well, that makes sense. now subtract the percentage that aren't wearing seatbelts. sans belts all bets are off.
and how many of those .26 dead cyclists die from head injuries with and without helmets. after all you are splitting up the automobile stats but not the bikes'?
Not to mention that a number of folks I know have landed on their heads while flying off a bike. In every case helmeted and the helmet was destroyed, heads saved. So regardless of the stats of cars vs bikes, one could say that empirically, helmets improve bike safety.
it *seems* like head impact might be more common in biking crashes than in car crashes. If you compare odds of crashing at all vs. rate of crashes with injuries for both cars and bikes, I would not be surprised to find that more bike crashes result in injuries overall than cars' crashes.
Of course with both there are many instances where injuries are minor and not reported. There are so many things that are easy to prove if you use statistics in a simplistic fashion, or in wayas that don't really provide numbers that are relevant to the question.
I had a roomate that was a statisical analysis nerd who always said "statistics don't lie." its true indeed but they can also tell the wrong thruth and make it sound like "science."
Originally Posted by bostontrevor
And on what do you base your assertion? Me, I got some real numbers. "Science" I think they're calling it these days, or maybe it was "emprical evidence". It's so hard to keep track.
According to the Failure Analysis Associates (now Exponent), riders in passenger cars (drivers and passengers) die from car related causes at a rate of 0.47 per million hours of exposure time. Cyclists die at 0.26 per million hours.
Given that travel is typically measured in time taken, this seems to be a reasonable way to look at the stats.
Further, about 1/2 of motor vehicle related deaths are from head injuries. So if you take that 50% and multiply it by the 0.47, you get 0.24 deaths due to head injuries per million hours of motoring. Pretty comparable with the overall cycling fatality rate.
Zoom!, Mr. Earnhardt.