A Scottish TV road safety advert - above - that encourages motorists to “treat cyclists like horses” has been banned, but not on the grounds you might think.
Instead, the short clip that depicts cyclists as horses has been taken off the air because some of the horse-cyclists were not wearing helmets.
The advert was part of a campaign by Cycling Scotland that tried to encourage motorists to slow down and give a cyclist space; the same instinctive precaution most people behind the wheel would take if they happened across a horse on a road.
While the depiction of cyclists as horses – being groomed, led on reins and jumping over fences – may have been expected to generate complaints, it was the helmet row that saw the advert pulled.
Cycling Scotland told the advertising watchdog that wearing helmets was not compulsory in Scotland and that images of cyclists both wearing and not wearing them ran through the clip.
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The Advertising Standards Authority ruled the ad must be pulled off the air and not shown again because it was “socially irresponsible” not to wear a helmet and to feature helmetless riders in a cycling safety campaign.
Cycling Scotland told the authority that because there was no legal requirement to wear helmets while on a bike, taking that precaution was a matter of personal choice. That view had informed the decision to depict riders with helmets and also those without.
It cited its own position on any effort to make helmets compulsory, saying such a move might restrict the uptake of cycling and would also encourage some motorists to be less careful when interacting on the roads with cyclists.
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Complaints that the cyclists in the ad were riding too far from the kerb were rejected by Cycling Scotland.
It said that given the width of the road featured in the advert, the cyclist was safer riding out past the area where cars would be parked so they could be clearly visible to other road users.
However, the ASA noted that the cyclist in the final scene was not wearing a helmet or any other safety attire and appeared to be more than half a metre from the parking lane.
"We understood that UK law did not require cyclists to wear helmets or cycle at least 0.5 metres from the kerb," the ASA said in a ruling yesterday.
"However, under the highway code it was recommended as good practice for cyclists to wear helmets. Therefore, we considered that the scene featuring the cyclist on a road without wearing a helmet undermined the recommendations set out in the highway code.
"Furthermore, we were concerned that whilst the cyclist was more than 0.5 metres from the kerb, they appeared to be located more in the centre of the lane when the car behind overtook them and the car almost had to enter the right lane of traffic.
"Therefore, for those reasons we concluded the ad was socially irresponsible and likely to condone or encourage behaviour prejudicial to health and safety."
A promotional image to accompany the Scottish video road safety campaign aimed at helping cyclists.
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