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Honk if you've had enough

Ken Livingstone's anti-car, pro-bike adverts reveal a snobbish distaste for the masses' chosen mode of transport.

A strange thing happened during a recent visit to the flicks. As we were waiting for the film to start (Superman Returns, since you ask) we were shown four - yes, four - road safety adverts.

And I'm not talking cutesy cartoons with daddy hedgehog teaching baby hedgehog how to navigate the traffic. These were grisly depictions of death and destruction on the roads. In one, a drunk driver smashed into a pretty blonde woman, causing her neck and limbs to snap like twigs. In another, a 14-year-old boy was killed by a speeding driver.

The other two ads featured motorcyclists. In the first, a biker smashed into a lamppost near his home, losing the use of his legs forever, we were told. In the second, a biker sped through suburban streets to a soundtrack of Crash by The Primitives ("Here you go / Way to fast / Don't slow down / You're gonna crash"). And guess what? He crashed.

I couldn't help noting the irony that we had come to see a feelgood film about the man of steel only to be subjected to four mini-horror films first, depicting man as weak, fragile, easily snuffed out or broken in two by a speeding car, motorbike and other apparently evil vehicles.

What's behind these new and nasty road safety ads? They're everywhere: in poster form on the London underground and at train stations and bus stops, in ad breaks during primetime TV programmes and on a constant loop, it seems, at the cinema.

These "public information" films are no longer about imparting useful information to the public, as they might have been in the past; they contain no tips about how to stay safe on the roads, no Green Cross Codes. Instead their aim seems to be to demonise car drivers and motorcyclists, and brand them as selfish, dangerous, antisocial and uncaring. This is not public information so much as poisonous propaganda.

The bloodiest of these ads - the ones showing a woman being horribly smashed by a drunken driver or schoolboys and schoolgirls dying on the roads before fulfilling their dreams of becoming pop stars or films stars - are produced by the office of Ken Livingston, the mayor of London, and his Transport for London group. And Ken, as we know, is about as anti-car as it gets.

His increasingly grim crash movies have little to do with educating the public. British roads are far safer today - both for motorists and pedestrians - than they were in the past. Yet as our roads become safer, the authorities' road safety ads become more shocking and horrendous.

In 1981, more than 11,000 children were killed or seriously injured on Britain's roads every year. By 1991, that figure had fallen to around 8,000 a year. Today it stands at around 5,000 a year.

In London, the number of all casualties caused by road traffic accidents - including both adults and children - fell continuously through the 90s. In the years 1994 to 1998, there was an annual average of 6,684 fatalities and serious casualties caused by road accidents in London; by 2002 the annual average was 5,648 and by 2003 it was 5,164 - a 23 per cent reduction on the annual average of the mid-90s.

Yet if you took the proliferation of Ken's gory death ads as any kind of measuring stick, you would think that Britain's roads were becoming increasingly lethal, especially for kids. The opposite is the case. Every year the roads become safer.

These propaganda films are really about presenting driving as a dodgy activity, and drivers as morally suspect. That is why the ads are raw and shocking, because their impact is intended to be moralistic rather than practical or useful.

So the ad featuring The Primitives' song Crash consciously sets up a moral divide between drivers (in this instance a motorcyclist) and everyone else: mums pushing buggies, girls walking home from school, responsible citizens sitting together on a bus rather than selfishly riding a motorbike. As the biker speeds along, these various individuals mouth the words of the song in his direction: "Here you go / Way to fast...."

It creates a powerful image of the biker as intruder, stealing the streets from their rightful owners: pedestrians, schoolchildren, mums, bus-users. He gets his comeuppance in the final reel, though, when he smashes into a car and lies in the street unconscious. It looks like the contemporary equivalent of being struck down for your sins.

In the ads featuring teens being killed by speeding drivers, we are first shown the young people's future dreams - one boy imagines being a movie star; a girl fantasises about being a pop star on MTV. But along come those nasty cars to crush their dreams.

There is a subtle difference between this kind of ad and earlier ads aimed at raising awareness about child safety on the roads. In the past, public information films warned that children might be injured or perhaps even killed if they did not strictly follow the Green Cross Code. Today the focus is on the impact that speeding motorists apparently have on the dreams of a future generation, rather than on individual children. Here, drivers are depicted as a societal menace rather than just the occasional causer of accidents.

The moral message behind these films becomes clear when you see Ken's advert to encourage more people to take up cycling, of the pedal-bike variety. It is currently being shown on TV. In contrast to the grey, sinister, shocking films that show kids being killed by cars on grim suburban streets, this ad has pleasant piano music, lovely sunny shots of London landmarks, and smiling cyclists making their way around the city.

What's more, it is inferred that cyclists are better people. The cyclists interviewed claim to be healthier and better-adjusted than those who travel by motorised vehicle. As the slogan at the end of the ad says: "You're better off by bike."

Here, we can glimpse the rank snobbery driving today's anti-car propaganda. Who drives cars? The mass of the population does: busy mums doing the weekly shop at the supermarket; dads dropping their sons off at football matches; suburban boys and girls who drive to cinemas, bowling alleys, leisure centres. Who rides bicycles? Largely, the middle classes - in London it is mainly those who can afford to live fairly centrally and who thus only have to ride a couple of miles from their plush flat in Angel to their air-conditioned office in Clerkenwell.

In demonising drivers and championing cyclists, the London mayor and his bike-riding supporters are looking down their noses at millions and millions of people for whom cars are an essential part of everyday life. However much Ken and the rest try to dress up their anti-car snobbery in safety-conscious or environmentalist lingo, it is difficult to disguise the fact that, in reality, they are a tiny minority attempting to impose their moral values on the majority.

Honk if you've had enough of it.


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