Cyclists in Australia are not human

Some time ago I wrote something about cycling in Australia. I noticed that quite a few motorists regard cyclists as an obstacle to traffic and having fun expressing this with their driving style.

Now a new Australian study by researchers at Monash University, QUT’s Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety – Queensland (CARRS-Q) and the University of Melbourne’s School of Psychological Sciences, has found that cyclists are not human — or rather,  55% of their study group doesn’t see them that way. Bicycle riders in Australia are as unpopular as cockroaches.

This starts in the language and ends in dangerous actions, such as taking the right of way or throwing objects at cyclists. Common insults for bicycle riders Down Under are ‘cockroach’ or ‘mosquito’.

‘Cockroaches on wheels’ have no right to use the road

With this type of insult, a police officer in Queensland hit the headlines in 2014, denouncing bicycle riders on a social network as ‘cockroaches on wheels’ and declaring that ‘cyclists have no right to use the road’.

‘Cockroach on wheels’ – a strong image: After all, most want cockroaches crushed under their shoe soles or killed in another way. The case of the accused police officer illustrates exactly this ‘dehumanization’, from cyclist to cockroach: The linguistic comparison makes the people on wheels ideal targets for aggression and harassment, say the researchers.

In the study, cyclists and non-cyclists from different regions provided information on how they think about cyclists. On the basis of two development scales – from the monkey to humans and from the cockroach to humans – they should indicate at which point of the evolutionary stage cyclists are:

Abuse, cut, block

55 percent of non-cyclists surveyed did not assign cyclists completely to the human species. For the researchers, this also explains the following behaviours: 17 percent of respondents said they had once deliberately blocked cyclists, 11 percent had passed extremely close to bicycle riders, and 9 percent had already deliberately cut them off.

Once someone classifies someone other than ‘not totally human,’ he can more easily justify hate or aggression.

Mechanism: devaluation justifies discrimination

The results of the study were so striking that researchers recommend we abandon the word “cyclist” altogether, replacing it with the term “people on bikes.” Because as humans, we all share the streets with each other.

‘Once someone classifies someone other than ‘not totally human,’ he can more easily justify hatred or aggression,’

However, there is no need for a study confirming that bicycle riders in Australia are being harassed and cursed by many motorists on a daily basis. You just have to cycle a longer distance to experience this aggression yourself.