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Old February 7th 18, 07:42 PM posted to rec.bicycles.misc
Ivan Shmakov
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Posts: 6
Default AG: Dead Right

Frank Krygowski writes:

[...]

But there are complications. Rather frequently, I encounter people
who have deluded ideas about dangers. On one hand, the people Joy is
addressing have no idea that they are putting themselves at risk.


On the other hand, and ever more common, there are people who imagine
that certain safe or even beneficial activities are dangerous. Those
people will (for example) never ride a bicycle at all, because they
think bicycling is very, very dangerous. As a consequence, they are
much more likely to die of a variety of ailments triggered by being
sedentary.


Now that the routes I usually follow are either covered with ice
or buried under snow, I'm not going to consider bicycling "safe,"
either.

I don't think I'm going to get anything due to "being sedentary,"
though: I walk 15 minutes every workday to get to job and the
same amount of time to get back, and I walk a few floors up and
down regularly while there. (Both for necessity and health.)

(Refusing to ride without a magic plastic hat is a variation on this
theme.)


Why, that hat saved my head from a lot of bruises I'd otherwise
have got from all the low-hanging branches I've encountered
while riding through local forests.

I've come across a man - educated, recently elected judge - who said
he would never walk in a forest while wearing earplugs, because there
is such a high risk of a tree falling on a person. (Seriously!)


Yep; it was the last summer (or the summer before that) when a
Scots pine broke due to strong wind a few meters from me.
Thankfully, it fell pretty much the opposite direction to what
I've been standing at.

But what I'm really not going to do while wearing earplugs is
crossing a road.

[...]

There are countless people who will never fly in a commercial
airline.


As someone who took a commercial flight recently (the previous
one I had was one to Moscow, from where I got to Leningrad
by train), I can attest that knowing that you're safe /and/
convincing your own subconscious of the same are in fact two
vastly different things.

Thinking rationally helps, but only that much. And, of course,
knowing your weaknesses is a prerequisite for mitigating, if not
overcoming, them.

(Thankfully, I had mind to order train tickets for my trip back
home. I had no such option for getting to the site due to time
constraints.)

And on the third hand, there are the clueless who's deluded
self-preservation leads them to do things that put them at much, much
greater risk. Every wrong-way bicyclist is convinced that he's far
safer than those riding properly. The same is true for sidewalk
riders, despite copious research proving them wrong.


Care to suggest any? As a long-time sidewalk rider (which is,
to the best of my knowledge, entirely legal in my jurisdiction)
I'm rather curious about that.

[...]

--
FSF associate member #7257 np. Absolution; Winterglade -- Makkon
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