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Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

When one ton of metal hits you naked at 50kph (the legal speed limit in traffic areas of cities here in France) the acceleration alone can tear or damage your aorta with impressive odds (IIRC about 50% chance). A helmet is an extremely marginal protection.

On a pure energy analysis, I'd rather have cyclists navigate with pedestrians than with cars. The latter result in a basically non-elastic collision transmitting most of the kinetic energy (1T@30~50kph) to the human body (75kg@5~20kph) while the former is much, much more even.

I don't know the state of streets in the U.S but his is especially true in old european cities, where streets are often narrow and there's simply not enough room for both cyclists and cars on the road, especially when cycling is thought of after the fact.

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Existing pedestrian facilities are simply unsuitable for cyclists.

My regular 3km ride to the shops takes me about five minutes by bicycle. If I had to ride in the footway with pedestrians, I would be faced with two choices - either to recklessly continue at each junction and cross the road at speed, or to stop and start like a pedestrian. Doing the former would quickly prove fatal, the latter would increase my journey time fourfold.

Most footways are far too narrow, too tightly radiused and contain substantial amounts of furniture like lighting and mailboxes, which pose no danger to pedestrians but are a potentially fatal hazard to cyclists.

It also bears pointing out that European roads were built for cyclists, not motorcars. The invention of the safety bicycle prompted the widespread development of smoothly surfaced roads. Motorcar traffic represented a minority of journeys in most of Europe until long after the Second World War. Bicycles are perfectly well suited to the narrow streets of old towns, it is the motorcar that is out of place; Many enlightened local authorities are making the sensible decision to prohibit non-essential motor vehicles from town centres, improving conditions for both cyclists and pedestrians.

There is no infrastructure problem. There are many cities with substantial amounts of cycling infrastructure but low rates of cycling and poor safety; There are many cities with practically no infrastructure but huge numbers of cyclists and very good safety.

Energy Analysis is pointless in this situation.

Mixing cyclists and pedestrians is extremely dangerous in locations where pedestrians aren't used to cyclists, because pedestrians have a tendency to change directions very quickly.

Having a bell on your cycle helps a lot with this - just give it a ring a few times before overtaking people on a combined cycle/foot path and they will generally (although not always) try and do the sensible thing.

In my own experience I was somewhat surprised to find that using a bell actually works a lot better than saying "Excuse me please".

Also, some pedestrians will do intentionally stupid things when encountering a cyclist on a cycle path, but fortunately them seem pretty rare and far less common than cyclists who do stupid things.

I am generally a pedestrian, and in my experience when I am running on a paved path and cyclists go around me, they sometimes say "on your left" which works pretty well, but bells are great.

edit: doh!

Single pedestrians/runners are almost never a problem. Even couples are OK. What can be risky is when you have a group of 3, 4 or more - they tend to be focusing more on each other than their environment and when they get startled they will often all jump in different directions.

[NB This isn't a serious problem, but I do spend a reasonable amount of time on cycle paths trying to co-exist with other path users on civilised terms!]

> I am generally a pedestrian, and in my experience when I am running on a paved path and cyclists go around me, they sometimes say "on your left" which works pretty well, but bells are great.

As a cyclist, I don't feel like it works very well. About 50% of the time the pedestrian startles and dodges when they hear you say it. In about 50% of those cases, the direction they dodge is to the left. And this is on the bike path where pedestrians are presumably accustomed to and expecting bicycle traffic.

I still do it for the sake of courtesy (and the hope that it will eventually become a common and well-understood practice), but I don't rely on it and give pedestrians as wide a berth as possible as well.

> extremely dangerous

In which way? Unless the cyclist is moving like a madman in a crowd, the worse that usually happens is a bruise (and in rare cases, a broken bone).

When I'm riding, cars pass centimeters away from me, and that's not because they're careless but because in some areas there's simply no other choice, except riding on the sidewalk.

> aren't used to cyclists

Unless you organize like here[0], people need to cooperate with cyclists, whether in a car or on foot.

As arrethuza mentions, a bell on your bicycle helps a lot (and cars simply don't hear that bell). It's not aggressive in any way (entirely unlike a horn on a car), and people just move out of the way of cyclists without much thinking about it.

[0] https://maps.google.com/maps?q=strasbourg&hl=fr&ll=4...

You do realize that there will always be an initial conflict when introducing a new system. I am fairly fresh out of college, and where I went to school (now over 20,000 students) all of what used to be streets in the middle of campus are for pedestrian traffic only. We all got along just fine with bikes being everywhere. Look at Stanford and Boulder, two very bike friendly places.

As far as helmets are concerned, I rode for my college road team, and I wore a helmet every time I touched the pedals for training and racing. We went very fast, and the competitions justified it. When I rode my beater bike to class I never wore a helmet. I was just fine.

A major reason people don't want to ride bikes to work when a helmet is required is really cosmetic, because they don't want to screw up their hair! Have you met a girl who wakes up and gets ready for work then says, "oh yeah let me mess up my hair on the way to work"? I am a dude, and If I had the option to ride A bike to work, I might not just because I need to look professional.

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