Viewing 7 posts - 161 through 167 (of 167 total)
  • Cycle deaths per mile ridden by experienced cyclists
  • orangetoaster
    Free Member

    @ Graham S

    What you want there is a car. Or maybe just a moped

    I ride a motorbike the 25 miles currently. Takes 30 mins or less. Quite happy to double that time providing I can use rights of way. That means a higher rated electric bicycle as allowed by swiss law.

    I definitely don’t want to drive to work as 2 wheels is more fun, commuting should be fun and it is on the motorbike. As you say a moped would do the job, but that needs to be an electric one (electric MTB) with assosciated access granted to Rights of Way.

    Ta for info from all

    simons_nicolai-uk
    Free Member

    How many people does anyone know that have been seriously injured in a car crash? Not many….1:30’000 chance of being killed on the roads seems OK to me. My personal risk will in fact be far lower as the overall risk includes high risk groups like motorcyclists, young drivers, and drivers with alcohol in their blood.

    I’m not sure how you worked out your odds. This puts it at 1 in 200 (presumably these are lifetime figures)

    Personally I’m far more worried about the serious, life changing, injury than death and the ‘seriously injured’ stats are about ten times deaths. That’s for each member of your family as well so you’ve got a few chances at it.

    A ‘safer form of transport’ doesn’t remove your risk completely either – 12% of road deaths are pedestrians and 10% of those are on the pavement when they’re killed. It’s not just the stupid and reckless who are affected.

    How many people you know probably depends on your age. My Mother has suffered with whiplash related neck problems for about 30 years after a rear end on an icy motorway (undiagnosed at the time). Mother of a close friend at University was seriously disabled in a wheelchair after an accident. A guy in my class at school who ended up as part of my sister’s circle of friends was killed in a car about a mile from home. Girl in our street was run down and left walking with sticks getting off the school bus. My boss at work walks with a permanent limp after a motorbike accident. Best friend of a mate dead on a motorbike last year.

    Personally I’ve had two potentially serious offs commuting in London, neither my fault, both when I’d been firmly ‘taking the lane’. The second put me in hospital overnight with concussion.

    bails
    Full Member

    bails, come and ride the Bristol/Bath Path at rush hour on a weekday. Then ride it on a Sunday. It’s absolutely heaving at both times but with completely different sorts of cyclists.

    Sometimes it’s a win/win. And it’s all more people on bikes.
    I don’t disagree with that, or

    The two goals are not mutually exclusive.

    Safe usable routes benefits all cycling.
    But this is about the best standard of cycling facility that I have the joy of choosing to use or ignore: http://goo.gl/maps/8CpEk
    That’s a two way cycle path and pavement. It just ends in a couple of hundred yards and spits you out into a NSL road.

    It’s not really like :

    There’s a bit that I used to use here: http://goo.gl/maps/zkeaC
    Again, it’s a two way cycle lane, at least the pavement is separated by a strip of grass, but the bike side is narrower than the DfTs guidelines for a single way route. It’s too narrow to pass confidently at speed. The grass on either side of the pavement and cycle path is wider than the cycle route, it could easily be three times its current width, but for some reason it’s not.

    I’m not ‘anti infrastructure’ and I’m wary of confusing support for utility cycling (good) with support for vehicular cycling (needed to survive on our roads, or at least the ones I use). I wish Mrs B or my parents or younger cousins could just hop on a bike and use it instead of a car/bus. But the first thing the GF said to me when she got a bike was “I’m not riding into town” (~2 miles) because it would involve crossing a 6 lane dual carriageway where there is zero cycling provision. And I don’t blame her.

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    GrahamS
    Full Member

    there is zero cycling provision. And I don’t blame her.

    Yeah I just had a quick look at that area on the Sustrans website and there really doesn’t seem to be much about. There is the NCN 52, but it doesn’t look like that goes where you want. As I sadi earlier, all I can suggest is that you join whatever local cycling advocacy group you have and add your voice to those pressuring your council for better facilities.

    On another note, I found this on Twitter via Carlton Reid, a nice collection of tweets from people that I really, really don’t want to share the road with:

    🙁

    GrahamS
    Full Member

    An interesting summary of how the Dutch got their population cycling in relative safety:

    – Reducing car access to city-centres and create car-free areas;
    – Making parking in city-centres more expensive;
    – Constructing cycle paths and reducing road space for cars;
    – Facilitating cycling through cycle network planning, road design, signalling, parking and enforcement;
    – Reducing maximum speed on the majority of urban roads to 30 km/h or less;
    – Promoting cycling to encourage the use of bikes and discourage car-use.

    The Netherlands has around 29,000km of segregated cycle path!

    atlaz
    Free Member

    I’m not sure how you worked out your odds. This puts it at 1 in 200 (presumably these are lifetime figures)

    That “infographic” is really quite strange. So a lottery win is a 1 in 14M chance which we know is correct for a given lottery draw. Then they say that a road death is a 1 in 2000 chance. Given my average is 500-600 car journeys a year and most people who commute by car would be at around the same level, you’d expect hundreds of thousands of deaths on the road each year. Probably more given there’s supposedly 20 odd million cars and 45 or so million adults.

    I call bollocks.

    simons_nicolai-uk
    Free Member

    Indeed – I think it mixes some lifetime risks with some ‘one time’ probabilities.

    However, quick google gives support for the ‘death on road’ stat –
    “The lifetime risk of dying in a transport accident is remarkably high – with most of the risk coming from road traffic accidents. While the risk of dying in a road accident in any year in the UK approaches 1 in 20,000, the lifetime risk is 1 in 240.”

    Source – http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/booth/Risk/trasnsportpop.html

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