Originally Posted by
Joe Minton
prathmann:
Gosh! I hope you're right.
But, I’m not so sure you are.
Exposure:
One of the cornerstones of accident research is "Exposure". Time is one of the elements of assessing exposure; for a given travel distance, a pedestrian has a time exposure that is three to four times greater than a cyclists. Does that matter, probably but I am not qualified to make that call.
Location:
Another element of a collective judgment about a particular exposure is location. By comparison, urban pedestrians spend more of their time on relatively secure sidewalks and are only exposed to vehicles when they cross a street. Cyclists, on the other hand, are constantly exposed to vehicles. Cyclists must depend upon being seen together with the attentiveness and good intentions of car drivers. Cyclists do not have the physical protection of curbs, lamp posts, signs or parked cars.
I have never been accosted by a road rager on a sidewalk but have been several times while cycling. I’ve never been yelled at for walking alongside a road or on a sidewalk; I have been yelled at for cycling on a road. With the exception of stopping a liquor store robbery and a couple of attacking dogs, I’ve never needed to use pepper spray on a fellow pedestrian. I’ve had to do so twice with road ragers attacking me for no other reason than I was riding my bike on the road and appeared to be an easy target for their insanity.
Joe
The figures I gave before indicated that the risk of fatality for cyclists were quite similar to that for pedestrians when based on the probability per trip. As I also indicated, cyclists trips tend to be longer than pedestrians so if analyzing the risk per million miles the cyclist would have a lower probability while if analyzing risk per million hours the figures would favor pedestrians. But in any event the risks are quite close with minor variations depending on how the analysis is performed. Based on the figures that I've seen I can't see a justification based on the risk that would call for always using a helmet for one of the activities while not ever considering it for the other.
Based on fatal accidents that have happened locally where details have been made public I disagree with your emphasis on malicious acts such as motorists deliberately attacking you. All the fatalities with which I'm familiar were due to negligence and reckless behavior (inattention, losing control of the vehicle, DUI, etc.) rather than a malicious attack on the victim. Nor do I see sidewalks as providing all that much safety. They tend to have a great many interruptions for driveways where vehicles can strike pedestrians. And two of the most recent cyclist fatalities locally were on a sidewalk when a driver lost control and struck not only them but also took out a fire hydrant and most of a business storefront. Furthermore, intersections tend to be the most common place for crashes and that's where both cyclists and pedestrians are frequently struck.