Re: Ban cycle helmets for cyclists

On 20/01/2011 21:44, Phil W Lee wrote:
PhilO<goo18731@xxxxxxxxxxx> considered Thu, 20 Jan 2011 08:33:27
-0800 (PST) the perfect time to write:

On Jan 20, 3:32 pm, Judith<jmsmith2...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:19:03 +0000, Peter Clinch
Cycling isn't especially more productive of
serious head injuries than walking.

Pete.

Oh really - perhaps you have the stats to back that up:

--
2009 per billion passenger kilometres:

Cyclists Killed or seriously injured : 567
Pedestrians Killed or seriously injured : 415

Do you think those stats back anything up? You ask people to provide
stats and then give stats that are irrelevant (and misleading since
you left out the Killed data you don't like)
You have no idea what proportion of the KSI were head injuries for
each group, do you?
Do you have anything more relevant to quote?

Which is the safer form of transport?

Since you ask, lets look at the data you conveniently "forgot":
Killed per billion passenger km: Pedal cycle 21, Pedestrian 26, DFT
2009 figures)

Hmm, hard to see any difference.

But you knew that, didn't you?

Don't forget that all those figures exclude single person accidents to
pedestrians, but include those for cyclists.

To get the complete figures, you'd have to add in all the "slips,
trips and falls", which won't be in the STATS19 data.

And don't forget that there are about twice as many again cyclists[1] recorded by hospitals as seriously injured (and their definition of "serious" is narrower than the STAT19 one), in single person (no other vehicle) road traffic (excluding off-road)[2] accidents, that are not reported to the police, and thus don't make it into the official STATS19-based data. For on-road accidents which /do/ involve other vehicles the hospital data matches well with the STATS19 data.

[1] Some may say that hospital data doesn't distinguish well between pedal cyclists and motorcyclists - AFAIK, the only evidence of that is in a TRL report stating that data from one of the London hospitals for 2001 got the two mixed up - they don't suggest that any other hospitals had the problem.

[2] Some may also say that many off-road accidents get reported as on-road accidents - that only happens if the location is left unrecorded, in which case on-road is assumed as the default.

--
Matt B
.

Relevant Pages

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