What we can learn from a bicycle courier company that banned helmets

A bicycle courier company that has banned its employees from wearing helmets sounds highly irresponsible.?But — as is often the case when managing human risk — sometimes an illogical approach, can be more effective than a logical one.

Pedal Me , a London-based e-bike cargo & taxi service explained their policy as follows:

people that are taking risks that are sufficient that they feel they need to wear helmets are not welcome to work for us - because our vehicles are heavy and could cause harm, and because we carry small children on our bikes?

In the clip below, you’ll see their CEO, Ben Knowles , participate in a discussion on making cycle helmets mandatory, explaining the logic behind this.?

In a social media post this week, Pedal Me said that the vast majority of injuries to their drivers occur off the bike, rather than on it. So their focus is on eliminating those risks instead.?They know this because they’ve developed a ‘near miss’ & incident reporting program that informs how they manage risk. From that, they learned that their biggest single source of injuries was bungee ‘pings’. So they eliminated bungees and use dead inner tubes instead, which don’t have hooks that can cause damage.

They also look at actual, rather than theoretical risk.?A major cause of cycling head injuries comes from people going over the handlebars —?for which a helmet provides valuable protection.?But on Pedal Me’s three-metre long cargo bikes, that can’t happen.?

Equally, by tracking rider behaviour and providing training on bike maintenance, they’re deterring human risk and allowing riders to help make their environments safer.

And that policy on helmets? It’s driven by hard research findings which, as you can see in the video clip below, reveal that making helmets compulsory actually increases accidents and reduces people’s propensity to cycle.?

We know that increasing helmet wearing rates make cycling more dangerous per mile - although there are confounding factors here, this indicates that overall they do not provide a strong protective effect in the round - otherwise the opposite effect.

Finally, PedalMe don't?just used data, they also rely on anecdotes —?or, as I prefer to refer to it anecdota:

We observe that companies that use helmets while wearing cargo bikes seem to be much more likely to jump red lights and take greater risks in general, as we might expect from risk compensation

Lessons for Ethics, Compliance & Risk

So, what are the lessons here for Ethics, Compliance & Risk managers?

1. Obvious risks might not be the biggest risks, but they can consume our thinking and resources.?If you want to genuinely minimise risk, don’t rely solely on gut instinct.?When we hear about homicides on the news, we’re naturally scared.?But, heart disease poses a far greater risk to most people.?Yet we tend not to think about that.?To properly mitigate risk we need anecdota — an understanding of what is happening and why.?
2. If something has happened once, it can happen again.?Equally, if something almost happened, it could easily actually happen.?Unlike machines, humans will make mistakes, even when they’ve been trained not to.?If we want to mitigate human risk, we need to think beyond just mitigating risks that crystallised.?That means identifying patterns from incidents and recognising where the underlying dynamics might easily replicate. If PedalMe weren’t recording incidents, they might not have identified the risks posed by bungees.
3. If you’re trying to influence human behaviour, it’s worth thinking about counter-intuitive solutions.?Banning helmets seems illogical, yet could be more effective than having them. But we might not naturally think that way.
4. The more we make the world feel safer, the more we increase the likelihood of people engaging in ‘risk compensation’ — in other words, taking more risk.?If, for example, you add safety features to a car, there’s evidence that people will drive faster as a result.?Equally, if you highlight how sophisticated your compliance or ethics program is, then you could find people assuming that anything which isn’t categorically banned by your rules or blocked by your system is fair game.?After all, if you’re program is that sophisticated, you’ll have covered everything.
5. Having ‘skin in the game’ is a great way to make a risk more salient.?Someone who rents a car with no excess on the insurance is less likely to drive carefully than someone who is responsible for the first [insert your preferred currency here] 1000 of cost. Partners whose house is on the line if their partnership goes under, are more likely to think carefully than employees whose worst-case risk exposure is they lose future earnings by getting fired.?Not wearing helmets could help actually make people ride more safely.

I think what Pedal Me are doing is really interesting. I'm still going to wear a helmet when I cycle, but I think they logic they've deployed in managing risk makes perfect sense. What do you think?