On Sun, 13 Aug 2017 12:15:13 -0400, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 8/13/2017 3:19 AM, John B. wrote:
On Sat, 12 Aug 2017 07:13:51 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

On Friday, August 11, 2017 at 4:45:32 PM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 8/11/2017 12:58 PM, Joerg wrote:
On 2017-08-11 09:06, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, August 11, 2017 at 8:56:59 AM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski
wrote:
On 8/11/2017 10:54 AM, Joerg wrote:
Just imagine if that driver up front had been a cyclist.

"Just imagine" is a Medieval way of choosing safety strategies. One
can imagine anything - "Here there be dragons" - or maybe mountain
lions.



http://bikeleague.org/sites/default/...port_final.pdf

Permission to stick your head back into the sand now.

First, Joerg, the techniques used in that "study" are laughable and have
earned much derision. As they say, "The majority of the information
captured by Every Bicyclist Counts came from newspaper reports (56% of
all reported sources), TV reports (25%) and blogs (19%)." Those are
hardly reliable sources of details necessary to determine crash
mechanisms. The very fact that their "hit from behind" category is so
much larger than any other study should raise red flags, even if the
"study" were not done by an organization that these days, devotes most
of its energy to promoting segregated facilities.

Second, there is little or no indication of whether or not most of the
cyclists were using techniques advocated by me, by _Effective Cycling_,
by _Cyclecraft_, by the League's own cycling classes, by CAN-BIKE, by
BikeAbility etc. I'd say it's very likely they were not. IOW, those
cyclists were probably riding like you do. Ponder that, please.

Third, in the sample of "such a wonderful guy/girl" personal stories,
there were at least two killed while riding in bike lanes and two while
riding shoulders. A person could use those tales to say the bike lanes
and shoulders you tout are completely useless. Also, note there are no
heartwarming stories about people riding at night without lights, or
riding drunk, despite their severe over-representation in other data on
bike fatalities.

What I do agree with is probably most often missed by readers: the need
to gather better data. Good data doesn't come from scanning blogs.

Frank - are you suggesting that the government hire bicycle
counter to stand on every corner and make a count of the bicycles? Or
perhaps require licenses?

Get a hold on yourself and no I don't mean there.

Back in 1930 Amsterdam did just that as a part of their traffic
planning. They counted every bicycle that passed an intersection for a
12 hour period.

Why not in America?

That works if you're trying to evaluate bike use. I was talking about
what the LAB effort pretended to determine, which was the cause of
crashes. For that you need good collection of info about the crash,
preferably by cops immediately after the crash happens.

As far as I can determine there is no accurate count of bicycle
accidents and or deaths. In fact I've read mention of this in a number
of studies as (the studies say) some? many? bike accidents are either
not reported or do not result in a visit to a clinic, or even if a
clinic is visited the injury may be recorded but not the fact that it
was a "bicycle accident".

Even where, it appears, that an effort was made to acquire accurate
information, such as the L.A. county study (that reported that more
then half of the bike - auto crashes were the fault of the cyclist)
only the initial cause was recorded. If a bicycle was riding the wrong
way the blame was attributed to the bicycle regardless of any other
actions that might have added to the severity of the crash.
--
Cheers,

John B.