nose in that which I didn’t want to face: that Lee had been unduly influenced by my showing off.
It stung, because she was right. Lee’s crash was my fault. The Zaveruha Doctrine was born.
What Happened Next
A few months later, Susan wisely dumped me. I bet that news makes you smirk.
Lee’s collarbone healed. He got a PhD in physics from Cornell, and had a suitably distinguished career. And I was left with a lesson of responsibility.
The thing that most matters is how I influence others.
What I say or write matters. How I say it matters. My actions matter.
Lesson Learned
I apply the Zaveruha Doctrine unsparingly to myself and my work, because Susan was right.
In the world of bicycling, writers and advocates who use ad hominem attacks, logical fallacies and diversion tactics to obfuscate the delivery of important safety information?
Guilty.
Editors who withhold information because they don’t want to deal with the topic?
Guilty.
If you advocate for on-road bicycle infrastructure because it’s “better than nothing,” remember Susan: Every coffin corner collision, every broken collarbone from a car door collision — that’s on you.
And my favorite: You can’t glide past the fact that the coffin corner, the door zone, and other hazards actually do cause human tragedy, and then say:
“Oh, but these facilities will induce so many people to ride bikes that the overall crash rate will go down.”
Um, no.
An alleged — and roundly discredited — mythical safety “statistic” doesn’t absolve your responsibility for individual tragedies.
Guilty with a cherry on top.
You can’t have it both ways.
You can’t smirk at Susan’s decision to dump me unless you also accept this expanded definition of responsibility. With that definition comes your own responsibility to look in the mirror for breaches of responsibility.
That, my friends, is the Zaveruha Doctrine. We should all adhere to it.
Thank you John for a reminder to all of us and welcome Mr. Editor!
re: “Oh, but these facilities will induce so many people to ride bikes that the overall crash rate will go down.”
“An alleged — and roundly discredited — mythical safety “statistic” …”
Have the following now been “roundly discredited” elsewhere? If so, it would be helpful in future to include citations when making important and perhaps controversial claims.
American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) December 2016
Bicycle Use and Cyclist Safety Following Boston’s Bicycle Infrastructure Expansion, 2009–2012
Felipe E. Pedroso MD, MPH, et al.
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303454
City of Cambridge, MA:
Bicycle Crash Information, Bicycle Crash Summary Report
https://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/Transportation/bikesincambridge/bicyclecrashinformation
Claiming or asserting authority to lead or teach is indeed a responsibility we each – myself included – must take seriously and welcome civil informed critique.
Fair question, Michael. We’ve been working on what turns out to be a fairly complex discussion of “safety in numbers,” and we need a good essay to point to. There are several aspects to this. Here’s one: The Snead Effect, first documented in the 1940s for car users, showed that there was a lower crash rate as there were more drivers. That doesn’t mean any individual driver was safer as a result of there being more drivers. Mostly, it means that each individual driver had more experience.
I have seen, numerous times, people advocate for bicycle facilities that they believe will attract more bicyclists, despite known and serious dangers (door zone bike lanes, for example). Their justification is that the overall crash rate will go down. However, the Zaveruha Doctrine is clear that we care about individuals. Each crash created by that door zone bike lane would be the responsibility of those who advocated for that bike lane.
We have plenty of ways to advocate for more cycling without resorting to endangering any individual bicyclist.
John,
Glad to hear you are researching the issue, or rather issues. It’s a difficult subject to study as there are multiple confounding variables to take into account. Experimental & controlled studies are well-nigh if not totally impossible even conceive involving whole cities & populations. Public health findings reviewing statistics and records and surmising quatifications of “bikelanes” and accounting for variable cyclist cohorts & equipment, etc.
Real world contemporary studies are, for example, each limited by variables such as: historical time, changes and differences and extent of infrastructures implemented, differing and changing traffic laws and motorist conduct eg: right on red, speed limits; “advances” in automotive engineering for safety for drivers which – as with claims re: helmets increase risk taking, also could reasonably apply to drivers who might speed and take more risk the safer or “smarter” their vehicle is perceived to be;, variability due to possible increases in distracted driving and other road culture factors – DUI laws, definitions & enforcement, etc. Then one must consider the bicyclists, the changing cohorts as bike share is introduced simultaneously before, with or after delay, by introduction of door zone bike lanes, bike lanes with buffers, separated bike lanes & protected bike lanes or tracks of various designes in diverse places; changes in helmet use & quality; improvements in integrated trauma care systems which have the effect of lowering near-term fatalities though increasing survival of more and most seriously injured vulnerable and protected road users, thus altering statistical measures.
So I opine that every such study will be able to questioned and clear conclusions will require meta studies of many many studies yet to be performed, each taking years! Not that we should be prevented from debating each on its easily questioned merits.
Here’s one such for your consideration which had its own unanticipated finding…
Cycling lanes reduce fatalities for all road users, study shows
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190529113036.htm
Best,
Michael C
Hi Michael,
You cover a lot of ground here. There are some things I agree with, and some I disagree with. Most, I’m not going to even try to respond to.
My major gripe with most bicycle-oriented safety studies is that they don’t look at the mechanics of individual crash causes. Rather, they count what they choose to count.
Examples:
(1) Most cyclist injuries, and more than a few cyclist deaths are not counted because they do not involve a collision with a motor vehicle in motion. These include falls, collisions with pedestrians, collisions with fixed objects and collisions with the doors of parked cars. That is the data that is most easily available, so that’s the data that gets number-massaged. (One splendid counter example is the work done by Paul Schimek in Boston, some of which he reported on in the Cycling Savvy blog.)
(2) The Furth study of partially separated bicycle facilities in Montreal got positive numbers BY EXCLUDING THE INTERSECTIONS. My goodness, ever since the dawn of time, most collisions have occurred at intersections.
(3) Not differentiating between “cyclist ran a red light” and “driver was clearly at fault for hitting the cyclist” allows for a lot of distortions to creep into interpretation of the data.
There are more examples, but they will have to wait.
Bicycle crashes are a lot less complex than body chemistry.
The causal factors leading up to most bicycle/car collisions are usually simple. Person X was looking in direction Y and person Z was headed towards person X, from a direction other than Y. A collision ensued.
For that reason, any good study of bicycle/car collisions will look at the mechanics of individual crashes or collisions.
But the public health researchers typically don’t look at crash/collision mechanics. They just look at raw numbers. And their track record of missing the point is just huge. As we all know, statistical correlations can make one blind to actual causes.
I think this is a result of two factors: (1) the number of bicycle crashes is small enough that statistically nonsensical stuff is more likely to happen, and (2) they are going off of the drug testing model.
The drug testing model goes like this: body chemistry and drug interactions are infinitely complex. So you design the drug based on very tiny understanding of whether the causal effect you posit is actually going to happen. You do clinical trials and — surprise! People are harmed or killed. And the drug may or may not do squat. And so on. After a drug is released, it is often found to have serious and fatal consequences, in statistically significant numbers, that were not found during clinical trials. (I used to take Seldane, so I am familiar with this concept.)
Bicycle facilities are not like drugs and diseases.
You take a drug because you have a disease of such severity that the ill effects of the drug are a lesser evil than not curing your disease.
But a bicycle facility begins with an empty street, a traffic engineer who should be saying, “First of all, do no harm,”and a clear imderstanding that
So when a facility directs cyclists to endanger themselves, I say ‘no.’ I don’t care about enticing new cyclists or other claimed goals when the facility endangers those who use it. The facility’s defenders can find ways to claim the facility is safe, but we can all list the names of people who died using the facility as directed, colliding with someone else who was using the roadway as directed.
The Snead effect, identified in the 1940s, shows that increased participation is correlated with lower crash rates. But it says nothing about individual behaviors.
I am keenly interested in improving individual behaviors, not in using statistics that mask the effects of individual behaviors.
John,
Thank you for your response, of which I find much to agree with. Crash resports & data gathering are indeed nortoriously poor, especially when it comes to road incidents involving VRUs. And indeed, public health research is about outcomes for populations not individuals per se. As for drug trials research that is indeed a complex model – though I find your brief critique questionable on several points – and I do not believe lessons of drug trial limitations easily translate to road safety research re: VRUs.
Focussing on the forensics of VRU incidents is, I agree, a very worthwhile and the field needs much greater research & attention. Bike lawyers and expert witnesses such as JSA of course do know alot though must it seems rely on scant academically vetted research. Here pressure on NHTSA to fund more such research actual crash causation & dynamics would seem to be a very worthwhile initiative.
On your in-process Snead related essay, one point perhaps you’ve already considered and bears on the individual vs population risks.
It seems to me a reasonable inference that as more VRU types share the road with motorists that motorists do learn to adjust their conduct. With the rapid introduction of slow moving novice to middling skilled bike share users two effects may be at play re: research. Bike share bikes’ “granny bike” slowness, (woman) user friendly dipped horizontal tube, standard lights front & rear, and upright bicyclist position, are themselves safety factors independent of infrastructure changes which likely accompany or follow their introduction. That bike share users are likely more risk averse but also less experienced at least at the outset of their introduction, is also a factor to be considered.
So the addition of this new ‘safer’ population of VRUs would dilute actual numbers of crash incidents (as well as alter estimates on helmeted vs non-helmeted risk estimates as at least at present bike share users are – I would guess- relatively more helmet-less than bike-owner users).
The above bears on your statement:
“My major gripe with most bicycle-oriented safety studies is that they don’t look at the mechanics of individual crash causes. Rather, they count what they choose to count.” For indeed city planners, policy makers, economists etc. look at the aggregate. We as individuals are then required to adapt respectively, realizing that solutions for the society do not benefit all or all in the same way. A Snead calculation will hopefully improve aggregate outcomes, but sub-sets of the population may find their welfare (as variously defined) negatively impacted or neglected.
Best,
Michael C