More people riding bikes makes cycling safer for everyone, major new study finds
cyclingweekly.com
cyclingweekly.com
Cycling can reduce risk of death by 41%, death by cancer 45% and death from heart disease by 46% http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39641122
A single 10ft cycle track can carry the same number of people as 7 lanes of car traffic.
Netherlands is currently at 10% obesity and going down to 8.5% by 2030. The UK is at 27% and predicted to go up to 35%.
So cycling really does appear be to that miracle solution for urban transport but you absolutely cannot 'share space'. Absolutely key to segregate. A good end to end network is only as good as its weakest link and too many times, town planners give in to politicians and local residents and deliver stuff that really is does not provide inclusive ages 8-80 cycle routes.
Bike lanes may be a hard requirement for you, but the quintessential American childhood experience says that's not exactly widespread.
We go through the rite of passage of transitioning from bikes to cars at age 16 because they increase our time-efficiency and decrease physical exertion.
EDIT: A cursory Google puts the rate of cycling among children at 70%. Would you care to explain your disagreement?
I avoid those streets if possible. I also don't like fast traffic and parked cars on the side. That's just me. Safety aside, calm streets are more pleasant.
In my locale, there are enough slow side streets interspersed with the higher density neighborhoods, that I can generally avoid fast streets. In some places, a bike path along an old rail line solves the problem. There's a sort of "Jane Jacobs utopia" neighborhood on the other side of town, where cars drive on one street and bikes / buses on the next street over.
If it's dense enough, then people can walk.
The odd thing is that the suburbs aren't necessarily great. They might not have sidewalks -- an issue for pedestrians and the smallest kids -- and everything is great until you have to get past a high speed road or intersection. Plus, due to lower density, distances are longer. I live in a moderately dense urban area. My friends who live in suburbs are the ones who drive everywhere.
This gives a speed profile/volume of traffic recommended infrastructure matrix from sharing (20mph < 2500 cars per day) through to hard segregation with a verge (60mph).
National standards are key. The US NACTO also released a phenomenal free design guide https://globaldesigningcities.org/publication/global-street-...
In suburbs you have to watch out for kids playing on the street anyway, most drivers live in those suburbs and they know their neighbors. In my experience, drivers in suburbs are much more attentive and friendly than drivers in big cities.
Last but not least, kids tend not to ride their big on big roads that cut through suburbs, they are on small side streets that don't see much traffic anyway.
When you ride a bike in SF from Sunset to SoMa you'll notice the difference.
It would be great to have bike lanes on those busier thoroughfares, or friendlier streets parallel to those thoroughfares. But I maintain that we shouldn't need 100% coverage of bike lanes between all points.
What this is about is giving people travel choices. You should have good options to walk/cycle/drive/use public transport to get to school/work/shops.
I note much of the rhetoric around "war on cars" is done within the context to have the freedom to choose to use your car as you wish. The problem with that argument is that it stands to reason that people should have the freedom to choose to walk and cycle safely but that really is never recognised as equally important as driving.
More interesting is the call for a paradigm shift within urban transport policies to recognise the need for healthy efficient roads and to provide good space for walking, cycling, and driving.
At the end of the day, the private vehicle is hugely inefficient use of space. That's not to say it should be banned, but people should be able to have the choice not to drive. That is what is lacking.
I think the factors holding people back from cycling are time efficiency, physical exertion, and weather exposure. The preponderance of children bicycling makes the safety argument not very credible, to me anyway.
Naturally worsening traffic is tipping the balance in favor of bicycling for time efficiency, at least during peak hours. Also the ability to use trains as "bicycle freeways." If the average speed for cars on a road is <15mph, then a rational person will bike. If it's >25mph, the road might be highly frustrating as a driver, but it's still adding value relative to biking.
Electric bikes are cutting down the physical exertion required, which is exciting. On the other hand, electric bikes are just slow motorcycles, so it's not clear why the pent-up demand for ebikes hasn't picked up Vespas.
Weather exposure is a matter of wearing the right gear. Cold cities might get more new cyclists by handing out Under Armor than by painting more bike lanes.
I don't know anything about Baath. I do know that in my childhood suburb, at least half of students would ride their bikes to school on any day with decent weather. It was a relatively compact suburb, though; bicycling was just a faster alternative to walking and distances were 2-3 miles at worst. No buses.
Getting people where they're going without wasting too much of their time or making them too uncomfortable is an entirely appropriate use of space. A great public transit system could do it with less, and I'll happily vote for one. What I won't support is lowering overall utility by i.e. torpedoing driving without building a credible alternative. I don't think dedicated lanes will make that credible alternative materialize. Ebikes might.
At least from my experience, suburban streets have much less traffic, and what traffic they do have is usually slower.
On the other hand, the types of roads adults would need to use to commute have much more traffic, and at higher speeds.
[0] - An interesting study to do would be to compare the bicycling rates of children in suburbs vs those in urban/downtown areas. I suspect that the rate in suburbs would be significantly higher.
Because our kids aren't cycling to and from our jobs 5 days a week in rush hour traffic. You might as well suggest we get rid of all the crossing guards and 15mph school zones if you're fine with your kids cycling through rush hour traffic.
The evidence is out there. London has had a 60%+ increase in the last couple of years on routes with protected cycle infrastructure.
'Normal' people need visible safety. In fact New York City has found that protected cycle lanes (tracks) also reduce pedestrian injuries. https://www.fastcompany.com/3035580/new-york-citys-protected...
Your final paragraph is also the problem. You are pretty much saying that the road system cannot be compromised to enable people to have the choice to walk and cycle if driving is in some way compromised. You want to get more people out of cars you need to provide good safe alternatives.
I really would ask you to stop thinking only in terms of yourself and what you would do on your roads. The US has cities/towns where there are high levels of cycling. They all have one thing in common. Segregation.
Remember though that cities are not investing in cycling because it is healthy. They are doing it as it solved congestion. A single 12ft lane can carry 2000 cars or 14,000 bikes or 19,000 pedestrians. Removing one lane or reducing lane width, known as a road diet, and installing cycle lanes can increase road capacity by the equivalent of adding 7 car lanes. It is logical to do this.
If you have the budget and political capital to do a massive infrastructure project like protected bike lanes on all blocks of all roads, then BRT or light rail are probably better uses of that capital.
Right now, bicycling is in this catastrophic failure mode where people believe it requires a massive infrastructure project, but accomplishing that infrastructure project is no more tenable than blanketing a city in rail.
>You want to get more people out of cars you need to provide good safe alternatives.
Yes! And if we are going to do a massive infrastructure project and shrink roadways to provide alternatives, we should get the best bang for our buck possible. I remain highly skeptical that bike lanes are it. (In temperate cities, where ebikes are allowed, maybe).
Cycling is consistently the fastest way to get from A to B in a city. Cycle infra makes other traffic faster and protects pedestrians. The economic benefits are huge as well and proven.
So I still do not understand why you think the idea that given a choice, investing in BRT is a better solution.
For an example, my morning commute in Shanghai takes about 30 minutes by bicycle, 35 by car, or 40 by subway. Traffic lanes are congested, bicycle lanes aren't.
As to riding without dedicated lanes, I can't really speak to that. We have enough bike lanes here that I usually avoid roads without them, but it seems like it would be bad for both cyclists and drivers.
Most of the EU has recognised that this is a failed approach that only results in less people cycling.
I've been doing it for over a decade. I take the lane and the vast majority of cars switch to the adjacent lane to pass me. It's not dangerous at all if you ride in a predictable manner.
This is the fundamental problem with this thinking. "I can do it, why can't you?"
The evidence is that is you want people cycling it must be visibly safe and segregated from cars no matter how easily you find it is taking the lane.
I am the parent of a 6 year old and am currently teaching her how to keep to the right on the local MUP while riding. Once she's got that down, I'll start taking her on the roads here.
I suppose it really depends on personal experience. If the parent doesn't have experience riding in traffic, then I doubt they would feel that it's appropriate that their child(ren) do so.
The only way to go to school was to take a bus (or be driven there by my parents) even though my elementary school was less than a mile away, and my high school was less than 3 miles away. With no sidewalks or bike paths, I can see why my parents wouldn't allow me to do either.
With no safe way to bike across the small town (which was only around 8 miles from end to end), a car was the only viable option.
But 15 years after leaving my bike behind in that small town, I discovered cycling as recreation and lived in a city that had enough cyclists and bike paths to make cycling safer and viable as transportation.
I haven't looked back and now ride my bike for commuting and for general transportation - it's very convenient to ride downtown and not have to worry about parking (and since I can cut through a train station and a city park on my bike, it's faster than driving would be).
When I was a teenager I thought that "reducing physical exertion" was a good thing, now that I'm almost 4 decades older, I welcome the chance to increase my physical exertion by commuting by bike.
That, I imagine, is a fairly key difference. A child cycling suburban streets isn't likely to be building up any significant speed (due to lack of training, intersections, not being in a rush, surrounding traffic being slow etc.), whereas an adult commuting likely will. Having seen the aftermath of a ~40MPH collision (car turned into the path of the bike, car was written off due to the extent of the damage), I'd be extremely reluctant to commute at speed on mixed-use roads.
Suburbs are a bit hillier, as are cities on the West Coast, but even just by selecting for the flattest/most temperate places in the US and building up solid cycling infrastructure, you're still talking about something thats affecting potentially 10's of millions of people.
Coming from car life, though, it's unbelievably good. There are two factors that I think make it work so well:
1. Hills are negated by electric assist bikes. Those are super-common here, mornings are packed with moms taking preschoolers to school on them. Mine evens out even steep hills to an exertion level similar to a regular bike on flat ground. (You of course can exert yourself when you want, and go faster.)
2. Technically, you aren't supposed to ride on sidewalks, but this is absolutely ignored by all, per common understanding. You can always ride on the sidewalk, as long as you exhibit common sense and courtesy and ride more slowly and safely. This means when a road feels too dangerous, you have a slower safer option.
My own commute is about 50-50 road vs sidewalk. I hope I never have to do any other kind of commute.
I'm originally from rural Northern California, and even though I did ride my BMX along miles of dangerous road, I wasn't allowed to, and wouldn't allow my kids to, either. Too many blind curves with very little shoulder, and pretty fast speeds.
But I think most cities could be as awesome as Tokyo is — which for me is for all practical purposes just as good as when I lived in the famously bicycle-friendly Amsterdam — if they just made judicious decisions about "share the sidewalk" in addition to "share the road".
That is indeed key, and I'd love to see more of it in the UK, where cycle lanes aren't usually segregated, and tend to disappear as soon as the road narrows. Or is interrupted by a parking space, or any other number of daft things.
If you're in London, try going to Richmond Park on any Sunday when the weather is halfway reasonable. Narrow roads, hordes of lycra-clad cyclists and a 20mph limit for cars doesn't make for a safe environment... I'm surprised more cyclists haven't been injured or killed there!
I hope someday we'll start using absolute numbers when we talk about risk increase/decrease
45% decrease of the risk of heart deseases is not so great The same results can be achieved by swimming a couple of hours a week Consider that smokers are 20 times more likely to develop lung cancer AKA 2000%
Biking is not a panacea, I dare you to come biking in Rome from June to September, with temperatures well above 40 degrees Celsius
It's so dangerous for the health that in the news they advice to not go out, not even for a walk. Imagine biking for 20 km, up and down Roman hills...
And please, death risk cannot be decreased, death is inevitable
Your argument about not cycling in high summer is the same one people use for not cycling when it has snowed 1-2m outside. It's a bit silly. Just because there are 1-2 months of the year where cycling is difficult, does not mean the other 10-11 months of the year should also not be considered.
I'm not sure the best way to go about having a car for 1-2 months of the year. Granted, I can take the bus, but for some people, that's not an option.
(The year I got my bike (2011) was the year we had 90 days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Today the high is a nice, cool 90 degrees.)
[0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/
The biggest threat to a biker in this city is another (often less experienced) biker, pedestrians not looking around or trying to cross tram tracks parallel. However, it did take almost 40 years to get here though, changes starting in the 1970s - I do hope many cities will follow a similar route.
Helmets are pretty misunderstood. They don't offer much in the way of protection in a serious accident. The real value is in preventing serious head injuries in an otherwise minor fall/accident.
People in Amsterdam may not wear helmets but it's because they choose not to, not because helmets aren't needed.
It's just absurd to say they are "needed".
Who are you to say that? Most of my cycling is to and from work, on my own bike. Wearing a helmet costs me nothing in the way of inconvenience. I simply leave the helmet on the bike when I park it at home and at work (both secure locations).
Who are you to issue some blatant proclamation that "in reality" this isn't worth the nonexistent trouble?
The most serious bicycle accident I ever saw did involve someone's head, but not a way where any helmet would have helped (his steering tube broke and sliced off half his face). I've fallen a few times, at high speeds too (rounding a corner that hasn't been de-iced ended with my hip getting closely aquatinted to the asphalt), reflexes seem to have taken care of protecting my head. I think they might offer some protecting in high speed accidents where even your body does not have time to turn your head away from the ground, but I think in those cases the chances of breaking your neck are just as high.
This is also not theoretical to me. I hit a big pothole last year at speed, wrecked, and broke my ankle. I was wearing a helmet and the helmet struck the pavement. My head was completely uninjured. It may not have been uninjured had I not been wearing the helmet.
Saying "reflexes protect you" is seriously underestimating how much ragdolling is going on in the split seconds while you're going over the handlebars before smashing into the road or some object.
But, given the fact that, like I said, virtually everybody here cycles, I'm aware of the fact that nobody in my family ever hit their head in a way that caused any permanent damage. None of my friends ever have, none of my teachers, coworkers or anybody else I know (maybe they died before they met me?). The type of cycling I'm talking about is very close to the speed that our reflexes are evolved to deal with, I know exactly how it feels to fall of a bike and I'm not underestimating anything I'm sure.
But going back to the original point:
So does a helmet help prevent injuries? Yes I'm quite sure they do. Is it worth the bother to lug your helmet with you everywhere? Nope, not for me, and not for anybody else I know, including my 90 year old grandmother.
We might as well wear full body armor on the sidewalks, I also think they'd prevent injury in certain cases, but most of the time it'd just be inconvenient and hot.
You do, of course, have professional medical assessment to back this up? Because otherwise this is simply assumption and anecdotal data presented as a fact.
Yeah, well, I go a bit faster than that, whether it's commuting or fitness cycling. You have to, because you're on the street a lot of the time with fast-moving cars. Cycling in the US is a bit different than cycling is in Europe, so the safety measures you consider appropriate over there are different over here.
> Is it worth the bother to lug your helmet with you everywhere?
Did you read the part of my comment where I said that I always keep my helmet with my bike? I'm not lugging my helmet with me anywhere ever. It's not a bother, it's just always on my handlebars.
And guess what, I also have a Citibike bikeshare membership, and sometimes I don't wear a helmet while riding that because I don't have it with me. Not having a helmet with me won't stop me from riding. By the same token, though, easily having a helmet accessible, which describes most of my riding, definitely will get me wearing it!
I should also point out that >90% of all my fellow bike commuters at work, as well as >95% of the fitness cyclists I ride with, wear helmets. Not only does it just make sense as a reasonable precaution you can take (like wearing your seatbelt in a car), but I'd very much stand out if I didn't wear one.
> We might as well wear full body armor on the sidewalks
Lacerations and broken bones heal. Broken brains are generally for life.
The problem is that full body armor is heavy, quite inconvenient, and you'll overheat really quickly. Plus, all of that extra mass on your feet will really make your cycling less efficient. Body armor simply isn't practical for cycling, so people don't do it except for certain specific high risk cycling activities, like stunt or downhill BMX.
But a helmet isn't nearly as inconvenient as full body armor, so there are many more situations in which it makes sense to wear a helmet. For me, commuting daily in NYC traffic, it's pretty much always worth it to wear a helmet.
On a group ride, the cyclist in front of me hopped over a pothole and his fork snapped on landing. In addition to getting punctured by one of the pieces, he went helmet-first into the ground. At the hospital, he couldn't remember the accident. I was glad he'd been wearing a helmet.
Side note: if you're riding an aluminum bicycle, you should change the fork if it's ever had a strong impact. Hairline fractures are serious. Or just go with a steel frame, since they won't snap.
One wonders if they'd look at a modern automobile that was mangled nearly beyond recognition in a terrible wreck, but that allowed its passengers to escape with only minor injuries, and say that it didn't do its job, and that they may as well have just been standing there and been struck by a car going highway speed and turned out just the same.
This is why, for Dutch people, wearing a helmet during normal daily biking instinctively feels like nonsense. And I don't know a single person from another country that, after having lived here for a bit longer, still wears their helmets here. I don't know of a single helmet study that takes such conditions into account. It's always "this many people died", but never do they mention if they were biking to the local supermarket or going 20 mph downhill in the forest on their mountainbikes without a helmet.
I believe if you want to get people biking, you should invest in making biking feel as safe as it feels in the Netherlands. In the meantime, wear helmets.
You have it with you, you could fall while walking, and it could protect you.
LOL well it worked. I've never driven a car and bike everywhere. Also cracked my helmet (not my skull) in a slow speed fall when I landed on my butt and fell backwards banging my helmeted head on the pavement.
Helmets are good for those willing to ride with them. For those who will only ride without a helmet, far better for them to bicycle without helmets than to not bicycle. THAT is the point.
To the extent that helmet-wearing reduces total bicycling, we are worse off if we push helmets. To the extent that you're talking about someone who would bike either way, wearing a helmet is a good extra safety measure.
But bicycling without a helmet (especially, as the article emphasizes, in a culture of widespread biking) is far safer than driving a car.
Lots of people roller-blade. When they start, they don’t usually start with all the pads and guards…but most experienced bladers have them.
Even in cycling, lots of people don’t wear cycling gloves (I can’t entirely blame them; I have a funny hand tan…), but in the event of an accident, they can save your palms from being shredded.
Where are you getting this information?
Statistics from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Fatality Facts: Bicycles - 2014
"Helmet use has been estimated to reduce the odds of head injury by 50 percent, and the odds of head, face, or neck injury by 33 percent."
"During the past few years, no more than 17 percent of fatally injured bicyclists were wearing helmets."
Statistics from New York City
"Almost three-quarters of fatal crashes (74%) involved a head injury. Nearly all bicyclists who died (97%) were not wearing a helmet."
Have you got a source for that claim?
http://bhsi.org/stats.htm#effectiveness
"Helmets provide a 66 to 88% reduction in the risk of head, brain and severe brain injury for all ages of bicyclists. Helmets provide equal levels of protection for crashes involving motor vehicles (69%) and crashes from all other causes (68%). Injuries to the upper and mid facial areas are reduced 65%.
Authors' conclusions Helmets reduce bicycle-related head and facial injuries for bicyclists of all ages involved in all types of crashes, including those involving motor vehicles. Our response to comments from critics are presented in the Feedback section.
Plain Language Summary Wearing a helmet dramatically reduces the risk of head and facial injuries for bicyclists involved in a crash, even if it involves a motor vehicle."
The solution isn't to leave the unsafe conditions untouched and protect just a part of the body by means of a helmet, rather it is making the driving conditions for bikers safe.
As it turns out, those safe conditions render the helmet as unnecesary. As pointed out, helmets could be a net loss in safety in a safe biker environment.
Biker helmets are a sign of bad road safety.
Here are stats from the Netherlands [0]. Looks like there are about 9000 serious crashes each year that don't involve motor vehicles, with about 2500 cases annually of head/brain injury. That's actually a much higher rate than for crashes involving cars in the Netherlands, presumably because of the infrastructure and culture....
[0]: https://www.swov.nl/en/facts-figures/factsheet/bicycle-helme...
Look at this guy without a helmet get one because he screwed up on a track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVZz8EN_NKw&feature=youtu.be... The crash didn't look that bad, but it was enough.
Yeah, or in my experience on the W&OD bike trail (largely just people on bikes), you can easily hit a rock or a deer and go sideways. It's more likely to break a collar bone than hit your head, but it's probably smart to have a helmet on.
Getting on a skateboard or a bike without having learned how to wipeout is about as irresponsible as going into a boxing match not knowing how to dodge or block a punch. Like, if there was a match between a guy with a helmet and no boxing experience, and a guy with no helmet but plenty of boxing experience, who would you bet on?
Pro skateboarders and BMXers rarely wear helmets and regularly walk away from spectacular, cringe inducing accidents that would kill or cripple a less skilled individual, and of course, they've been mastering the art of wiping out for as long as they've been riding.
A friend of mine once stood on a skateboard for not even 2 seconds before it rolled out from under him, he fell back and broke his elbow, he just hadn't conditioned himself to react properly in that situation. I saw another guy on a bike go sailing over the hood of a car that cut him off, and he did a face-plant on the other side, he didn't think to tuck his head or get his arms between himself and the pavement. His face was all bloody and his front teeth were knocked out, his helmet didn't do him much good. Being able to react instinctively to something like that takes training.
Strapping some styrofoam to your head is probably better than nothing, but framing bicycle safety as a binary depending on whether someone has a helmet on is a gross oversimplification. Between skateboarding, various styles of cycling, and general horsing around I've had hundreds, if not thousands of wipeouts and the only time I suffered a concussion was when I was mugged by a guy who came up behind me.
Not to mention its not very enjoyable to learn unless you are in some large padded room.
Who was doing that?
One wonders why competitive track cyclists wear helmets, then? After all, no-one is on the track but the cyclists, all moving predictably, and they minimise the weight of everything else... so why not lose another 400 grams from their race weight?
[1] https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10092/7804/Thes...
> As pointed out, helmets could be a net loss in safety in a safe biker environment.
I haven't seen any data on this yet. Do you have a source for this claim? I don't buy it.
> Biker helmets are a sign of bad road safety.
Bike helmets are a sign of someone who knows that the energy of impact is proportional to mass times the square of velocity. Every doubling of your speed does 4x damage if you crash.
I've crashed my bike on my own probably 10x more than because of someone else. Hitting debris, riding in the rain, riding at night, unseen obstacles, railroad tracks, animals, mountain biking trails, all things that have taken me down. If I didn't have a helmet, I think I'd have cracked my own nut a long time ago, and road safety would have little to do with it. You can go without if you think it's somehow safer, I'm happy to wear mine.
> Have you got a source for that claim?
The CPSC (Consumer Products Safety Commission) impact testing standards for bicycle helmets only require that the pass tests like a guided free fall on a weighted headform from a height of about 6.5 feet. That's the equivalent of falling over from a trackstand, for example.
If you're going at speed or are hit by a car, the forces the helmet will experience will far exceed the force generated by the impact tests as specified above.
Does that matter? It may not be ideal, but even a helmet that only meets those requirements is going to _reduce_ the force experienced if you land on it. My dad was in a crash with a car (impacted the side of the vehicle, went over the top and landed on the other side) - his helmet was cracked into three pieces, but he was fine. I find it difficult to picture him avoiding some sort of head injury without the helmet.
From [1]:
>> The principal protection mechanism in a cycle helmet is the polystyrene foam, or styrofoam, that covers the head. When this receives a direct impact force, the styrofoam is intended to compress and in this way spread and reduce the force that is passed onto the skull, thus reducing linear accleration of the brain.
>> However, it is common for helmets to break without the polystyrene foam compressing at all. A major helmet manufacturer collected damaged childrens' helmets for investigation over several months. According to their senior engineer, in that time they did not see any helmet showing signs of crushing on the inside (Sundahl, 1998). Helmet foam does not 'rebound' after compression to any significant extent. If the styrofoam does not compress, it cannot reduce linear acceleration of the brain. The most protection that it can give to the wearer is to prevent focal damage of the skull and prevent minor wounds to the scalp. It is not likely to prevent serious brain injury.
It's one thing to look at some cracked helmets after a crash and suggest that they might not work as expected. It's another thing entirely to use logic to try to contradict direct evidence. Evidence wins.
Regardless of whether foam compresses or cracks, the outcomes of people wearing helmets is markedly better than the outcomes of people who crash with no helmet on. To suggest that the existence of cracks mean it's unlikely to prevent serious brain injury is flatly false.
This is complicated stuff, and simple messages, anecdotes or one-dimension studies don't help work out the best solutions.
This argument seems unscientific. The experiment already ran, and the data shows reduced injuries for helmets. Explaining why something "suggests" it might not work makes no sense, when it did already work on a large scale.
I also don't buy that helmets grip more on average. Most are coated in plastic and my scalp is coated in skin and hair. One of those grips gravel & concrete more easily, and it's not plastic.
I gave a source for the quote above, and it comes from a meta analysis of multiple studies.
The simple message is simple because the science showed a large and compelling result. When the statistical significance is enormous, and the results are a clear and unmistakable positive across numerous studies and a lot of scrutiny, the message gets less and less complicated.
Suggesting that there's anything complicated about wildly improved outcomes seems like FUD to me.
There has been criticism of that study, some of which is listed in [1].
The critique also doesn't challenge the conclusion, it's challenging the specific degree, getting into the weeds on the numbers and the subtler points of methodology. It looks to me like the page you linked even provides links to other papers that came to the same basic conclusion that helmets reduce risk of death, in the event of a crash.
"Government agencies withdraw support for 85% claim"
That's a pretty misleading statement considering it leaves out the fact that the NHTSA and CDC both still quote Thompson 1999 and both have strong and unambiguous pro-helmet recommendations.
Cyclehelmets.org says they are not helmet skeptics, that their beef is only to correct the science. Is that the same goal you have? Do you think that people should or should not wear helmets? Are you policing what you think is bad science?
I ride bikes a lot. I've crashed a lot. I've seen other people crash a lot. I've seen head injuries and concussions with and without helmets. I honestly don't really care to debate the science at this level, because I didn't perform any studies myself and I don't research helmet effectiveness or policy. Do you? Do you ride bikes and want others to ride bikes? Are you upset about mandatory helmet laws or something like that? What does this debate mean to you?
I didn't click through enough links to check the year and only checked the author names and found the 1989 study. Through more searching, I found the pdf of the actual study you referenced and checked through the studies that they referenced in their analysis. Most of those source studies have corresponding analysis pages on the cyclehelmets.org website with similar types of criticisms.
> Do you think that people should or should not wear helmets?
I really am not concerned about whether or not bicycle riders wear helmets while riding. But I think it's a disservice to cyclists to imply that wearing a helmet is the only thing that matters in terms of safety. I would like to see more emphasis on other things like bicycle maintenance, equipment like lights and a mirror and education on how one should ride their bike on MUPs and in traffic, but it seems that the debate on helmets has overshadowed the other things that can have a greater impact on the safety of the rider.
> I ride bikes a lot. I've crashed a lot.
I ride roughly 2000 miles per year (for the last 12 years). I've only crashed once.
> I honestly don't really care to debate the science at this level, because I didn't perform any studies myself and I don't research helmet effectiveness
I am interested in reading research on helmet effectiveness, critiques of that research as it pertains to study methodology and standards that helmets are required to meet in the US. I think it's necessary to have that knowledge and keep up to date on the field to really have informative discussions on the issue.
Excellent! You must be bike commuting to work? I do too. I also like to go mountain biking on the weekends as much as I can. So do you wear a helmet when you ride?
> I really am not concerned about whether or not bicycle riders wear helmets while riding. But I think it's a disservice to cyclists to imply that wearing a helmet is the only thing that matters in terms of safety. I would like to see more emphasis on other things like bicycle maintenance, equipment like lights and a mirror and education on how one should ride their bike on MUPs and in traffic, but it seems that the debate on helmets has overshadowed the other things that can have a greater impact on the safety of the rider.
I think that's a really fair point, I can see why & how this helmet debate feels like it overshadows other topics. To be fair, the article at the top of this thread is discussing those other things, it's not primarily about helmets. Maybe instead of arguing against helmets you could link to some of the safety evidence related to bike maintenance & lights & mirrors, if you know of some. I for one would love to see it, and I would honestly appreciate it. It is hard to find information on common injuries that aren't head/helmet related.
FWIW, I don't think anyone in this thread, nor any of the links that have been shared claim that wearing a helmet is the only thing that matters in terms of safety. I agree with you very much, there are many other important safety factors.
The problem, I suppose, is that we have clear data on the hundreds of bicycle deaths, and no clear data on the hundreds of thousands of minor bike injuries. Death is the worst thing that could happen in a crash, and what we do know is that head injury is by far the most common cause of bike crash death - something not even cyclehelmets.org disputes.
So the reason people recommend helmets so strongly is that a helmet is the primary way to avoid death in an accident that is serious enough to otherwise cause death. It's not the only way, even in serious crashes, but it ranks above all other ways in terms of statistical impact. Your valid point is that what that ignores is the many orders of magnitude larger number of people that get in lesser accidents.
A huge risk factor clear from all the data we've all shared here is alcohol. Avoiding drinking while riding may be overall just as effective as wearing a helmet overall. Do both, and you're in a pretty good spot, statistically speaking.
I have children, and part of my concern is what to recommend to my children, and what behavior to model for my children, in addition to what is safer for me so that I survive to raise my children. When the American Academy of Pediatrics says that the helmet is the number one way to prevent a head injury, given the statistics they have on the annual half a million ER visits, a third of which involve head injuries, I have to really stretch to even imagine arguing against their advice. These are the people that see all the skull fractures that happen and are there when kids die.
One of my kids crashed his bike when he was little and got a concussion, right in front of my house while going pretty slow. He was asking what we're going to have for dinner while he was eating his dinner. It would have been a lot worse had he not had a helmet on, and I don't really want to think about how much worse, I'm just really glad he had a helmet on.
That goes to your point in some ways; fear of death is greater than fear of recoverable injuries. That is rightly so, but it is in some ways also disproportionate.
It might also be worth looking into the effectiveness and recommendations of helmets when doing anything else besides bicycling. Helmets are used for many other sports and activities. Maybe ask yourself which other activities besides biking would it make sense to argue that helmets aren't effective. Motorcycling, football, skiing, kayaking, skydiving. Why would helmets make sense in construction, manufacturing, and for military personnel, and not bicyclists?
> Most of those source studies have corresponding analysis pages on the cyclehelmets.org website with similar types of criticisms.
That web site has been updated much more recently than 1999, so why does the page you linked to not discuss Thompsons's more recent study, or even link to a new critique? That's a serious question, I don't think it's an accident. Cyclehelmets.org clearly has an agenda to provide a counter argument to every single bit of evidence that helmets actually work. The misleading statement I just pointed out above is more than enough to demonstrate to me that cyclehelmets.org is biased and not acting in good faith nor for the pure interest of good science. And I can plainly see a lot more examples. Like you, I'm also interested in research and critique. But please forgive me if I don't trust that site very much, it's agenda is a little too thick for my taste, and they are not being completely honest. If you read more of the links from bhsi.org as well as NTSB, NHTSA, CDC, AAP and many others, there is a consistent pattern of recommendation, and you may begin to spot some of the places that cyclehelmets.org is cherry picking their evidence and quietly omitting evidence they don't like.
The most important safety factor is to ride in a way that minimizes the risk of getting into a crash in the first place, but a lot of articles and accompanying discussions I've come across over the years either concentrate on helmet use or segregated infrastructure rather than how to best ride in the current situation.
> you could link to some of the safety evidence related to bike maintenance & lights & mirrors
I don't have links to any studies for those things, but being able to see approaching traffic from behind, being seen in low light conditions, and being able to trust the equipment to not fail when you need it is something that reassures me when riding. I certainly would not drive a car that didn't have mirrors, lights, or wasn't properly maintained.
> It might also be worth looking into the effectiveness and recommendations of helmets when doing anything else besides bicycling. Helmets are used for many other sports and activities. Maybe ask yourself which other activities besides biking would it make sense to argue that helmets aren't effective.
There has been mention about the fact that helmets in American football haven't prevented concussions and examination of brain tissue of former NFL players have revealed that about 85% (177 out of 202) of them showed signs of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Bike helmets themselves appear to not do much to mitigate the risk of a concussion in a collision either.
> That web site has been updated much more recently than 1999, so why does the page you linked to not discuss Thompsons's more recent study, or even link to a new critique?
Because I specifically linked to the page referring to the 1989 study. There are other pages on that website that address more recent studies [2] (which has links to numerous pages discussing other, more recent, studies).
[1] http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2645104 [2] http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1052.html
I agree with this 100%. Cheers!
Don't know how well its enforced in the rest of the UK, but when I lived in Cambridge wearing a helmet was your own choice. Riding with insufficient lights can and will get you pulled over and fined.
"Summary:
* Bicycle helmets may have some protective value, but not nearly as much as has been claimed, or most people seem to think.
* Wearing a helmet does nothing to prevent you from being hit by a car.
* Real bicycle safety involves learning how to ride properly.
* Crash helmets could easily save more lives for motorists than bicyclists.
* Helmet laws can result in the targeting of minorities, discourage cycling, make cycling more dangerous for those who remain [since more cyclists on the road increase driver-awareness of cyclists], and shift the blame in car-bike collisions to helmetless cyclists even if it was the motorist who was at fault."
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...
All you have to do to know for sure whether helmets result in more or less net risk of injury is look at the statistics for the people who've been killed wearing helmets vs not wearing helmets.
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/pedestrians-and-bicyclists...
Walker's research didn't show an increase in accidents or injuries, it showed drivers who are 3 feet away getting a little over 3 inches closer. I'm not personally more afraid of cars getting a little closer according to one guy than I am of the direct and overwhelming evidence supported by multiple studies of reduced risk of death when wearing a helmet.
"The cars were giving him, on average, a very wide passing clearance already," he explains, noting that most vehicles typically stayed well over three feet from the bikes, rendering the 3.35-inch discrepancy to be insignificant."
Also, my personal anecdata of getting buzzed by cars in the US is that it's happening less often as bike awareness goes up. In direct support of the article at the top, I suppose. I feel like cars are giving me more room now than they used to. Walker's study was 10 years ago, maybe we've already made up for the 3.4 inches already.
So if you ride, for the sake of you and your family and friends, I hope you find confidence and pride in wearing your brain bucket.
Yes, but if helmets raise your risk of having a crash to begin with (due to cars driving closer to you or otherwise), it's unclear whether it's better to wear one or not. (Higher risk of less destructive crashes vs. lower risk of more destructive crashes.)
> All you have to do to know for sure whether helmets result in more or less net risk of injury is look at the statistics for the people who've been killed wearing helmets vs not wearing helmets.
I disagree -- that's correlation, not causation. Perhaps people who wear helmets are just more careful in general. (That seems pretty likely to me.)
That wasn't demonstrated in Walker's study. Neither correlation nor causation.
> that's correlation, not causation. Perhaps people who wear helmets are just more careful in general.
No, there is a lower death rate for riders given that they've been in an accident. That rules out rider behavior. Helmet wearers may have lower accident rates than non-wearers, but minor and major injuries often aren't reported, so we don't have great data on that. What we do know is that if you have an accident, your risk of death is lower if there was a helmet on your head.
I'm not sure why that's surprising or debatable. It's armor, it puts shock absorbing material between colliding surfaces. It seems rather obvious it would reduce the severity of the collision. We use padding and shock absorbers and suspension systems everywhere... because they're effective.
Having crashed quite a few times myself, and caused several minor and major injuries on my mountain bike, I'm pretty sure my helmet has saved me. Sometimes I wear body armor and a neck brace as well. My biking friends won't ride with me or let me ride without a helmet, and they expect the same of me.
Anyway, some studies on the effectiveness of helmets have controlled specifically for rider behavior, and ruled that out as a factor in the lower death rates of helmet wearers. Here are some starting points, if you truly are genuinely unsure and want to do your own research.
http://www.bhsi.org/shouldi.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00036941.htm https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598379/
It's been cited so often that it's become a factoid, but it was barely scientific: The author is his own test subject. Nobody has attempted to reproduce the work.
Why not just set up a video camera somewhere, and make an unbiased observation?
Many people hate this change, by the way. It scares them that an attitude they used to be able to joke about in a positive way is now something they have to hide. It makes them angry that they have to invest effort and attention for the benefit of people they feel opposed to. It's easy for progressives to simply see it as "progress" and not realize that it leaves a lot of people feeling like losers.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1015448839242164...
https://www.bikelaw.com/2011/10/s-c-driver-convicted-of-felo...
"Throughout the country, cycling deaths are regularly dismissed by law enforcement as mere traffic ‘accidents.’ But often they are not accidental, the needless fatalities are tragic consequences of reckless driving and lawless drivers."
Just last week, a vehicle appeared to slow down for me to cross the road, and just as I began to proceed, he gunned his engine and forced me to make a panic stop.
Also, I've had things thrown at me on more than one occasion.
Yes, violence by motorists against cyclists is a thing. Even if it's just a threat or a joke, it's still assault.
I get the point you're trying to make, but if you read that out of context, it sounds a lot like an apt comparison to what parts of society have been going through with racism (or sexism, or...). It may leave a lot of people "feeling like losers" but to put it bluntly, when a group of people are flat out wrong, such 'side effects' can happen, and I'm not sure that's such a bad thing...
They may also associate cycling with children, and get mad in the same way that they'd get mad if they caught their own kids playing mumblety peg with the chainsaw. The kids don't deserve to get injured, but you're mad at them nonetheless.
But once people gain a reasonable level of comfort riding a bike on roads, they're still scared of hitting a cyclist while driving a car, but less likely to think the cyclist is being inherently stupid by riding on the road.
Speaking from personal experience, as a driver I absolutely hate cyclists. Weaving through traffic at speeds slower than the vehicles they cut off, no indication of intended lane changes, running of compulsory stops, shortcuts across footpaths only to pull out in front of vehicles that have right-of-way. I've seen them push their bikes through red lights, to avoid the "but you rode through a red light so you're in the wrong" legal consequence they might face if hit. There was one group of adults and children who overtook me on the side I was indicating and moving to turn, once. That's most illegal here, and I nearly hit them. (They blamed me, but the police blamed them when I phoned the complaint in. "If you ever see that again, have your passenger phone us and you follow them, so we can have a chat with them about safe road use.")
Then there are the times I was a pedestrian. I've been crossing the road at a controlled intersection at one particular location for several years, and in that time I've nearly been hit by a car once. I'm nearly hit by cyclists running red lights there at least once a month, usually a lot more often than that.
One particularly stupid individual on a bike was doing about 45mph on the footpath, cutting blind corners very closely. Nearly hit me three days in a row, and if he had I would have been hospitalized just because of the speed he was doing - stupid little %@#! went on Facebook and started bitching about how a pedestrian had been in his way, I later heard, even though he was riding illegally.
Another one - who should be nominated for an honorary Darwin Award - was trying to squeeze between two parked buses. Had my friend (the driver) not noticed, the cyclist would have been crushed to death.
Why do I hate them? Unpredictability. Many of them are car drivers (weather extremes in my town make year-round cycling a rather miserable affair) who know they shouldn't be doing these things, but they don't care because how will anybody track them down if they don't have plates?
I'm not going suggesting that all cyclists are like this by any means, nor am I going to get into drivers because that would be off topic. I'm simply trying to add a little perspective as to why drivers may dislike cyclists. I am very much in favor of physically separated spaces for cyclists (although how controlled intersections would work is a topic I leave for civil engineers and law enforcement).
Everything from not checking for pedestrians (or cyclists) when turning, not indicating when turning, using a mobile phone whilst driving, trying to squeeze their giant SUV into tiny gaps, changing lanes every 20 metres because they think it will get them "ahead".
There aren't rare occurrences - but things that are illegal - yet the majority of drivers do them (in Sydney), because being an aggressive driver is seen as "normal".
I've even asked friends - one of which has had two accidents related to mobile phone use - why do you talk on the phone? Apparently they consider it a badge of bridge that they're "good enough drivers that they can text and drive"...
And let's be realistic - unless you have a deathwish, most cyclist aren't going to take needless risks. When was the last time you saw a cyclist try and text and ride? Unlike a car, you don't have airbags, or slabs of metal, or crumple zones.
Yet drivers have all of those, and so yes, they do act with more impunity.
Also - when was the last time you saw the headline "Cyclist maims SUV driver in brutal collision"?
However, I absolutely agree with you that unpredicatbility is very bad.
In fact, that's exactly why cyclists ride on the road, and don't weave in/out on footpaths. You pick a straight line, and a constant speed, and stick to it, ignoring all the loutish drivers who beep at you for not riding on the footpath.
Often. I've also seen a cyclist using a laptop while riding. Yes on the street.
I'm a pretty good cyclist, I commute every day, but even I would probably struggle to use a laptop whilst riding...
I mean, a bike has two wheels, if you stop holding the handlebars, you kinda...topple over?
On the flipside - cars make it pretty easy to use your phone (or heck, laptop, as you say).
I see drivers using their phones several times every single day in Sydney. I'm pretty sure most people would be lying if they told me they didn't see it either.
The CDC and NHTSA's has webpages devoted to this trend:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving
https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/distracted_driving/in...
We're talking several thousand deaths and several hundred thousand injuries every year in the US.
the trick to driving without using your hands on the handlebars is to simply keep enough speed to not fall over. This way you can steer a bit by moving your weight left or right from your saddle.
Few years ago, when I lived in Cambridge, I saw someone cycling with their phone in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other (i.e. no hands on the handlebars). Some cyclists certainly do take stupid risks.
> "Cyclist maims SUV driver in brutal collision"?
May not happen often, but it can.
You cited a single example of somebody using their phone on a bike, several years ago - and yes, I agree, that was a pretty silly risk (and I hope that person is OK, and didn't do it again).
How often do you see a driver of a car using their phone?
I see it several times every single day in Sydney. I'm pretty sure most people would be lying if they told me they didn't see it either.
Heck, if you want stats - sure, here's the CDC and NHTSA's info on distracted driving:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/distracted_driving/in...
Car drivers often don't like to be confronted with how bad a driver they are - but the statistics don't lie. We as humans are shockingly bad at driving (and I drive as well, and I'm well aware of my limitations).
And regarding your SUV vs bike example, may not happen often? I think that's stretching the rules of incredulity. I'm not going to make any assumptions about your background (e.g. you may not have a technical background). - and I don't have a physics background either - but I believe the basic equation is:
F = m * a
So you take a 2,000 kg SUV.
And a 8 kg bicycle, combined with a 65 kg person = 73 kg.
Even if they were travelling with the same acceleration (doubtful) - the SUV would impart around 30 times the force on the cyclist versus the other way.
I see it damn near every day here in Japan. Often with an umbrella in the other hand... Also lots of people biking wearing earbuds. Different culture though, I guess. The roads people bike on here are probably a lot slower than in Sydney though, and most biking is on mixed-use sidewalks.
A major difference between the US and the netherlands is the infrastructure. Dutch infrastructure makes it possible for people to do that without it being an incredible lethal endevour.
Somebody has to have thought of putting up a video camera and measuring the prevalence of law / safety violations among cyclists, but to the best of my knowledge nobody has bothered with this, instead hoping that anecdotes and "studies" will somehow shed light on the situation.
Speaking as a cyclist, if cyclists are regularly behaving as recklessly as you describe, I'd be the first to join in protesting and embarrassing them.
What I've noticed is that the crimes of both motorists and cyclists are crimes of convenience and opportunity. For instance it would be hard for a car to squeeze between two buses, but likewise, nearly impossible for a cyclist to ride as far above the speed limit as every car that goes past my house. At least, my own legs aren't that good. ;-)
The big difference is cars kill people, bikes usually don't. If a driver is careless around a cyclist, the cyclist dies. If a cyclist is careless around a car, the cyclist dies.
Try it, see what it's like from the other side, it might change your thinking a little.
I do a lot of long-distance biking in Asia during my vacations and I consistently feel much safer there than in the US (I've done more cycling in China, but also Japan, Myanmar, Vietnam, Taiwan, and other places). A big part of this has to do with the fact that there are just so many people on bikes, tricycles, and other low-speed vehicles that it's hard for drivers to not notice. And nobody will ever curse at you for riding a bicycle. It's an extremely normal thing to do for the masses.
In reality, most traffic lanes are not wide enough for a cyclist and a car to travel side by side with sufficient clearance between the two vehicles. A cyclist is about 2.5 to 3 feet wide and many states have laws requiring at least feet of distance between them and the cyclist. The cyclist will also ride about 2 to 3 feet from the right edge of the lane. A car is a little less than 6 feet wide on average.
If you add those distances up, you end up with a total of 14 to 15 feet. Even on interstate highways, lanes may only 12 feet wide. On surface streets, they may only be 10 feet wide. Because of this, you end up with the situation where cars will "lane split" while passing a cyclist and frequently misjudge how far they are from the cyclist when passing them. Also, the lane splitting car cannot leave enough room for cars in the adjacent lane because the lanes do not have sufficient width to accommodate a vehicle and half of another vehicle.
Another problem is that cyclists riding to the right aren't as visible to traffic as opposed to those who are "taking the lane". They're more vulnerable to collisions such as "right-hooks", traffic entering from side streets and opposing left turning traffic who didn't see them.
The laws should be changed to say that cyclists are like slow moving vehicles who are entitled to the full use of the lane they're riding in and passing traffic must move completely into the adjacent lane, when safe to do so, to pass the cyclist and only return to their original lane of travel after they have sufficient clearance. The law should also allow vehicles to pass cyclists on a double-yellow when its safe to do so with the same conditions as above.
This will legally sanction the "take the lane" type of riding and make cyclists more visible to the rest of traffic.
In 2017 I am glad to say that all the bike parking is taken at 8.55 in the morning and there are bike to work posters in the kitchen.
There is nothing new in this study. Perceptions have changed though and I thank all who have participated in this.
Weekend warrior lycra cyclists, I think, cleared the path for regular cyclists. It kind of normalized adults on a bike on roads.
Cars weigh thousands of pounds. Consider the safety precautions for cars with air bags, crumple zones, and crash testing. There is no protection from cars for someone on a bicycle.
They try to say riding on the sidewalk with a bike is more dangerous because cars do not look out for bicycles at driveways and such.
But personally in most areas I don't feel safe biking on the street, and would rather stay on the sidewalk like I did when I was a kid. I would just have to pause to check before crossing driveways and intersections.
I believe that there will eventually be something like a smart safe city where 2000+ pounds vehicles do not freely mix with pedestrians, cyclists, and baby strollers. There should be physical barriers or totally separate walkways.
Think about it. They can't even sell a car without an airbag anymore. Yet what chance do you have from a physics standpoint to be truly safe when the other vehicle exceeds your mass by 2000+ pounds?
All I read from your post is that cars are big and heavy, which would hurt unprotected people. In some cities people bike less. Ft worth is way too hot to bike, and definitely not average for bike culture.
https://www.amazon.com/Fit-System-RM011-Clip-Mirror/dp/B001A...
Would you buy a car if it received less than average safety scores? But all of the cars with those below average safety scores have large metal frames, a body, and a huge amount of mass that as I said, due to the basic physics equations means that the occupants of a car will be much, much less likely to be injured or killed if there is a collision. So considering how seriously people take car safety regulations, this is a bit of a crazy double standard.
It continues to be unsafe in this manner because we treat cars and trucks different to all other transportation. It's unthinkable we all shrug our shoulders when a pilot crashes a plane because he was checking his Facebook. There is a root cause analysis and there are effective measures taken. But here we are with car casualties many times that of planes or trains and yet no one is doing any cause analysis at all. Car manufacturers continue to produce ridiculously overpowered and oversized vehicles and advertise them speeding through the city at night.
Just the other day I came about a cyclist driving on the shoulder, against the flow of 80 km/h traffic, with his hands off the handlebar. Insanely dangerous no matter how capable the drivers of the cars were. (Not to mention it's not a good idea to think you could safely check you Facebook updates as long as you were, say, cycling, or even walking about.)
So I expect a tiny little subcompact hatchback to be less safe than the average car overall. Yet it's what I drive.
Also, based on what I've read about statistics, I expect driving a car to be less safe than riding a bus, yet I drive a car.
Still, I suspect you're right that a lot of people are afraid to ride a bike. When folks see me pushing my bike out of my workplace, they get a look on their face like I'm about to go skydiving without a parachute, and say: "Pleeeaase be careful out there."
I'm sure there are ways these kinds of things could be handled well (maybe lights that separate the two forms of traffic?). But it seems like a lot of places are putting these in without much thought, and with the assumption that there won't be many cyclists - because if there were, some of these intersections would become dangerous messes.
I think it's called Amsterdam ;-) More seriously, I went there recently and it's amazing how natural cycling is, everyone uses a bike, there are trams, and cars are clearly second-rate citizens in most of the city. An additional side effect of that is that everyone seems to be fit and healthy…
> I don't feel safe biking on the street, and would rather stay on the sidewalk like I did when I was a kid. I would just have to pause to check before crossing driveways and intersections.
Cycling is not particularly dangerous, depending on how you define "dangerous".
Most car-bike collisions occur at intersections and are "right-hooks". This is when a car turns right, cutting across the path of the the cyclist and the cyclist hits the car because there's not enough room to stop or turn. These accidents typically result in bruises, damage to bike and sometimes a broken collarbone. They're rarely fatal unless the right-turning vehicle is a truck and the cyclist ends up under the truck.
The accident you're probably thinking of is a car hitting a cyclist from behind with a huge difference in speed. This, I believe, results in the most fatalities for car-bike accidents. It is relatively rare.
> ...what chance do you have from a physics standpoint to be truly safe...
Heard this a thousand times and I don't buy it for a second. The speed differential between cyclists and pedestrians is an order of magnitude different than the speed differential between cyclists and cars. And the argument about driveways and intersections falls 100% flat on it's face if you use the incredibly basic assumption that cyclists should (a) use crosswalks and (b) shoulder check when crossing driveways.
A pedestrian walks at around 3 to 4 mph. A cyclist can ride at 15 to 20 mph. Cars on suburban streets can go 25 to 40 mph. That's about a 12 to 16 mph difference between a pedestrian an a cyclist and a 5 to 25 mph difference between cyclists and cars.
What is also important is the nature of the collision. A glancing (side-swipe) collision, is very different from a direct collision. Also in right-hooks, the most common collision of all, you have a cyclist colliding with a slowly turning car while typically braking and turning at the same time.
But even if we're talking about direct collisions, the cyclist often ends up going over the hood or roof of the car simply because of the height of the bike vs the car. This looks awful but is actually better than hard impact.
There are more factors than mass and speed differences.
People fly by you in their car, inches away, while on the street on a regular basis, and you have no control over this. On a sidewalk, I have to be more observant, but more accidents there will be avoidable if I am paying attention.
It is realistic to try to avoid putting myself in a position where I may avoid being hit or run over by a car with no steel or anything to protect me. And we are making massive strides in terms of safety with things like self-driving cars.
You may know that risk can qualitatively be thought of as a product of two factors: the severity of the outcome and the probability of occurrence.
In the case of cycling a high-speed rear collision with a car is very unlikely but very severe in its outcome. How common is this accident? Not very common-- it ends up on the news when it does occur.
Many many cyclists enjoy riding, on the street, for their whole lives and never have a serious accident or injury.
It does help if you are confident in your ability to ride in a straight line and to brake on a dime (aka using mostly the front brake). And, same as passing a truck on the highway in a car, it's generally not a good idea to hang out in a car's blind spot. As for cars that are scared to pass you, yea, that's really obnoxious. But as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the vast majority of bike-car accidents don't happen on the straight-aways; they mostly happen in intersections.
How does that protect me from a car just ramming into me from behind? There just doesn't seem to be anything I can do about that. I'm always relying on the hope that the driver behind me is paying attention and I'm not big on hope.
Riding on the street to me is usually very rattling because of how many cars repeatedly pass me, it doesn't really reduce my fear.
But it lets me comfortably maintain a sort of "inventory" of what's behind me at any given moment. I'm much less likely to get taken by surprise.
I tend to be conspicuously and gratuitously polite. For instance I will wave if I see that someone is stuck behind me, and will pull aside when possible. One thing I realize is that i'm often in someone's neighborhood, so they'll probably see me again.
If a sidewalk is available I use it for biking. And I am 40 years old and have driven a car less than ten times in my life. I bike/bus/skateboard everywhere.
I have only had one accident and that was bad because the driver was looking out the side window when she hit me. And it was a gentle hit and I just rolled up on the hood. The problem was she had headphones on and keep accelerating into the road taking a left turn. I was on her windshield staring at her when she finally looked forward and noticed me. I had enough time to think, "she is going to slam on the brakes and I am going to be so fucked". Which happened and I was flung off the hood of her car into incoming traffic.
Luckily I was alright except for a few scrapes and bent rim.
The sidewalks aren't really busy enough where I live for biking on them to a issue. And if I go downtown I just walk my bike.
Hold your line, if you have to deviate from it make sure you use your hands to signal your intention. There's tech to help you with that too. Garmin makes a proximity sensor that you can install on your bike that you let you know when cars are getting close to you; and there's my favorite solution, a Bontrager Flare RT rear light. Finally, you should use your bike to explore alternate/less trafficked routes. Bonus tip sourced from anecdata: I've found out that if you can keep up with the traffic speed most drivers will leave you alone.
Keep cycling and have a nice ride! :)
Proximity sensor + rear mirror sound like good ideas to at least make one feel safer, I didn't know these were a thing (don't bike much due to aforementioned fears), thanks!
More bikes available also means more bikers, something we're working on at Spin for US cities. Get in touch (email in profile) if this seems like a problem space interesting to you :)
Similarly, as the percentage of folks who use heroin increases, the relative rate of overdoses declines. But that doesn't mean that heroin itself has become any more or less safe.
Take it to the logical extreme, imagining legalization of heroin and subsequent widespread use and sale in convenience stores, and it'd be way safer, because you'd always be getting a standardized product.
That definitely was true for a while, not sure about in the last few years. A less controversial analogy might be with coffee, where the rate of people overdosing is probably lower now that it's no longer mainly used by Sufi mystics in enormous doses for entheogenic purposes.
Most people would agree that driving has become a safer activity if you could show them that the number of injuries or fatalities per driver or distance travelled has been falling. The same is true for cycling.
For heroin, this is probably true, for cycling not so much.
I'm really not. Read what I actually wrote instead of projecting onto it.
The best way I can think to reject the risk-aversion hypothesis (without doing a RCT) would be to see a time-lag. If accident rates drop after ridership increases, that would suggest it's not risk-adverse people coming in later, whereas if ridership increases lead the rate drop, that would indicate that it's not a risk-tolerance thing.
On the other hand, ridership increase proceeding accident rate dropping might need to account for newer riders being less experienced.
I've read/read about other studies that found the same thing as this one, but I'm having trouble finding them right now. I found [0], but the methodology doesn't look like it would address the risk-aversion hypothesis.
Personally, I think we should encourage cycling even if it doesn't lower accident rates, but evidence of improved safety makes it a more rational choice for urban planners.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/04/17/actua...