On Friday, August 30, 2019 at 3:09:00 PM UTC-5, pH wrote:

There was an article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel back in May about a cyclist killed around the Davenport area. There was *never* a follow up about who it was or the circumstances around the death--I even called the local radio station to ask that their news department please follow up on it and give us further information as it became available. Nada thus far.

That second fatality involved the cyclist being struck by a car going in the same direction, ie: "struck from behind".

The League of American Bicyclists had a project going on a few years ago called "Every Bicyclist Counts" (https://bikeleague.org/content/why-e...fatal-crashes). It was an imperfect study, for reasons enumerated in the report, but it had some interesting findings. The most important (to me) was that a third of the bicycle fatalities were the result of the cyclist being "struck from behind".

Now, since this is such a common mode of death for cyclists, it would seem reasonable to try to provide the cyclist with some form of defense. To my way of thinking, this is a rear-view mirror. Of course, the presence or absence of a rear-view mirror wasn't even mentioned in the League's study, and this information is apparently not one of the data collected when a cycling death is investigated.

I just got back from an organized ride (the 50th annual Harmon Hundred) and I noticed that fewer than 10% of the riders had mirrors. It would be interesting to study the correlation (if any) between mirror use and "rear-impact" fatalities. I hypothesize that one exists and it is negative. But without data...
I always ride with a mirror on the street; it can't hurt.