"Tony Raven" wrote in message
...
I am in a discussion on a Cycling Campaign list at the moment and
when I said that cycling was not dangerous one of the members
responded:

[snip]

It's fairly safe for most of the people who do it, because people
can judge their own capabilities. But this situation limits
cycling, like skydiving or mountaineering, to a small subset of the
population. This is serious because cycling is so socially and
economically useful, unlike those other activities."

What do you do when shroud wavers like this are campaigning for
cycling?

Well Yiddish has a word for someone who is generically accident
prone - a klutz. Klutzes are probably at risk riding a bike, but
then, they leave a trail of accidents whatever they are doing

I don't think your dangerizers are thinking about the generic
klutzes, though. Let's invent a new acronym, SAK -specific activity
klutzes - which in this case means people who only become klutzes
when they get on a bike. It's the hypothesis of the dangerizers that
eh SAKs can recognize their SAKhood before they ever got on a bike.

I think the SAK hypothesis goes with believing that there is nothing
that can, or perhaps even should, be taught or learned about riding a
bike. If you don't actually fall off your bike too often, you "know
how to ride a bike". Demanding more knowledge, or more skill, is
"elitist" and therefore evil. We obviously need a word that's the
opposite of elitist here. I will use "stupidist", until somebody
coins a better word (There surely must be a better word)

People who teach bike courses think that makes their graduates safer.
I think that almost every eight year old should and could learn up to
level 2 of the new British standards, and every eleven year old could
and should learn up to level three. I think that would increase the
amount of cycling course graduates do, would greatly reduce the
likelihood of course graduates having accidents, and that this would
show up in accident rate statistics.

I think that those who disagree with me should be prepared to say
what proportion of the population can or can't learn the skills on
the list for each cycling standard, what effect on safety the
knowledge of each of the skills has, and whether other skills should
also be on the least, teachable or unreachable

John Forester thinks experience and training teach cyclists to avoid
accidents - at least four out of five accidents are avoidable, he
thinks. He discusses this in Effective Cycling (6th ed, p 271) and
Bicycle Transportation (1977 ed, p60)

Somewhere I've seen the statistic that for cyclists who ride over
1000 miles per year the annual risk of accidents is a bout the same,
no matter what their mileage. In other words, after the thousandth
mile, each extra mile carries no extra risk whatsoever. If anyone
can give me a reference for this I would appreciate it.

Jeremy parker