rachel120

Do you really think that the same authorities that have taken children for walking a mile unsupervised and had CPS investigate for child neglect are going to be all happy happy joy joy about those same kids traveling that same mile by bike?

I-Like-To-Bike

Anyone is entitled to be fearful fearful worried worried as much as he/she desires when speculating about what might happen to somebody, somewhere, or chooses to extrapolate from an isolated negative incident into something far more pervasive to be fearful about.

mr_bill

You asked for ANY, you got ANY.

ESSA, aka re-authorization of ESEA

-mr. bill

rachel120

This is the big one. It's not the only one, it's just the one where the family went to the media to try and stop what was happening.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/13/livin...ain/index.html

Milton Keynes

Outrageous. When I was 10 I had a paper route so I was on my own riding about a 3 mile route all over town, every day except Sunday. Not to mention that I also walked to school and back (a little over 1/2 mile one way) every day unless the weather was bad. Of course it was 1981 and we lived in a small town, but have your kids do that now and CPS will try to take them away from you.

And that's not even including how, on some weekends, I would walk about a mile down the railroad tracks to an old stone railroad bridge and walk around in the woods along the creek. I think we knew that the trains didn't run on the weekends but we had enough common sense to get off the tracks if we heard a train.

I-Like-To-Bike

Again, another years old incident report with nothing about bicycling, young bicyclists or anything else related to the topic of this thread.

rachel120

Why are you in such denial that the laws have been strengthened in a way that supports today's helicopter parenting with over-scheduled kids? Why don't you see that letting your kids go off and be kids is now considered neglectful since anything can happen to them if an adult's eyes are not on them at all times? I could bring up article after article, including one where CPS told a woman she was neglectful for closing her baby's door when he was napping since she wasn't watching him, but somehow I don't think you would accept any of it.

Bottom line, yesterday's latchkey kids remember the trouble they got into when left alone and have gone the opposite extreme. Reinforced by the Mommy Wars and by the number of latchkey kids that pined for the greener grass of parents being around and the news going for shock value and giving the perception that the world is more dangerous than ever for kids, they've pushed laws through that are supposed to "protect" children that have ended up being over-protective. Then mix in the culture change as well, and those that are to interpret the laws are very, very likely to be helicopter parents themselves and think that less supervision is wrong.

You want proof? Go to your city park and look at the playground equipment. Kids have to be super protected, so playgrounds have been modified to the point of ridiculousness that prevent possible injuries by making the slides so low they aren't really slides and the swings can't go high up in the air to be jumped off of.

mr_bill

Full stop.

Anyhow, "research" from Iowa "proves" that children can't walk.
(Stay tuned for "research" that "proves" children can't ride a bike.)

-mr. bill

I-Like-To-Bike

Any bicycling content and not just ranting how society could be going to hell in a handbasket?

rachel120

Bicycling content? How about logic? If people cannot let their children walk around alone without investigations of neglect, then they also can't let children ride a bike alone. So that is a legal consideration when people ask why kids can't just ride a bike to go do fun stuff.

Maelochs

So ... from this thread I learned that even though bicycle deaths are lower than in 1975, there are more cycling deaths ... caused by drunk drivers texting while hitting drunk cyclists?

Or did i learn that as in so many cases, "statistics" generated by "studies" like these actually prove pretty much nothing?

One thing I didn't learn, is that discussion with some posters (Not referring to anyone who likes-to-bike, surely) is pretty pointless.

I didn't learn that here because I already knew it.

Anyway ... shouldn't we be contrasting the number of helicopter parents dying while flying in helicopters versus fluctuations in the price of aviation fuel, and then try to calculate how many were drunk and texting their free-range kids? That way we can calculate the appropriate fines for raising free-range kids who don't do good internet research.

Oh never mind. I am going to go ride my bike before work.

njkayaker

It's a dumb click-baity article and the OP (and some others) fell for.

It doesn't really show the statistics (it showed cherry picked numbers).

And it undermines its implied conclusion ("cycling is getting more dangerous") by pointing out that the number of bicycling-miles have gone up.

Daniel4

This thread reminds me of a story in a ww1 documentary I watched. Head injuries escalated after the practice of wearing metal helmets.

Maelochs

Yup, and after the war when people stopped wearing helmets ... you guessed it.

njkayaker

https://www.cartalk.com/puzzler/metal-helmet-mystery

Daniel4

Yes, both of you are spot-on. Don't attribute the helmets to the head injuries. Attribute the killing or the attempted killing.

It's not the number of bicycles that's the cause of cycling deaths. It's the number of cars on the road.

njkayaker

You don't know that. (Bicycles don't "cause" deaths anyway.)

Bicycling-miles have gone up (according to the article). An increase in deaths would not be unexpected even if the number of cars stayed the same.

There might be more cars but people are driving less miles. Maybe, there are more shorter (urban) trips being taken (which might increase the risk to more cyclists). (I believe urban driving per mile is statistically safer than rural driving.)

Maybe, the increase is random fluctuation.

The article doesn't show all the data.

It's an obviously poorly written article.

The "metal helmet" story is about drawing a conclusion without having all of the data required to be able to draw that conclusion.

Maelochs

"We have all these numbers but nobody knows what they mean."

"Well, then, they can mean whatever we want."

"Yeah, but they still won't really mean anything."

"Yeah, but I'll get paid."

Daniel4

Yes we do know that. How many bicycles fatalities per mile would there be if there were no cars on the road? Not as high as 818 per year.

A bike ride on a road with no cars has a much much lower fatality rate per mile as compared to a bike ride on a road with many cars regardless if they are going at 30mph or 80mph. Again, compare 6am on a Sunday morning with 4pm on a weekday in any city.

Remove all the bicycles from the road and the US road fatalities would still be 30,000 motorists and about 3000 pedestrians.

The metal helmet analogy is to be careful not to blame the metal helmet for the increase in head injuries but to attribute the number of lives saved in context of the real cause of deaths and injuries, the war. When the war ended, the number of ongoing deaths due to ww1 dropped to zero (except for those who were wounded during the war but died after it ended).

In our case, one is quick to blame the bicycle in context of what causes all the road fatalities - the car.

In this article,
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/201...t-to-stop.html

way down below in the chart titled "Pedestrians in peril in early Toronto" shows a chart of pedestrian deaths over time. Bicycles were around since the 1890s. But notice how pedestrian deaths started to go up around 1910 when the automobile and streetcars were getting popular? Not even the horse and buggy were as much of a risk.

Although there are no charts listing bicycles deaths over this same time period, with pedestrian deaths, who is going to say the rise in their deaths in the 1910s should be measured per mile rate of pedestrians because there were more pedestrians?

It's the number of cars one encounters, plain and simple.

And that's why a lot (not all) cyclists - commuters and recreationalists - prefer to take trails and side streets even though the distance is longer than direct along busy streets. The distance is longer but the number of cars encountered is what matters.

njkayaker

Everybody should be riding on unicorns instead.

It's the result of the number of bicyclist-car encounters. Reducing one or the other (or both) will reduce the number of encounters (and encounter-related fatalities).

"Blame" is a conclusion. Conclusions should be correctly/carefully made based on "complete" data.

The "metal helmet" conclusion was based on an increase in the number (or percentages??) of wounded with head injuries. That conclusion can't be made without knowing the number of fatalities with head injuries before and after the introduction of metal helmets. That other data is absent.

??? What does this have to do with the "metal helmet" story?

Daniel4

So on your next bicycle ride, make a comparison which you would rather take, a route with lots of fast moving cars or one with hardly any? And then measure their distances.

Get rid of all the cyclists is what some politicians want. But that doesn't solve the pedestrians deaths does it?

In 1971, the Dutch recognized it wasn't the number of kids but it's the drivers that were killing them.
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/metro...gment/15527415

njkayaker

There are two parts to this.

1- explaining why the death rate increased.
2- what to do to decrease the death rate.

Death rates will be expected to increase if you increase car-miles OR bicycle-miles.

If the number of car-miles hasn't increase (the number of car-miles has been going down), then the reason bicycle deaths have increased isn't due to "more cars".

If the number of bicycle-miles has increased while car-miles have stayed the same (a possibility), then an increase in bicycle deaths isn't caused by "more cars".

It's not even clear that bicycle fatalities (as a rate) has increased.

All that I'm talking about is 1.

"Getting rid of cars" is not a "practical" way to solve either of these.

Getting rid of cyclists is relatively easy (it might even be agreeable to a majority of people).

Hippiebrian

Hmm, and how many people died from illnesses caused by obesity or a sedentary lifestyle in that same year compared to years past? I will take my chances cycling and probably live longer because of it. Not to say we shouldn't do whatever we can to get the numbers dropped drastically, but cycling is still relatively safe, and it will be safer if more cyclists are on the road. Let's not scare people off with a really small danger. That is just more dangerous overall (if that makes sense).

sdotkling

Aside from the neck-snapping tangent-tossing in this thread, I'm surprised no one has mentioned road design as being a contributing factor in bicycle deaths and injuries. New roads, especially in places outside of the old, crumbling Northeast US, are shockingly hostile to bicycles. Intersections in many places, like Florida, Texas, California, are vast 200-yard concrete kill zones, with complicated, multi-phase traffic signals with staggered turn-arrows, right-on-red laws and travel lanes, multiple lanes of traffic, no (or token) pedestrian amenities, and suburban sprawl so vast that everyone must drive for almost any purpose. I've personally been almost killed at a few of these massive intersections in Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia, and been honked at and shouted at at many others. Maybe that's just the effect I have on people when I wear Spandex. The occasional "bike lanes" on the shoulders can appear and disappear without sense or warning, as older parts of the road meet newer parts, often driving the cyclist out into traffic. Traffic circles seem to be the road-building rage in many states, and transversing one on a bike means joining the main traffic flow for a knuckle-blanching few seconds, to the usual ire of nearby motorists. It's rough out there, people.

rachel120

You have some good points, but you also have a couple of thoughts that may be making the whole problem worse. Suburban sprawl is a problem all the way around for everyone in every mode of travel. The shouting and honking is not really a traffic problem, it's an entitlement problem as people do that even if your bicycle is not affecting them. Lack of crosswalks does seem to be getting more and more common, not less, on major roads. But when you say "driving the cyclist out into traffic", that a cyclist caused problem. If you are essentially weaving in and out of traffic then it is very difficult for drivers to interpret your future moves and adjust your driving to compensate. If there's a viable alternative than the road, then that's safest for everyone. If the alternative keeps dumping you into traffic repeatedly, especially right before going through intersections, then it's safer for everyone to just be part of traffic the whole way.