On 9/9/19 8:24 am, Steve Weeks wrote:
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.


The idea of mandated mirrors is like mandatory helmets, hi vis and DRLs.

The effective solution is to eliminate the danger.

The rear ended fatalities usually occur on high speed rural roads.

Get your DoT to build separated cycling "roads" parallel to high speed
busy roads.

On quiet rural roads, make car drivers the guests and reduce the speed
limit.

--
JS