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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

I've been commuting by bicycle for nearly 40 years, under a broad array of circumstances, and the article's advice checks out with my own personal rules.

Although the vast majority of the crashes and wipeouts I've suffered involved no cars, just me losing control.

However, over hundreds of wipeouts accumulated over a lifetime of cycling, I have never hit my head! Wiping out is a skill. A skill best cultivated when one is young and pliable, and a skill that has served me very well across a broad array of risky activities.

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> hundreds of wipeouts

Wait, hundreds? I don't own a car and use my bike daily, including commuting to work (which means 24 kilometers per day commuting alone), for around 6 years now. As a kid, I cycled to school every day for 9 years.

I had maybe 2-3 crashes as a kid, and 2 crashes in the last 6 years: once a garbage man rolled a trash can into my handlebar at full speed, and another time a small branch got caught in my front wheel, blocking it completely and sending me flying over the handlebar onto the street.

(The latter was by far the worst bike accident in my life - the bike was ruined, I did not wear a helmet that day, yet for some reason I walked away without even a scratch. Nothing. It didn't even hurt. All the other accidents were far less serious, but always involved pain for days or trips to the hospital for suspected bone fractures).

I've done my share of BMX, mountain biking, and winter riding (where minor wipeouts can be common).

My last commuting wipeout was a couple years ago when I failed to register a speed bump while going pretty fast. I hit it, my front wheel turned sideways, and I slammed myself into the pavement pretty hard.

I've found cycling in winter (with snow or ice) much easier with studded winter tyres (and some care ... can't go 25 km/h over ice with those, either).

> Wait, hundreds?

Maybe they also mountain bike, or do some other sort of high risk bike sport.

For anyone else reading this, hundreds of wipeouts is many standard deviations away from the mean. As a point of comparison, I've been biking for 10+ years and bike commuting for ~5 of those. I've had exactly one wipeout, the first time I wore clip in shoes.

Please don't wear clip in shoes in traffic, they are great for races but they absolutely suck if you have to be able to put your foot down on a moments notice. I know several people with serious ankle injuries due to wearing those in traffic.

Likewise here, in 20 years of daily bike commuting, all weather, year-round, I've had one crash and a tiny handful of near misses. The crash involved hitting a patch of ice going around a turn, after an unexpected cold snap. I got studded tires for my winter bike right after that.

The friends I've had, who've gotten in crashes, were mostly off-road riders where crashes are expected, or competitive riders.

That seemed like a lifetime count of wipeouts (including as a kid and while learning). I don’t know my lifetime count, but I could believe it’s around 100.

I am cycling for 25 years (nearly daily commutes, in big central european cities) and the total number of times I was forced off my bike/crashed dueing that time is probably roughly once every two years. Most of them when I break so hard that I have to unmount the bicycle sideways and run the rest of the momentum off. Basically the bicycle equivalent of an emergency break in your car.

If you know how to do this safely at speed it can really protect you, because good breaks are all nice and sound, but if you are not leaning backwards you will do a frontflip immediately. And even if you lean back hard (behind the saddle) there still will be a point where your bike goes into front-wheelie/front flip. It is really good, if by that point you are not on the bike anymore, but running alongside.

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