Slashdot Mirror

I commented elsewhere that this is heavy, complicated and no better than a tiny rear flasher. Plus, while getting rear-ended by a car sounds scary, it's one of the least common bike accidents. According to these stats (based on bike collisions in 3 cities in 1995), only 3.8% of crashes were car rear-ends bike:

http://www.bicyclinglife.com/L...

There's some cool tech in this product, but it won't help with the most common bike collisions (#1 car pulls out in front of bike, #2 parked car door opens into bike).

Grandparent was claiming that riding a bike in traffic was unsafe (as an absolute). It was this claim, not that it was more unsafe than riding on the sidewalk, that the parent was intended to address. If you'd care for a study addressing the other claim, they're available.

Getting back to the appropriateness of the parent's argument -- claiming that an action is unsafe where that action increases rather than decreases one's life expectancy is... more than a little disingenuous.

Grandparent was claiming that riding a bike in traffic was unsafe (as an absolute). It was this claim, not that it was more unsafe than riding on the sidewalk, that the parent was intended to address. If you'd care for a study addressing the other claim, they're available.

Getting back to the appropriateness of the parent's argument -- claiming that an action is unsafe where that action increases rather than decreases one's life expectancy is... more than a little disingenuous.

Here's a spoon for you:
http://www.bicyclinglife.com/Library/Moritz2.htm

as long as people are willing to accept the risks themselves and sign something stating they will never impose upon the state for medical care if they are injured doing something foolish.

Riding a bicycle isn't foolish. Riding a bike in traffic is statistically safer than walking down the sidewalk. Basketball puts more people in the ER every year than cycling:
http://bicyclinglife.com/SafetySkills/SafetyQuiz.h tm

The dangers of cycling have been hyped by the auto insurance lobby to decrease payouts (scare people away from cycling, problem solved!) and taint juries (He was riding a *bicycle*, what did he *expect*?). They work largely through "bike advocate" professional 501c3 NGO-jockeys with no real interest or commitment to cycling. Look behind groups like Bikes Belong or the League of American Bicyclists and you will see the AAA. No joke.

Many helmets do not meet the high-impact safety standards, but the fact is there are helmets out there that do. Helmets today are lightweight, well ventilated and comfortable. Even if they can protect in only a small fraction of cases, isn't it worth it to wear one?

What standard are you talking about? SNELL? CPSC? Bike helmet standards in the US have been twice-downgraded since the early 1970s.

Handwringers obsess over legions of tube-fed cycletards draining the common treasury, but economic analysis of cycling from the Wharton School shows the contrary: Cycling (with risk of accident factored in) increases longevity to such an extant that there is a real concern that longer-lived people will consume more energy by being around for extra decades to keep a fridge going and to forget to turn off the light in the garage. See:
http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~ulrich/publications .html

It's that I'd have to ride on busy streets to get there, and I'm too young to die (or worse).

You might be surprised to find that cycling is no more dangerous than driving.

Follow that link. It leads to a "cycling safety perception" quiz, with some pretty surprising answers.

I really do not need statistics to tell me that if I stay off the road, I will likely NOT be hit by a road travelling vehicle.

In your case, where you take "off the road" to actually mean in the wilderness, yes, of course.

But many people use the identical argument to persuade themselves that they would be better off on, say, a sidewalk next to a busy road than actually in the road, and then they get in a nasty accident in the next crosswalk. (This Palo Alto study and this survey of LAB members are two examples of evidence for higher accident risk for sidepaths than for roads.)

This is why I am a cross-country mountain biker.

OK. Though in the case of someone cycling for transportation, this isn't really an option....

Also, though this is something I don't have real evidence for, I think there are likely to be differences between the risks encountered on typical recreational road cyclists' routes (rural highways, traffic rare but fast) and typical commuters' routes (more complex traffic patterns but somewhat slower, possibly more awake drivers). For what it's worth, I'm personally much more comfortable with the latter....

--Bruce Fields

I really do not need statistics to tell me that if I stay off the road, I will likely NOT be hit by a road travelling vehicle.

In your case, where you take "off the road" to actually mean in the wilderness, yes, of course.

But many people use the identical argument to persuade themselves that they would be better off on, say, a sidewalk next to a busy road than actually in the road, and then they get in a nasty accident in the next crosswalk. (This Palo Alto study and this survey of LAB members are two examples of evidence for higher accident risk for sidepaths than for roads.)

This is why I am a cross-country mountain biker.

OK. Though in the case of someone cycling for transportation, this isn't really an option....

Also, though this is something I don't have real evidence for, I think there are likely to be differences between the risks encountered on typical recreational road cyclists' routes (rural highways, traffic rare but fast) and typical commuters' routes (more complex traffic patterns but somewhat slower, possibly more awake drivers). For what it's worth, I'm personally much more comfortable with the latter....

--Bruce Fields

I'd seriously consider riding a bike on an everyday basis if I didn't have to worry about being run over by a car. AND, for most trips, riding a bike would actually be faster!

Yup. And the risk of getting run over by a car, while not zero (everything has *some* risk), is greatly exaggerated. A couple good sites for tips on riding in traffic:

• Bicycling Street Smarts
• Bicycling Life

It's scary the first few times you do it (so was learning to, say, merge onto a freeway in a car, if you remember learning that), but once you learn to do it it really works very well.

--Bruce Fields