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The Best Traffic Safety Policy Is Simply Fewer Bicycles

original Society & Ideas

Everyone was making such a fuss in April.

The blue ticket system for bicycles was introduced on April 1st. Every day, TV showed footage of the crackdowns. Everyone was talking about the 113 categories of violations, the fines going up to ¥12,000, what would happen if you rode on the sidewalk.

Now, nobody is talking about it.

There must be a reason it’s been forgotten, so I went to look at the numbers.

The National Police Agency published the operational status for the first month. Nationwide, police issued 2,147 blue tickets. The average monthly arrest count for the previous year, limited to the violation categories now newly subject to blue tickets, was 4,268, so this works out to roughly half. The total arrest count including red tickets comes to 2,980, about 60% of the same month the year before.

Meanwhile, police issued 135,855 guidance warning slips. That’s 1.5 times the previous year’s monthly average.

In other words, in the very month the police gained this new authority, tickets were cut in half.

Warnings rose by 1.5 times in exchange.

The National Police Agency’s representative explained it this way: this is probably the result of placing weight on on-the-spot guidance and warnings, in order to spread awareness of the system and traffic rules. The cases where police actually issued blue tickets were mainly cases where people ignored an officer’s warning, or cases where pedestrians were endangered.

The blue ticket is being used not as punishment for the violation itself, but as punishment for ignoring a warning.

I don’t think this is a failure. If anything, isn’t this exactly as designed?

A person holding a sword doesn’t need to draw it. If the other party knows you’re holding it, that’s enough to make them comply. The number of times you draw it actually goes down. Since the warning now has backing behind it, of course that’s what happens.

The goal was never to get everyone to comply. It was to create a state in which people could be made to comply. That’s how the numbers read.

Here’s the breakdown of blue tickets: failure to stop momentarily, 846 cases, 40%; using a smartphone while riding, 713 cases, 33%; running a red light, 298 cases, 14%; entering a crossing with the barrier down, 156 cases; going the wrong way on the right side, 63 cases, and so on.

Surprisingly, “riding on the sidewalk” isn’t on the list.

The very “riding on the sidewalk” that became such a huge topic, that sparked such heated debate.

What is this, you have to wonder.

But here’s where the real subject starts.

Behavior changed.

The JAF Mate editorial department ran an observational survey on roads in Tokyo with bicycle lanes. Between 7 and 8 a.m. on weekdays, 384 out of 465 bicycles rode in the lane, 83%. 81 bicycles, 17%, rode on the sidewalk.

The same survey in June 2024 found 155 out of 262, 59%, in the lane, and 107, 41%, on the sidewalk. In two years, sidewalk riding dropped from 40% to under 20%.

So it’s fair to say the rule worked.

But only where lanes exist.

A survey conducted by Nomura Research Institute across Tokyo and the six surrounding prefectures shows a different face. About 40% of bicycle users have made some kind of behavioral change. Here’s what that consists of.

Reduced the number of times they ride a bicycle at all: 21.9%. Stopped riding on rainy days: 14.1%.

As for what people who stopped riding switched to: walking, 77.1%; public transit, 36.7%; private car, 22.6%. And 5.8% are holding back on going out or shopping.

In another survey, the top scenario where people said they’ve come to feel anxious since the blue ticket system was introduced was “when riding on roads with heavy traffic,” at 45.7%.

Put it all together, and this is what you get.

Where lanes exist, everyone started riding in the lane. Where lanes don’t exist, people gave up cycling.

Rules can raise the utilization rate of infrastructure that already exists. They cannot create infrastructure that doesn’t exist. So in places without that foundation, rules don’t correct behavior — they erase the behavior itself.

Crack down on bicycles, and bicycles decrease.

This doesn’t show up as a failure in the statistics. Violations go down. Accidents might go down too. The people who stopped riding don’t appear on any table.

I want to talk about the Netherlands here.

I’ve been there several times, and that country has well-maintained bicycle paths everywhere you go. It’s the kind of thing you notice within minutes of arriving. Germany and the UK are both far better than Japan, but the Netherlands is a cut above even them — several cuts above, really.

I once asked a Dutch friend why they go that far.

The answer came instantly.

“To cut medical costs.”

It wasn’t an answer that came after thinking it over. It had the speed of someone being asked something obvious.

At the time, I just took it at face value and let it go. Later, I looked into it, and found real numbers behind it.

There’s a study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2015. Written by three authors, Fishman, Schepers, and Kamphuis, it uses the WHO’s HEAT (Health Economic Assessment Tool) and life table calculations to estimate, at the population level, the health benefits produced by cycling among the Dutch.

Here’s the result. Cycling avoids roughly 6,500 deaths per year. Life expectancy for the Dutch is six months longer thanks to cycling. And this health benefit exceeds 3% of GDP.

The paper’s conclusion is even more direct. Policies that promote cycling — for example, investment in improving cycling infrastructure and facilities — are likely to produce a high cost-benefit ratio over the long term.

In other words, the Netherlands justified building bicycle infrastructure using health economics.

They ran the numbers, and chose the more expensive option.

The result of that calculation has permeated society to the point that an ordinary person can produce it instantly.

So what about Japan?

Honestly, I don’t know whether medical costs will rise in Japan. The top alternative is walking, at 77%, and walking isn’t bad for your health. Looked at that way alone, you could say it’s not a big deal.

But walking can only substitute for short distances. 22.6% have shifted to private cars. Exercise drops to zero, emissions increase, and the severity of accidents is nowhere near comparable to bicycles. 5.8% are holding back from going out at all. And the most common purpose for cycling is shopping, at 44.5%. What’s being cut is movement within people’s daily living areas.

Whether the net balance is positive or negative, I don’t know.

The problem is that nobody knows.

Because nobody has calculated it. The Netherlands plugged numbers into HEAT, produced an answer of 3% of GDP, and used that as the basis for spending money. In the legislative process behind Japan’s blue ticket system, no evaluation of this kind exists.

I doubt that asking a Japanese person why the blue ticket exists would produce an answer at that speed. I can’t answer it either.

And yet the public already knows the answer.

In one opinion poll, when asked what they thought would be effective in promoting safe bicycle use, the top answer was “road improvements such as dedicated bicycle lanes,” at 65.1%. Crackdowns came in at 53.4%, in third place.

Making rules is cheap. Building infrastructure is expensive. So the cheap option got implemented.

Up to this point, well, it’s a regrettable but familiar story.

But I think there’s one more twist worth pointing out.

Not calculating is the very condition that allows things to be done cheaply.

The Netherlands ran a detailed cost-benefit estimate. That’s the obvious thing to do when deciding policy. But once you’ve calculated it, you’re forced to choose the more expensive option. That’s exactly what happened there. A country that produced the figure “3% of GDP” could never choose not to build cycling infrastructure.

So as long as Japan keeps deciding not to calculate, this system can never fail.

People who don’t ride bicycles never get into bicycle accidents. They never commit violations either. So the 21.9% who gave up cycling counts, statistically, as an achievement. If accidents decrease, officials announce it as the effect of safety measures; if violations decrease, they explain it as the result of successful awareness campaigns. The 5.8% holding back on shopping trips doesn’t appear on any table. There’s no column for it.

The numbers are guaranteed to improve.

The safest bicycle user is the person who doesn’t ride a bicycle.

Thinking about it this way, it starts to make sense why no follow-up report has come out since the first month’s tally. Neither a three-month nor a six-month figure has appeared yet. They probably never will. If you don’t measure, nothing comes out. And if nothing comes out, nothing is wrong.

The system continues. Police are issuing guidance warnings today too. Nobody is talking about it.

A few years from now, there will probably be an announcement that bicycle accidents have decreased.

That won’t be a lie. And it’s precisely because it won’t be a lie that it’s so vicious.

References

This piece was drafted and directed by Kuzuryu, with the writing done by AI.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2026/07/1711/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.