On Tuesday, December 18, 2012 10:44:41 PM UTC-5, John B. wrote:
On Tue, 18 Dec 2012 13:59:37 -0800 (PST), Frank Krygowski wrote:
On Dec 18, 3:39*pm, wrote:
On Thursday, December 6, 2012 6:02:56 PM UTC-8, Frank Krygowski wrote:
New paper out of Britain:
http://road.cc/content/news/71717-go...-risks-cycling....
The researchers claim the dangers of bicycling have been overstated.
How about that?
- Frank Krygowski
Frank, in the SF Bay Area here those who seem most likely to be killed or injured are not traffic cyclists but semi-racers on week-end type rides or "training" rides since they're so concentrated on beating some other weekend warrior that they make HUGE mistakes such as riding in the opposing lanes around blind turns and other absolute stupidities like that. Another form of cycling deaths I've been finding is that modern bikes and wheels are built so lightly that they are failing and dumping riders on their heads at high rates of speed. When my state-of-the-art carbon fiber fork broke and dumped me on my head I was luckily only doing 5 mph or so and yet it took two years to find the proper medication and another year for me to return mostly to normal.
In the last year as I've been returning to cycling several people in the area have been killed in just such manners. Apparently most have failures of things like these crazy 12 spoke wheels and the like. Going down a hill at 45 mph and having a wheel folding up would not be my idea of fun and so I use steel frames and forks and standard 32 spoke wheels.
Another thing is that we cannot get any good information on the cause and effect of these increasing numbers of bicycle accidents. Here in the bay area and especially on the San Francisco peninsula the increasing numbers of riders since I was injured is staggering. I rode an organized Century and there were many times that number in "training groups" on the same roads.. We certainly need better information to reduce injuries but can't get it.
Certainly, some types of riding are more risky than other types of
riding. The same is probably true of some types of equipment.
Speaking of information: Here in Ohio, we have a rather prominent
cycling lawyer who is attempting to get accurate details on each and
every bike fatality in the state. There are only about 15 of them per
year, but it's still a pretty big project, involving paying for and
poring over police reports, which aren't necessarily completely
accurate.
But again, there are only about 15 cyclist deaths per year in Ohio.
There are nearly 100 pedestrian deaths. Nationally, there are about
700 cyclist deaths, vs. over 4000 pedestrian deaths, and tens of
thousands of motorist deaths.
- Frank Krygowski
One of the problems is the way the data is presented. 100 pedestrian
deaths out of what? a population of 11,544,951 (as of Jul 2011) versus
15 out of what.
100 deaths in a population of 11,544,951 is a very small number while
15 of (how many) may be larger.
By the way I had a look at Steve Magas' site in hunting for total Ohio
cyclists and couldn't find the number there either :-)
Yep. You've touched on two common problems with cycling data: First, it's sparse and a bit unreliable, at least in the U.S. Second, as a result, that makes denominators shaky (as in "deaths per mile traveled").
However, I take some hope from that situation. Why is the data sparse? Partly because there's no horrible problem of bicycle safety. American society sends research money to solve problems. If there's no problem (e.g. very few bad outcomes from cycling) there's no flood of research money.
Still, there are researchers who choose to dig for and evaluate data as well as they can. And even if their papers' abstracts claim "Omigosh, we've got to do something!!" (i.e. "someone's got to send more money so I can publish another paper"), the numbers routinely prove that cycling is quite safe and beneficial.
Here's some data:
http://ohiobike.org/misc/CyclingIsSafeTLK.pdf
- Frank Krygowski