Found this in the UW Daily today. I thought it was great that they printed an article like this, especially in an college campus with so many novice bikers. I liked the way that it didn't imply at all that helmets are sort of a cure-all for accidents. Vehicular cycling is much more effective in preventing those accidents.

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A red 4x4 occupies the IMA parking lot where David Smith gives a bike-handling lesson. The name "DAVE SMITH" pops from its license plate. It's just coincidental, because it's not Smith's car. Smith arrived on two wheels, not four -- his bike.

"Turn your head and tell me which hand I'm holding up," he said during the lesson, when he rides alongside students next to the long, two-inch thick white line striped across the lot.

The idea, Smith explained, is to emulate lane change preparation in traffic. He refuses to rely on helmet mirrors. Nor does he buy studies attributing helmets to 85 percent accident reduction. Rather, he says safe cycling is largely about "social skills."

Smith is an advocate of riding bicycles with the flow of traffic as opposed to on sidewalks or in bicycle lanes. It's a safer approach that has led to significantly fewer accidents, he said. To get his message across, he holds bike safety classes for a wide audience, which includes UW bike riders, and has also produced an instructional video that demonstrates his principles of safety.
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here's the whole article: http://thedaily.washington.edu/features.lasso?-database=DailyWebSQL&-table=Articles&-response=featurespage.lasso&-keyField=__Record_ID__&-keyValue=12488&-search

... David Smith ... says safe cycling is largely about "social skills."You might be interested in a photo of David (http://community.webshots.com/photo/205515226/205522271tPZsms) taken at a Seattle Bicycle Club meeting. The photo has this caption: David is a certified bicycle-driving instructor with the League of American Bicyclists, and presented "Social Skills For Traffic Environment" to a rapt SBC audience. (Autodidacts may visit www.bicycledriver.com ) I don't know what Autodidacts are, but that's the URL for David's web site.

Autodidacts are people who teach themselves.

Some excerpts of interest from this article...


Smith is an advocate of riding bicycles with the flow of traffic as opposed to on sidewalks or in bicycle lanes. (my emphasis)
...

Every cyclist has a fear spot, a proverbial barricade invoking avoidance of this trouble spot while on bicycle.

Claire Cramer's commute from home to lab at the UW is two miles long, but a "nightmare" intersection where Harvard Avenue meets Eastlake Avenue makes the commute longer than it should be. Taking lessons from Smith, the physics graduate student said she now can "integrate myself into traffic and take control of a situation."

She learned the "rock dodge" by swerving between tennis ball hemispheres that mimic glass, potholes and other road debris. Smith's lesson on left turns that takes place on 10th Avemie East and Broadway is suited to Cramer's needs, as she has a difficult left turn on her way home from the UW on Eastlake.

Another of Smith's students, Karin Bulova, a Seattle Bicycle Club member, feared most the un-shouldered, sidewalk-less Lake Washington Boulevard. She returned to that route with Smith, to find that "it was a totally different experience" to tackle the Arboretum route with a mentor.

"I realized there was so much you don't know you don't know," Bulova said.

In Smith's mind, a bike is really a small car -- it belongs in traffic.

I find this a bit funny:

Nor does he buy studies attributing helmets to 85 percent accident reduction.


I doubt a helmet ever prevented an accident... it may help to reduce injuries, but "prevent accidents..." not hardly. I have the same doubts. :D

It probably means an 85 percent reduction in reported accidents.
Or cycling accidents reported by hospitals, perhaps.

But even for that, 85 percent seems high. But who knows, maybe cycling injury incidents (accidents) went down by 85 percent some place after they mandated helmet wearing by children there?