Re: I have been CHALLENGED. . .

On Mon, 9 Jun 2008 16:34:10 +0900, dagbrown@xxxxxxx (Dave Brown)
said in <idmi2g.og9.ln@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

Cars are dangerous. Car drivers kill tens of thousands of people
annually worldwide, and are the leading cause of injury death in
children in most of the West.

I wonder how many of those people are on bicycles.

Not many. Cyclists account for, if I remember correctly, about 6% of
road traffic hospital admissions in the UK, but that number might be
wrong (I haven't got the original documents to hand right now).

I wonder how many of those bicycles were doing something blatantly
against the rules of traffic, so that the car drivers had no way of
predicting what they would do next.

In studies I've seen, the fault in car v bike collisions was usually
(for values of usually varying between 65% and 85%) with the driver.
Interestingly, the injury proportion was subtly different: 100% of
the injuries were the cyclists. I believe the figures for
pedestrians are 50% fault and once again approximately 100% of
injuries and fatalities. Incidents of serious and fatal injuries
caused to pedestrians by cyclists run in single figures and are so
rare as to be impossible to analyse reliably. All of which tells us
two things: first, cyclists are less likely to be the author of
their own misfortune than pedestrians (for which read, in many
cases, people who have found somewhere to park the car); and second,
that all the danger seems to come form one side of this particular
power balance and all the injuries to fall on the other.

Bicycles are great. I like them. I will cheerfully share the road
with them. I only wish they'd return the favour. All I'm asking the
cycling community is that they follow the same rules everyone else has
to--pedestrians and motorists alike--so that motorists can predict
what they're going to do next. It's not about rules-lawyering for
the sake of rules-lawyering. It's about cyclists making things safe
for themselves by remembering that there is other traffic on the road
and the vast majority of it can kill them.

I completely agree that being predictable is sound practice. My
number one tip for cyclist safety, though, is to put yourself where
drivers are actually looking.

That's one reason cyclists often jump red lights - to be in front
and in the vision zone when the drivers enter the junction - or
better still to be somewhere else entirely when the drivers enter
the junction. The other reason is more mundane: accelerating from a
stop uses about the same energy as riding between 100 and 250m on
the flat (depending how fast you ride and how briskly you
accelerate). I stop on average nine or ten times on the way to
work, that's probably between 10% and 15% of all the energy I
consume on the ride.

Guy
--
But ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof:
I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh;
[Proverbs 1:25]
.

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