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Old 06-15-11, 05:41 PM
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StephenH
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One reason routes use the roads they do is that you have to make the route where it can't be shortcutted, or else put a control to avoid shortcutting it. Some of the roads I ride on everyday would make a fine brevet, but it would be difficult to work it for this reason.

I find the mirror most useful for watching other bikes, and for watching traffic if I'm changing lanes. I don't think my odds of avoiding a rear-end runover would be a lot better with the mirror than without. (Assuming the car is coming up from behind you, you'd be using the mirror to stare into his headlights the whole while.) And all the reflective gear in the world doesn't help if the driver is oblivious to his surroundings due to alcohol, sleep, texting, or whatever.

Ultimately, for me, the question is not so much "did a rider die", but "what are the odds of that happening". Probably all of us that are of any age have personally known people that were killed in car wrecks, but it never made us stop driving, either. If it starts looking like bicycling is way more dangerous that anything else, that's worth looking at. If you pick out incidents here and there and say the sky is falling, you get kind of misleading results.
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